The abstract Abstract

Well, this insane process is finally coming to a close. Literally, 2 and a half dissertations later, with a new advisor and new committee, the lumen at the end of the tunnel has appeared. While I keep my fingers crossed in anticipation of my defense, I might as well submit one draft of my abstract online, for posterity sakes. Here it be,

Spycy Eyes: Towards a Visual Rhetoric of Food

Food has the capacity to make worlds, to hold together many layers of experience at once, to imbricate bodily affect within cultural phenomena, to instantiate the visual within food. Indeed, food is not just a visual artifact but also a means of visualization. The visual inheres in food as a productive possibility, which I call spyce, the worldmaking capacity of food. Thus far, cultural studies has not fully addressed spyce, limiting scholarship to the study of food representation. Therefore, the unrepresentable in food, the preverbal affects, the illegible feelings, the autonomous intuitions, is omitted from rhetorical consideration—a blind spot in the politics of food and vision. Addressing this gap, spyce registers our embodied ways of seeing and knowing through food.

However, as this dissertation insists, spyce is not a self-consistent phenomenon; it is a highly differentiated, often contradictory visual space. Thus, visual rhetoric exposes the politics of spyce, its reconstitution of the early modern world economic system in John Dryden’s nationalist poem, Annus Mirabilis, its creation of race- and food-based places in nineteenth century cookbooks, its intervention in the global, capitalist food system in Cherríe Moraga’s play, Watsonville, or its re/figuration of gender in Chitra Divakaruni’s magic realist novel, The Mistress of Spices, and in the memoir cookbooks of Isabel Allende and Maya Angelou. Spyce, as emerging from the literature of the Slow Food movement, ultimately enables a way of seeing and recombining the multiple visualities that invest food with worldmaking power. 

Rick Perry 10 billion dollar cut to education

Just a memo to myself: Rick Perry and his allies are cutting $10 billion to the education budget in Texas. In September, the STARR tests--a more difficult version of the current TAKS; STARR applies to students' GPA-- will be implemented for high school students. In other words, teachers in low-scoring schools are screwed. More students, more pressure, less money. I've lost my appetite.

Dunkin' Brands Group IPO

Their Initial Public Offering opens tomorrow at 16-18 dollars. Dunkin' Donuts that is. This IPO occurs as I am writing a chapter on embodiment, the multivalent ways in which food and food images affect our bodies. Doughnuts, to say the least, affect bodies, or at least mine personally, in potentially dangerous ways that I can only express in the phrase, "I'm glad I don't own a doughnut shop." Pigging out would be on the mild end of my eating habits. But Dunkin' Donuts has sold as much coffee lately as their succulent sweets. And coffee, of course, is equally affective and, in my case, indispensable for the daily routine. Freud's addiction to cocaine pales in comparison.

I actually think Dunkin' Donuts' hedonistic undertone resonates nicely with Isabel Allende's Aphrodite, a memoir of sensory indulgence. She may appear high culture, but her book is as gritty and polluted with sucrose lines as the most hearty eclair. Homer Simpson understands her book better than I ever will.

Glencore

The world's largest commodity trader, Glencore, is going public today. Al Jazeera article accurately describes how Glencore, among other speculators, takes advantage of instability. Tenuous political situations equal maximum profits. Again, complex systems, those far from equilibrium states, prove central to understanding global economics.

Displacing Stereotype

Stereotype, according to Bhabha, "is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated" (Location 95). What is more 'in place' than gender and sexuality? But heteronormativity, an anxious repetition if ever there was one, acquires a fluidity and openness as it iterates over different cultures. Repetition and difference. It repeats, and not only reproduces, but also transforms.

When, in Aphrodite, Isabel Allende eloquently describes aphrodisiacs, a term she illustrates through various heterosexual relationships across different cultures, she arguably displaces--albeit unintentionally--heterosexual desire and stereotype. Instead, she reveals the affects behind sexuality. Affects flow across bodies indiscriminately. Only stereotype, acting as a screen or membrane, limits the affective stream. But when stereotype is no longer always in place, when it crosses cultures into a new social-material matrix, anxious repetition becomes transformative difference. Those differences, e.g., between Allende's relationship with her husband and a Taoist monk's relationship with his wife, testify to the movement of affects across multiple times and places. Bodies come and go, but the capacity to affect and be affected only intensify through the medium of aphrodisiacs.

