‘Raw’ & Queer Becomings (Essay)

It is widely accepted that horror as a cinematic genre is intimately tied to both implicit and explicit embodiments of queerness (Cooper, 2018). This bodily genre of excess suggests that “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (Williams, 1991, p. 4), thus enabling horror audiences to empathise with both on-screen victims and perpetrators. These “body-[centred] conventions” often allow the genre to be considered through a queer lens due to the way in which horror regularly navigates sexual desire and by the genre’s ability to depict “characters who are often coded as or depicted as openly queer” (Cooper, 2018, p. 2).

For the purpose of this essay, the term ‘queer’ will be employed as an umbrella term, applying to all types of non-normative characters, bodies and actions that are demonised by the “heteronormative majority” since they pose a threat to “heteronormative society” (Cooper, 2018, p. 3).

The refusal of this imposed normativity, this visible queerness, resonates with a fundamental facet of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s works. “Deleuze and Guattari (1987) want social identities to be liberated from ‘the great dualism machines’ such as man/woman, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, mind/body, adult/child, and so on” (Jackson, 2010, p.582). Guattari and Deleuze thus offer their idea of ‘becoming’ in response to Western philosophy’s over-reliance on stable identities or “universal characteristics to group” that differentiate binary social categories (Jackson, 2010, p. 581). For them, ‘becoming’ is a non-linear process that moves away from sameness to create something new, albeit “immanent to (not outside of) the social field to which it applies” (Jackson, 2010, p. 581). Thus, the Deleuzian-like concepts of “becoming-woman” (Jackson, 2010) and of “becoming-animal” (Bruns, 2007), when applied to cinema, can epitomise a character’s metamorphosis into a queerer, freer, more fluid state of being.

Julia Ducournau’s daring feature debut Raw (2016) arguably illustrates said notions of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal” more acutely than the average coetaneous horror film. This essay seeks to argue that Raw’s main character Justine (Garance Marillier) undergoes both “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal” as stepping stones in what can be ultimately be considered her “queer becoming”.

Raw is the story of 16-year-old Justine’s metamorphic experience during her first year at the veterinary school her parents formerly attended, where her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is also enrolled. Thrust into a reality far away from her vegetarian nuclear family, Justine and the other rookies must adapt to the hierarchical “food-chain” (Naqi, 2019, p. 17) imposed through hazing by the veteran students. The rookies are also coerced into parties where they are encouraged to have sex and abuse substances. Justine is immediately perturbed by the hazing, suffering a bad bodily reaction after being forced to eat a rabbit’s kidney. The skin she painfully sheds from the resulting rash symbolically marks the beginning of her ensuing transformation.

Justine grows increasingly unstable. On the surface, she is struggling with academic pressure, coping with the veterans’ strict rules and fitting into the gendered social performances that are expected by her peers. She wrestles with the typical teenage sexual frustration and with (a lack of) social interactions, almost exclusively being herself with Alexia and with her gay roomate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella). However, she also begins to secretly grapple with an animalistic appetite for meat. She ends her lifelong vegetarianism by attempting to steal burgers from the cafeteria and skipping school to devour shawarmas with Adrien. She develops a taste for raw chicken and after a horrific accident whereby Alexia cuts off a finger trying to wax her vulva, Justine ends up eating the finger and trying her first real bite of human flesh. Alexia, the sole witness, seems to fully understand how similar she is to her little sister for the very first time as her finger disappears down Justine’s throat.

Alexia blames the family dog Quicky for the eaten finger, allowing Justine some more time in the ‘cannibal closet’. Then, she causes a car crash to procure some meat for both of them although Justine runs away, still unable to fully give in to cannibalism. Consequently, her withdrawals worsen as she starts fantasising about tasting Adrien. At a party, Justine is doused in blue paint and shoved into a room for forced sex with a guy dripping in yellow paint. Inevitably giving into her primal desires, Justine rips off a chunk of the guy’s bottom lip. Her debauchery continues after an intense sexual encounter with Adrien, which he regrets after witnessing her feral behaviour throughout it. At another party, Justine unsuccessfully attempts to find someone else to bite until Alexia takes advantage of her inebriated state to humiliate her in front of all the veterans by holding a dead body’s arm in front of her like a dog treat. After Adrien shows Justine a video of that night, she physically fights Alexia in front of their entire campus. They both power-struggle, biting and scarring each other, until they eventually let go and hobble away, supporting each other despite the horrified onlookers.

