O cú do canibal: rethinking relationships in the contemporary world through a repositioning of the anthropophagic subject’s abject anus

• In Event: Performing insurrections. Four cuir anthropophagic perspectives

Abstract

Beyond the simplistic, biased and monolithic idea of the cannibal as the racialized and colonized monster eating human flesh, the Brazilian Antropofagia appears in the 1920s reconceptualizing the cannibal rituals of Tupi people. This artistic and intellectual movement starts from the figure of the cannibal to rethink about alterity using the metaphor of eating the Other as a way to take over their vital power in an enriched and non-utilitarian way (Rolnik 1998). Almost a century later, I reflect around the biological and material processes of eating (human flesh), digesting, puking (this one related with some interpretations about what Antropofagia is), and specially, defecating. The anus is a fundamental part of the bodily processes in the cannibal rituals, more specifically as the conduit to eject the waste that the cannibal does not want to absorb. First, I refer to the negative ideas around the anus in the social imaginary and also to the metaphorization of this body part “as the monster of the body”. Opposing that, I valorize the role of the abject and the disturbance that the anus provokes to expose the failures of the “normal traditional subject” (Altmayer 2016). Considering the “teoria cu-ir” (Bento, Pelúcio, Preciado), I relocate the anus as a fundamental part in the development of a radical anthropophagic subjectivity as a way to establish new possibilities of relationships within the violence of the neoliberal capitalist world.

Author

• Ana Belén Ávalos Abril