As this panel will suggest, food and cookery have become a vehicle for addressing the challenges and tensions that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (L.G.B.T.Q.) peoples are facing in diverse social landscapes. This work builds on the critical praxis and research of early and contemporary researchers that have advanced the dialogues about cultural intersections of food and L.G.B.T.Q. lives including the work of feminist and interdisciplinary scholars such as Julia Ehrhardt (2006), Laure Murat (2014), Jarrod Hayes (2017), and Katsuhiku Suganuma (2015). These researchers speak to the way that ideas about food are ensconced in the dominant social norms and cultural values that shape the potentiality for connecting intimately and socially. Like these scholars, our panel employs critical lenses such as Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Literary Studies for the sake of understanding the significance of how food relates to identities such as L.G.B.T.Q. lives as well as how humanity's food experiences are entrenched in asymmetrical power relations and institutions ranging from agencies of the U.S. government to the traditions of marriage.
Addressing the relations of desire, power, and humanity, this session will provide a set of critical commentaries on new and time-honored narratives of food experience including personal narratives such as recent digital food essays in online magazines like Eater, films such as Call Me By Your Name, and mid-twentieth century novels by the acclaimed African American writer James Baldwin. Although this panel's researchers originate from unique academic programs, their research similarly speaks to the manner in which marginalized populations have leveraged food and food-based discourse as a means of addressing inequalities that permeate a multitude of social and national landscapes.
Assistant Professor Jeremy Chow and doctoral student Brandi Bushman will deliver a critical commentary on the affective and physical dimensions of food-based experience in their presentation “The Erotics of Food,” which explicates the recent film Call Me By Your Name from Luca Guadagnino and its original source material from the Egyptian American author Andre Aciman. In close readings, Chow and Bushman argue the interdisciplinary lens of Queer Food Studies provides a means of explaining the representation of food’s connectivities with queer social entanglement—a phenomenon that approaches Stacy Alaimo’s scholarly conceptualization of “transcorporeality,” or the blending and blurring of human and nonhuman actors. This blurring manifests in the representation of shared meals and fruit such as a peach that the two American men eat within the film and book. Chow and Bushman understand this food experience as enhancing sexual pleasure, while also forging emotional intimacy that rectifies Elio’s shame—a feeling that arises from the social construction that says queerness is “unnatural.”
The blurring of actors and boundaries similarly is explored in the critical presentation titled “Baldwin’s Kitchen” from the Ph.D. student Emily Na. Through her research, Na elucidates the writing of the acclaimed queer African American author James Baldwin. In a comparative study of Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) and Just Above My Head (1979), Emily Na traces how James Baldwin’s transnational palate and personal experiences were blended with Baldwin’s vision of black domestic spaces in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, while black feminist cooks and writers like Edna Lewis, Jessica B. Harris, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor developed new theories of soul food in relation to the black American community and broader American cuisine, Baldwin incorporated these philosophies and transnational tastes into his lifestyle and creative works. Through this critical study, Na’s research explains how Baldwin’s lifestyle and writing embodied black feminist food theory in queer domesticities, thus blurring the lines between traditional African American family kitchens and queer intimacies. Such blurring leads readers to see how marginalized groups may find commonalities around food-based discourses.
Assistant Professor Edward Chamberlain expands on Na’s discussion of intersectional experiences of race and sexuality in food-based contexts by examining two recent food essays that speak to the social struggles experienced by a gay African American man and a queer white man who felt anxieties from the Pulse Shootings, where myriad Latinx peoples were murdered. Chamberlain's presentation “Queering Cultures in U.S. Food Essays” is an analysis of how the double-marginalization of racism and homophobia creates a spatial void for queer peoples, who are disadvantaged by intersecting forms of prejudice. Chamberlain builds on the scholarship of Laure Murat and Julia Ehrhardt, who lead readers to interrogate how history informs queer social experiences of food. Working with these lenses, Chamberlain compares Michael Twitty's personal essay “Writing about Food at the Intersection of Gayness, Blackness & Faith” with John Birdsall's personal essay “Where Can We Find Queer Space After Pulse?” Chamberlain contends Twitty and Birdsall narrate personal accounts that function as telling social commentaries, which reveal how queer social relationships are shaped by dominant social practices of food and drink in the U.S. South.
The research of Chamberlain, Chow, Bushman, and Na will encourage the conference's attendees to take stock of the ways that societal norms, animus, and quotidian practices influence the social potentials and eating habits of vulnerable communities that have been marginalized in the United States and beyond. By closely monitoring the session's time, this panel's speakers will ensure that we provide the required fifteen minutes of open discussion at the session's conclusion. This approach will allow all attendees to ruminate upon the ways that food-based representation can function as a rich archive of historical evidence that attests to the struggles and resistance of the past and present.