In Justine’s room, Alexia apologetically bandages the hole she bit onto her sister’s face. Justine sleeps with Adrien in his bed, only to wake up and discover that he’s dead: the now catatonic Alexia stabbed him in the back with a ski pole and devoured one of his thighs. After an initial emotional meltdown and an unsuccessful attempt to impale Alexia with the ski pole, Justine exonerates Alexia scrubbing the blood off her skin in the shower. Finally, after Alexia ends up imprisoned for her crime, Justine’s dad reveals to our protagonist that the cannibalistic urges within her are inherited from her mother (and clearly shared by her sister), by opening his shirt to expose the bite marks and scars that score his chest. After smashing Justine’s perception of her entire upbringing until that very moment, her dad eerily consummates this film: “I’m sure you’ll find a solution, my love” [1:32:41].

This essay will therefore argue that, throughout Raw, Justine becomes queer (in the Deleuzian notion) by constantly evolving as a person due to her coming-of-age experience and through the processes of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal”.

“Becoming-woman”

Deleuze offers his notion of “becoming-woman” in response to the apparent gendered inequalities of the Western world (Batra, 2012). He argues that “Western thought has been structured around the focal point of the white rational man”, which in turn restricts its society on simultaneously socio-political, individual and subindividual levels (Batra, 2012, p. 1). Thus, in the Deleuzian sense, “becoming is always molecular” because it entails escaping the subjectivity of the imposed order (Batra, 2012, p. 2). If the male figure is to be assumed as the reference point for “the Norm '', then the woman is automatically othered (Braidotti, 1993, p. 46). But “becoming-woman” is more than simply stepping into womanhood: Deleuze argues that any process of “deterritorialization” (Pullen et al., 2017, p. 107) involves the state of “becoming-woman” and thus it is “the necessary starting-point for the whole process of becoming” (Braidotti, 1993, p. 46). Therefore, through becoming one can alleviate themselves from their subject position within the binary, heteropatriarchal structure of gender. “Becoming-woman” thus becomes a political tool towards “the development of new concepts of man and woman” (Grosz, 2005, p. 5), a dissolution of gender-based roles/rules that could potentially free any individual from the restrictive nature of the gender binary. Furthermore, Deleuze argues that, for women specifically “becoming-woman” is a subversive process, whereby they “should (...) draw on the multi-sexed structure of the subject and claim back all the sexes of which women have been deprived”, thus developing a consciousness outside of the specifically feminine in an effort to topple the established hegemony (Braidotti, 1993, p. 47). Eventually “the elimination of the gender structure would truly be revolutionary, as it would mean a transformation in Western thought and being at the deepest level” (Batra, 2012, p. 2).

Naqi examines how Justine is transformed, from “adolescent to a woman and (from) human to animal” (2019, p. 3). Justine first comes face to face with the implications of “becoming-woman” the second she is left to fend for herself at the new school. Before this, Justine was quite shy, cheerful yet slightly socially awkward at times. Her anxieties are made to appear relatable, due to her young age, pushing the audience to identify with her. Nevertheless, her anxieties over starting at a new school are soon made immaterial by the traumatic initiation rites enforced by the veterans. During her first weeks at the school, Justine and her fellow rookies are forced to act and suffer like herd animals, forced to eat rabbit kidneys and coerced into attending drug-fuelled raves, all while being expected to keep up with academic standards and their social lives. Plus, the female rookies are submitted to another dimension of gender-based humiliation. This becomes apparent, for instance, when Justine is stopped in a hallway by a veteran and ordered to change into revealing clothes like the rest of the female rookies, or when she attends a veteran party and she is shoved into a room with a stranger, forced to have a sexual encounter with him with no regards to consent. The combination of Justine’s burdens rapidly snowballs into a deep-rooted anxiety that plagues her day and night, a grim antecedent of the changes still to come.

