Delicate Questions: ‘Meat Status’ and Cannibalism in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh

Agustina Bazterrica’s 2017 horror novel, Tender Is the Flesh, conceptualises a world in which the nonhuman animal bodies that power the animal agriculture industry are replaced with humans, or ‘heads’. This article explores how Bazterrica’s depiction of a globalised, culturally sanctioned cannibalism both stems and departs from historical depictions of the cannibal in Gothic and horror fiction, ultimately interrogating a number of interlinked systems that structure contemporary anthropocentric thought. The novel’s extensive attention to distinct linguistic regimes extends Carol Adams’s ecofeminist critique of the mutually reinforcing relationship between language and the political dimensions of bodies that can be figured as ‘meat’, while its equally interrogative discussion of the numerous human social, cultural and ideological constructs that rely on specific claims around who and what might be considered edible provide an imaginative framework for enacting the anti-anthropocentric ideas of justice suggested by Val Plumwood’s ‘Ecological Animalism’. In doing so, Bazterrica’s novel demonstrates the potential of Gothic and horror fictions that examine the edibility of the human to radically undermine human exceptionalism.