ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Barbara T. Smith engages with the idea of cannibalism in her 1969 performance Ritual Meal. In particular, this chapter considers how Smith drew from her own feminist awakening in the years around the dissolution of her marriage to create a work in which she invited her guests to partake in the metaphorical consumption of her flesh. This chapter considers how Smith designed the meal to make her participants hyperaware of the fact that they were consuming (albeit figuratively) a body, and that the body in question was her own female form. In so doing, Smith challenged the conventional notions of feminine sexual passivity, particularly those that are affirmed through the use of food metaphors to describe women's bodies as consumable entities.