Justine turns to Alexia, borrowing her clothes to aesthetically fit in with her peers, thus finally allowing herself to try to live by the school’s rules with Alexia’s help. As the sisters grow closer, with each other and Adrien, Alexia’s dauntlessness emboldens her to start taking agency of her own life and to revel in the freedom of making the necessary choices to survive. She wears her sister’s clothes and even attempts to “[conform] to a beautification process such as waxing” to comply with her flourishing womanhood (Naqi, 2019, p. 14). She begins exploring her sexual urges, practising kissing and dancing in the mirror, arguably becoming “self-aware” in her reflection, meeting her budding sexuality half-way (Naqi, 2019, p. 7). She also continues exploring her newfound hunger, (although this could be considered less of a choice and more of a necessity due to the bodily withdrawals she gets if not ‘fed’ properly). As Justine briefly grasps her identity and consequent womanhood, it can be argued that her “becoming-woman” is fully underway even if to her it (momentarily) means adhering to the enforced gendered roles. In line with Deleuze’s thinking, Justine’s “becoming-woman” is the precondition necessary for her overall (queer) becoming to occur. This process arguably becomes subversive in nature, since it enables Justine to redevelop her self-confidence and to reconnect with her ferocity whilst still under the school’s regime, exhibiting developed behaviours atypical of her previous self and effectively “[claiming] back all the sexes of which women have been deprived” (Braidotti, 1993, p. 47).

“Unbecoming”

Just as Justine is about to achieve her “becoming-woman”, however, the film subverts the general expectation of her coming-of-age encounter, which “as opposed to her first wax, is her first taste of human flesh” (Naqi, 2019, p. 14). This moment marks the beginning of Justine’s transitional stage, or “unbecoming” (McCallum et al, 2011, p. 1), between her “becoming-woman” and her eventual “becoming-animal”. Throughout this, Justine is aware of her hunger and of the moral implications of satisfying her appetite, thus initially she attempts to restrain herself from fully giving into her primal urges. For instance, when Alexia causes a car crash right after being hospitalised for her castrated finger, Justine runs away from the crash site and refuses to consume the victims. However, her withdrawal symptoms greatly corrupt her and she is unable to stop herself from fantasising about flesh. Naqi asserts that what differentiates humans and animals is “the ability to restrict oneself from indulging in the act of consuming another human” (2019, p. 4). Therefore, Justine’s attempts at restraining her desire for human flesh can be argued to represent her last attempts at preserving her own humanity, although her urges are exacerbated over her growing fascination with her best friend and roommate Adrien.

Adrien is overtly homosexual from the beginning, which Justine realises after walking in on him receiving oral sex from another guy. At one point, he even yells at Justine after a not-so-whispered argument in class: “I'm gay. OK? If I spent 20 years hiding, it's not to fuck girls now, OK?” [1:12.10]. It could be that his unapologetic attitude about this somehow inspires Justine to delve into her own urges, much like Alexia seems to influence her as well. However, Justine’s fascination with Adrien seems more like the obsession of a predator with incredibly elusive prey than an intense platonic or sexual bond. It could well be that his own queerness, which makes him virtually unaccessible to Justine, is what makes her “become infatuated” with him (Naqi, 2019, p. 9). But Adrien is coveted for his flesh, and thus becomes a commodity or a fetish that Justine cannot stop wanting to indulge in. Both sisters gradually befriend Adrien and seemingly compete for his favour despite both of them knowing of his homosexuality. But Justine and Adrien have a unique bond due to them being roommates. More importantly, Adrien seemingly always wants to understand Justine and to defend her from any harm. He demonstrates his loyal friendship on countless occasions, notably by worrying about her being forced into sexual encounters at the hospital party and by showing her the video of Alexia teasing her. Adrien is more empathetic to Justine than Alexia,

seeming to recognise himself and potentially identify with the deep-seated queerness within Justine from the very beginning. It is this empathy that ends up resulting in his undoing, foreshadowed by him pitying Justine enough to have sex with her once, resulting in her first ‘positive’ sexual experience (due to her masochism and his bewildered kindness throughout it). Even though Adrien later regrets the encounter, it arguably constitutes a key moment for Justine whereby she completely gives in to her feral side and climaxes. It could be argued that Justine becomes increasingly addicted to the thought of reindulging in her sexual-cannibalistic tendencies and climaxing again, finally entering the mindspace necessary for her to “become-animal”.

“Becoming-animal”

Leonard Lawlor states that the world has been “enclosed within a globe”, inside which humans remain dominant over all other animal species (2008, p. 169). He postulates, based on Cartesian and Kantian notions of humans being self-ruling, autonomous animals; that humans’ autonomy and self-presence grants them “a dignity that far surpasses that of animals” which acts as the justification for said human domination (Lawlor, 2008, p. 169). Still, Deleuze and Guattari promote a model of “becoming” that is transgressive, that goes beyond the limits of a threshold (Lawlor, 2008). “Then after becoming-woman we must ask, ‘what next?’” (MacCormack, 2006, p. 351).

