Spencer Chabot -Contributor

As if hypnotized, perhaps by an unseen screen, a man stares blankly in front of him. Distorted, highly saturated footage envelops him, reminiscent of a television’s glow. He begins to consume the body lying before him, gradually becoming agitated in his task. Blood and viscera hang from his mouth, cling to his hands and still he stares. Still, he consumes.

How do you tell people that you ate someone for your art degree? Even worse: it was tasty– though that might be because the bloody guts you ate were actually Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and corn syrup.

In the final semester of my visual arts degree at Cégep de l’Outaouais, I had to create a capstone project. I had been exploring themes of flesh and identity, with particular interest in the ineffability of the soul in contrast with the concreteness of the body. Drawing upon my fascination with the sense of self and my own identity as a transgender man, I decided to utilize cannibalism as a tool to explore self-creation, specifically in the context of gender transition. Depicting a cannibal was a more literal, violent way of presenting the human need to base our own identity on others. The literal cannibal consumes flesh, whereas we consume others’ traits and embed them into ourselves. This twofold cannibalism was presented through the eyes’ consumption of projected idealized images, and the mouth’s consumption of a human body. While we all participate in the figurative cannibalization of others to develop our identities, transgender people partake more than most: they must not only build their sense of self, but forge their understanding of their own gender, in contradiction with what they have been taught since birth.