As I finish the first complete drafts of chapter one and two, a distinction between these chapters and the later three has begun to emerge. The first two chapters, examining the emergence and intensification of novel food images, highlights systemic effects that provide social and material bodies with coherent self images (interpretants). The later three chapters, focused on the complex systems concepts of distribution, embodiment, enactment, examine the way these social-material bodies interact with multiple, cross-cultural foodways. So, metaphorically and literally bodies are at the forefront of the next three chapters.
As such, a healthy background of queer theorists', cyberneticists', and posthumanists' approaches to "the body," in all its ideological baggage, can benefit any research on the dynamics surrounding food and the bodies that derive symbolic and chemical nourishment from food. Queer theory especially deals with the complexities of interweaving material and social systems, a plaiting of food and culture with the body. Among cross-cultural foodways, ranging from tasting the Other thorugh foregin food to Creolizing culture with fusion foods, the fetish of occupying the Other's body through consumption often occurs within the matrix heteronormative behavior. The Other's food is coded as feminine, to put it reductively, and the consumer is coded male. Of course, television commercials often play with this normative binary, as in ads for the Quizno's torpedo sandwich.
Placing a phallic sandwich in a male-voiced machine, the sandwich "artist" (as Subway calls them) really does nothing more than enact a homosocial event akin to men horsing around in a football locker room. Nothing subversive here.
Where food begins a queer praxis, a new line of flight away from gender norms, is through a series of divorces, so to speak, from heteronormative pairings: food and reproduction, food and the fetish of the Other, food and nutrition (as a mainstream media enterprise, not Marion Nestle's empathic Food Politics). Divorcing, an appropriate legal metaphor indexing issues of gay marriage in the U.S., is a crucial first step towards reinventing the idea of marriage among actors and food with a queer image.
For starters, food, like sexuality, does not teleologically contribute to reproduction. The mass production of food in the U.S. bears more similarities with Walter Benjamin's descriptions of "mechanical reproduction" in the communications and aesthetic spheres than with Slow Food's vision of locally-produced food. The default process of food production is in fact reproduction. Food production comes implicitly packaged as God's plan, to echo to Catholic Church, for food to reproduce without variation. Evolution is stopped in its tracks. Likewise, food is often reduced to its nutritive value; it exists purely as fuel for the body. In this view, we measure pleasure in food against a background of health: if it tastes good, it must be bad. Similarly, sexual impulses and gender performances outside the heterosexual norm may impart some perverse, fetishistic pleasure, but it is pleasure measured against the heteronormative background.
What, then, might a queer foodways look like? Of course, as many theorists have pointed out, queer refers to a deviation from the norm and need not refer directly to sexuality. Stimulating accounts incorporating sexuality, however, may derive from Cherri Moraga's metaphors of hunger and closetedness in Loving in the War Years and Gloria Anzaldua's imaginings of corn in Borderlands. Julia C. Ehrhardt covers these topics in an article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature."
Samples of a queer foodways appear in more diffused form among food images used in the Showtime series, Dexter.
Images in the opening credits intentionally reflect Dexter Morgan's odd occupation as a serial-killing blood-spater specialist with the Miami PD. Not only is meat murder, but food and eating generally is murder. This weird association between food and Dexter's quirky serial killer justice lends a bit of queerness to food, bringing to the surface the pathological nature of eating and cooking. Take a closer look, the intro suggests, at the food you consume: the details reveal a little too much for comfort. Eating is a discontinuous process with no natural rhythm, no smooth path between male consumer and female nutrient. In a queer foodways, such binaries do not even exist. The eggs, the ham, the coffee, all have their singular texture; each has a culturally infused path, allowing us to connect to the world in novel ways. Already, I eat eggs with visions of bursting open bodies of strange yolk-ish creatures. A queer image, scary, pathological, and savory.