According to Guattari and Deleuze, ageing is the ultimate agent of the molecular changes in “becoming” (Lawlor, 2008). Ageing preconditions a “desubjectification” that allows the individual to “shed the form of an adult, [and...] to become something other than an adult man”, free to “become-child” and rid themselves from the enclosures of the adult form (Lawlor, 2008, p. 173). Desubjectification thus allows for a person to reflect on others’ sufferings, allowing for “the affects of love and shame [to] motivate one to become other than man” (Lawlor, 2008, p. 178). “Becoming” is not defined by “a final form” or a process of imitating (Lawlor, 2008, p. 175), therefore after “becoming-woman” (Braidotti, 1993; Batra, 2012; Pullen et al., 2017) and “becoming-child” (Lawlor, 2008), the final frontier to transgress would be that of “becoming-animal” (Bruns, 2007). The anarchy of “becoming-animal” has an asocial significance (Bruns, 2007, p. 705), insofar that it contradicts “the negation of nature, the prohibition or abjection of animal functions and, indeed, the repression or exclusion of the entire ontology of the flesh” that is “becoming-human” (p. 707). This dichotomy imitates the distinction between body and flesh: the body being a self-transcendent object of regard whilst the flesh is passive, “for eating and being eaten” (Bruns, 2007, p. 707).

“The paradox of being human is that only human beings are capable of transgressing the boundaries that determine what they are; moreover, these transgressions are not (just) accidents- moments of weakness or failure of spirit- but in fact take the form of a festive return to nature, that is, to the border or originary scene of self-creation. (Bruns, 2007, p. 708)”

Justine’s “becoming-animal” process is initiated after she ingests the rabbit kidney, but only fully realised when she actively chooses to consume Alexia’s finger . If “what distinguishes human from animal is the ability to restrict oneself from indulging in the act of consuming another human” (Naqi, 2019, p. 4), then Justine’s ultimate decision (to consume) constitutes her giving into “becoming-animal”. But the finger incident only heightens Justine’s hunger. She starts showing psychosomatic and withdrawal symptoms from her appetites and fantasising about biting people, specifically Adrien. She becomes increasingly feral as she has her first sexual experiences, ripping one guy’s lip off with her teeth at a party and later sleeping with Adrien whilst possessed by a ferocious, animalistic spirit that she appeases by biting down on her arm. The last party that Justine attends (a stark contrast to her first one) allows her the chance to finally act out the epitome of her “new ‘liberated’ self” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18). She sits atop a counter surveying the room, stalking out her prey before stumbling around attempting to kiss multiple people, of different genders. Alexia drags her off before she can cause any more trouble, after which she is publicly coerced into acting like a rabid dog by the former. “Here, Ducournau reveals to us Justine’s final, raw, unrestrained, cannibalistic self” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18).

Therefore, Raw underpins Justine’s cannibalistic tendencies as a reflection of the inner animal within every human individual. Away from the human who would never unleash the restraint on their inner animal, the cannibal deterritorializes the human body by rehashing the middle ground between human and animal (Naqi, 2019, p. 13). In Ducournau’s own words:

“[the cannibal] it’s too present in us. Because the animal inside our bodies can’t escape, it’s here, on many levels, still inside us. That’s why we would rather treat cannibals as if they don’t exist and are outside of humanity. It’s too close. ” (cited in Shepherd, 2017)

In conclusion, Justine’s final self completely trumps “the negation of nature” (Bruns, 2007, p. 707) typical of “becoming-human”. Undergoing processes of self-discovery and explorations of identity and sexuality leads her from “becoming-woman” to “unbecoming” herself, to finally “becoming-animal”. Justine finds herself perpetually in transitional stages throughout Raw, thus one can argue that her diverse “becomings” reconcile with her new, fluid state of being. Certainly, this aligns with the Deleuzian notion of “becoming-queer”, whereby “selves are constantly changing, always in process, and never able to arrive at a coherent identity” (Walker, 2008, p. 3). Justine’s rejection of “normality, coherence, convention, or assimilation into some kind of liberal subjectivity” postulates her as “a stunning monstrosity” (Pasquesi, 2013, p. 120). This kind of monstrosity indulges in what bubbles “beneath dominant institutions and their conventional life narratives” (Pasquesi, 2013, p. 120) and thus, it is often depicted as queer in horror filmmaking due to the threat it poses to a heteropatriarchally structured society. Justine becomes the ultimate threat to this society by unleashing her restraint on her true self, and as her father’s concluding statement [1:32:41] warns her, she will have to reconfine her inner animal “to remain human” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18). This will prove, without a doubt, a colossal task.