Gathering a sense of the affective flow, the forces that bring bodies into relation, we imaginatively  produce an embodied place where we are inseparable from the environment. The exotic, sometimes Orientalist, images Allende describes positively feed into each other, and, interacting with our imagination, produce an emergent embodied foodscape. Here, our bodies are the environment. That is, we are always becoming the place where aphrodisiacs can draw another's body into relation with ours. A new schemata, or screen, begins to form. Such an erotic place, a place of "amorous desire" (Allende 26), both opens new relations and excludes others. But in this event of becoming embodied foodscape, we are most fiercely affected. How I might be stimulated to action is a question at its most open. I might eat, I might cook, I might write, I might...

"Worst Person in the World": George Leef

A submission to Keith Olberman's "worst person in the world" list: conservative pundit, George Leef, for mocking Julia C. Ehrhardt's article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature." Per the title of his article, he asks, "Can You Find the Fake Course"? With the creativity of a juvenile delinquent, he pretends that someone made a course based on the title of her article and, by implication, suggests that any serious study on topics outside the heteronormative, white (& free-market loving) male doesn't possess any "bodies of knowledge." Apparently Chicanas, lesbians, food, and literature are devoid of knowledge, or maybe it's the specific combination that empties knowledge from these categories, he doesn't say. (He also mocks actual course titles--the Adultery novel, Queer Musicology, and Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism--complaining that students would benefit more from a course in logic. Funny, since he commits a number of logical fallacies throughout).


Although the article is poorly written, his initial image of queer Chicana literature and food as epistemologically lacking brings up some interesting questions about image. No single category seems to offend Leef. He never provides a reason why Chicana lesbian literature lacks knowledge, he only complains that such study takes up university money and valuable student time. Indeed, it is likely he can't articulate why he hates Chicana lesbian literature. He simply does. 


Rather, the combination--queer, literature, Chicana, and food--produces an emergent image, one too progressive for his conservative, cultured-yogurt sensibilities. Emergence, a process in which  novel images, behaviors, or phenomena arise from interactions, helps explain what Leef clearly cannot explain: his fears about food in Chicana lesbian literature. In fact, Moraga captures the emergent image in the title of one of her plays, "The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea." Chicana lesbians are hungry, possessing appetites for food and sex. The mythic figure of the Hungry Woman is covered in mouths, which threaten to eat much more than what Leef can control. Similarly, as third world countries (like new agricultural countries) threaten to become totally independent of transnational agri-businesses, the politicians and lobbyists subsidizing transnational industries are beginning to feel a collective fear. They don't have control over the Other. 


The fake academic, the pseudo-researcher, the pundit, the phony, the worst person in the world. George Leef. 

The Heteronormativity of Consumer Relations

The received wisdom of consumerism, both as a science and as a behavior, takes a binary approach to understanding consumers. The marriage between the consumer and a given industry or institution functions as the paradigm for nearly all business. But for academics, and even for companies whose primary motive is profit, this binary perspective places severe restraints on creative thinking. Imagined as a binary relationship, a type of heteronormative marriage, the consumer-industry coupling offers a feeling and image of stability. It focuses on one aspect of the economic system where the exchange between consumer and "producer" appears straightforward: one offers a product, the other purchases the product. The systems of debt, today signs of unsustainable economic growth, remain invisible. And as Marx argues in Capital, we never see surplus value, the profit and congealed labor that makes many markets fundamentally unequal.

Tourist destinations offer as part of the leisure activities a narrow focus on the acts of exchange, downplaying any images concerning debt. Consumer-industry exchanges, in fact, become leisure activities. Going shopping provides the pleasure of purchasing and exchange, a fleeting escape from the debt that increases with every escape. The mythic marriage between consumer and industry becomes a dominant form of escape, not just an unquestioned coupling resonant with heteronormative relations.

Co-evolution, in the meanwhile, with other people, objects, plants, technologies, spirits has been ongoing, building a store of relations that can be called upon to challenge the dominance of consumer-industry couplings. Recent cultural research in animal studies, embodied in scholars like Donna Haraway, draw attention to the way humans and pets co-adapt to environments and even produce new ecologies that share only weak links with consumerism. Eating practices--vegetarianism and veganism--often bring into relief our powerful links with animals and the affective character of food, its capacity to induce certain feelings in us. Whether these are queer modes of consumption or not remains a question of their capacity to connect us to a diversity of actors, rather than any narrow focus on what goes in to our mouths.