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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
Andrea Broomfield, in a Gastronomica article on the Titanic dining menus, demonstrates that despite the tripartite class segregation aboard the ship the bill of fares actually encourage patrons to "see their potential" rather than "feel their place" (41). Among third class passengers, for example, roast beef marked a cuisine normally reserved for higher classes. Upwardly mobile foods attracted a new market of third class passengers by placing them in a new food assemblage not found on other large ships. Even in offering a limited number of items the restaurant menu opens passengers to new horizons, including all the imaginative baggage of the American Dream.
The sense that third class travelers were embarking on a new path, whether the promise of class mobility was actual or not, is a type of distributed visuality affording them a new picture of what is possible. The image roast beef conjures is a worldmaking one, not simply reflecting economic conditions but producing an image of economic reality--of the U.S.--that invites exploitation. Of course, the consequences of the American Dream, much criticized, are far from perfect, the capacity of inducing a feeling of potential through a restaurant menu remains a powerful, if commonplace, strategy still in use today. Distributed visuality, as an invitation to other possible food worlds, is as much a filter or constraint upon material cultures as it is a line of flight away from hackneyed categories, stale ideas, and old images.
Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott argue that the restaurant menu enables by constraining, "It lends shape and pattern to the plethora of alternatives that are available in many social spheres in contemporary society" (913). A type of visual activity, the menu helps structure what J.J. Gibson's adherents call the affordance landscape, which helps decide possibilities for action. A menu positions us as actors, Korczynski and Ott explain, providing us with the opportunity to make a meaningful choice. We experience ourselves as autonomous subjects; we gather pleasure through seeing ourselves as sovereign subjects. In a world where institutional constraints often incite disciplined routines and make docile bodies, experiencing ourselves as autonomous subjects can become a pleasurable escape from everyday pressures. Distributed visuality, then, risks being employed as an autonomy machine, affording us "false" choices that only reify hegemonic institutions.
But in a complex system, distributed visuality like the restaurant menu teeters between chaos and order, a far-from-equilibrium state, and placed in the right niche--given the right environment--it can create lines of flight, new affordances, and actuate new capacities towards a re-visioning food.
About year or so ago Pizza Hut put out a commercial evoking the five senses. A character would go crazy looking at a pizza, another would go nuts smelling the pizza, and so on. Of course, for viewers watching the ad, the senses were largely semiotic constructs rather than experiential realities.
Sniffing was another visual tool at the disposal of marketers. But merely evoking the senses fails to achieve the complexity that distributed visuality entails.
Distributed visuality, a vision of interdependence among human and nonhuman actors, also draws on visual studies' association of vision with knowledge (John Berger's articulations, for example, in Ways of Seeing). That ways of seeing correspond to ways of knowing suggests what is at stake when looking at food, what scopic regime tends to dominate. If not a disembodied vision, like Cartesian perspectivalism, then at least a de-historicized vision arguably dominates our way of seeing food. While I doubt the Pizza Hut commercial could be considered embodied--it abstracts eating practices into a weird cartoon-ish world--it definitely doesn't offer room for personal narrative, let alone collective memory. Other than some personal work experience in this food industry, where can I recite a history that connects me to the ingredients, or to the place where the tomatoes were grown. More than being a locavore, I'd like to know my food at more than a sensual level.
Meredith Abarca writes about a type of sensory epistemology, sazón, which she locates among working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. Rather than quantify ingredients, measuring out a cup of flour for example, these women measured ingredients according to the taste of a dish. They seasoned, added sazón, according to their own subjective taste. This subjective, perspectival dimension, what Abarca calls al gusto, invites personal experience, memories, and stories into the picture of cooking. Not only are all the senses engaged, but they are subjectively enacted through cooking. Cooking, then, becomes a form of seeing and knowing the world, a distributed visuality that accounts for senses and stories.
The point of (r)evolutionizing how we see food through sazón and other distributed visualities may actually be a rather straightforward task. I certainly don't mind eating Pizza Hut. But shouldn't the ahistorical fast foods, and maybe even the faux-historical mass marketed exotic foods (certain culinary tourist foods), be the exception? Our jouissance can come from rarely eating out, rather than rarely eating a home cooked meal.
Globalization, as Marxist geographer David Harvey admits, has led to a multicultural fusion at all scales, the local, regional, and global are populated by diverse cuisines not just homogenizing agro-business or McDonaldization. Local and regional scales, in other words, are as much products of globalization as the world-system. As such, our cognitive processes and the food images we conjure are distributed among actors at different scales: transnational corporations, national governments, municipal institutions, community organizations, and individual people. During the carb-craze when bread got a bad rap, I heard everyone from government officials, to doctors, to my friends weighing in on the Atkin's diet. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, this craze was a just a symptom of the U.S.'s long-established eating disorder. A national image emerged from the interlocking of actors at different scales.
