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...
