5 CANNIBALISM AND NEW MEDIA

The idea of one person eating another often serves as an explanatory model for cultural phenomena in modern times, as is exemplified by bell hooks's 1992 essay on partnership, entitled “Eating the Other.” hooks's subject is not the usual metaphors applying to lovers who “simply devour one another.” Instead she's interested in racist “snacking.” In “cross-racial dating,” hooks contends, white men seek adventures with black women to add the spice of an exotic experience to their middle-class futures with white women. The Other, which hooks defines as the foreign ethnicity and culture of the partner in this experience, never becomes a fixed part of the men's lives. On the contrary, the women are merely tried out and come with an inherent sell-by date. The Other is consumed and forgotten. Such snacking is racist precisely because it never progresses beyond snacking.
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