No Return: Consumption, Desire and Uneasy Solidarity in Showtime's Yellowjackets

Showtime’s television series (2021-) follows the Yellowjackets, a high school women’s soccer team that become stranded in the Canadian wilderness following an airplane crash. The program depicts the aftermath of the crash as the stranded young women as decline into despair, violence, and, ultimately, cannibalism. Concurrently, it narrativizes the lives of the surviving women as they approach middle age and are caught up in a secondary series of crises. Yellowjackets’ diachronic narrative showcases to viewers how the short and long-term consequences of the crash act to form an uneasy, uncertain solidarity between the surviving characters. This is a solidarity formed on the basis of a simultaneously literal and figurative consumption of one another, and one which requires an ongoing, rapacious, reincorporation of the central characters’ shared trauma to remain intact. Together, we will consider the imaginative and emotive dimensions of this consumption-driven solidarity, turning to the ways in which the series conflates cannibalism and communion, ignites fraught and visceral depictions of queer desire as a form of inter-corporation, and dramatizes the dual mutilations and mutualisms that constitute girl/womanhood.