As obvious as this multi-scaled process may seem, the tendency, even for Pollan, is to grant more influence to national actors (the government, national media, the CDC) and see the contributions of individual people as mediums for mainstream ideology. For Pollan, John Kellogg, the physician who invented cornflakes, appears as a scientist promoting the hidden nutritional properties of food over taste. Never mind that Kellogg's medical practices, including enemas involving yogurt, were initially not mainstream. Divorced from historical context, Kellogg's goal to remedy and prevent gastrointestinal problems common in the late-nineteenth century become footnotes (if that) in Pollan's critique of scientific discourse. Pollan sacrifices the object-oriented vision, the distributed visuality, Kellogg uses to formulate his dietary advice. Kellogg, following modern science, was convinced that gut flora--the microscopic organisms in our stomachs that help breakdown food--played a crucial role in our digestive process. He saw beyond anthropocentric approaches and sought to create a co-adaptive environment for both humans and flora. (To his credit, however, Pollan offers an excellent non-antropocentric view of distribution in his book, The Botany of Desire)
In the same way that Pollan overlooks Kellogg's relationship with or perspective on gut flora, transnational food corporations have overlooked many-a-culture's relationship with food and the land. Cherrie Moraga's play Watsonville, for example, depicts a pueblo (a people and a town) whose relationship with the lemon trees and the oak groves around them contrast against the packing of nutrient-rich broccoli into tin cans at a cannery factory that employs many Mexican and Mexican-American workers. Food for Dolores, an older Chicana who has lost two children, is as much spiritual as it is nutritional. The opening scene begins with her placing a tray of enchiladas before the "Virgen," not for human consumption but for spiritual edification. On the other hand, where Dolores works, factory workers seal food into cold, separate, and serialized containers. The presumption on the part of the cannery owners is that food is eaten for its nutritive dimensions, who cares how it is packaged, who does the packaging, and how much these workers are paid? In Watsonville, food among the pueblo is a shared material, something to share with other people as well as a type of communion between the people, their land, and their spiritual ancestors. Together, this distributed assemblage of people, land, and spirit make up the pueblo.
Actors like the pueblo, and even Kellogg, contribute to the formation of a global system. They may be the nearly invisible background material, as in the peublo in some of Alfonso Cuaron's films (e.g., Children of Men), but the repressed capacity of their brand of relationships awaits a reawakening. Oddly enough, they may, in a postmodern turn, blur the relationships between foreground and background, casting the relationships between agri-business and a series of distributed actors into sharp relief. It will be hard to ignore suffering.
Part of re-visioning the seemingly predominant fast-food perspective of food production and consumption in the U.S. is the now fashionable phrase "food revolution," popularized by ABC's Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (which will be returning for a second season in 2011). The show, accompanied with the usual reality TV spectacle, has received positive reviews from some of food studies' most influential members, including Marion Nestle's review in the Huffington Post. For Nestle, the most striking scene was when a class of West Virginia grade schoolers failed to identify the most common vegetables.
Striking perhaps, but not surprising. Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussions on "unknown knowns"--those things that we don't know that we know--could help anyone wishing to articulate how, of course, we know grade schoolers are not taught about vegetables, eating habits, or food production. This unremarkable fact is culturally repressed just enough so that when we are shown some actual footage of it framed by Oliver's British disgust, we can perform a bit and shake our heads.
Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit activist who has helped urban communities reshape their environment, offers a twist to Oliver's reality TV revolution. In an uncanny revision of "revolution," she calls for a good food (r)Evolution: a revolution accompanied by evolution, a collective evolution out of our current mindset. On her blog, she explains,
most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the food produced by agribusinesses who care as little about our health as they do about the health of the chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and where visible, is covered with excrement.
Using visual terminology, she evokes what I have called "distributed visuality," a way of seeing interdependency among multiple human and nonhuman actors. At stake in a food (r)evolution is the health of humans and animals, not to mention entire ecosystems. Revolution at the human scale, entails seeing our evolution with animals, plants, and land.
In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua actually uses the term (r)evolution to echo chemist Ilya Prigogine's notion of "dissipative structures" (103). (R)evolution works out the clash of cultures, she says, creating an unpredictable and more complex structure, a new breed of corn. And like corn, Boggs sees communities growing from the ground up, starting urban gardens by using the city's young people.
As striking as Jamie Oliver's encounters with grade schoolers' ignorance may seem, the image ABC produces is first a spectacle. Real life covered in excrement. Should he begin to touch on the interweaving of government, corporations, and U.S. culture, a distributed visuality, we may begin to see that the barn floor is covered in shit.
Harriet Friedman's "The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis," a 1993 essay published in the New Left Review among other venues, launched a number commentaries on what she calls new agricultural countries (NACs). Countries like Brazil and Thailand, considered third world countries by Western policy makers, developed distributed systems of food and agriculture that modified and even defied the dominant U.S. mercantile practice of producing food surpluses, subsidizing domestic agriculture, and using embargoes to enforce third world countries' dependence on U.S. transnational corporations. Brazil, she explains, "shifted the focus of domestic policy from agricultural subsidies to agroindustry, which increased the value of commodities and did not create surpluses" (46). A shift in "focus," Brazil's emergence as a key global player in exporting value added soy meal marks collective shift in perception among Brazilians.
The first shift in perception occurs when collectives refuse and critique the vision of the Green Revolution, the view that third world countries "lack" Western technology--genetically modified crops and chemical fertilizers--and, thus, they require intervention from Monsanto. By rejecting this position of dependance, NACs open up new visions of market dynamics. The second shift might be called distributed visuality, "a strategic mix of agricultural settlement, credit, and taxation policies to create an intensive livestock sector based on nationally produced grain and soya." Defined against the background of transnational corporate agriculture, distributed visuality invite actors to envision the economic world-system as a decentralized network not as a system reliant on any single country, institution, or rule.
There is no governing equation to economic health, especially in terms of the Green Revolution. The sublimation of genetically modified crops and laboratory produced fertilizers, perceived as the solution to world hunger, has proven only to impede in the development of local agricultural practices. Local environments, for instance, cannot sustain nutrient and water demands of genetically modified plants. Instead, each actor--that is, each country--holds a unique relationship to the world-system, the emergent geopolitical whole. Exploiting this relationship and the capacities hidden within a country's agricultural system begins with a new vision, seeing the collective body as capable of more actions than the dominant food regime would allow.
For Benedict Anderson, national "imagined communities" emerge from productions of mass media. The printing press, for example, distributes images of, say, England nationalism on a mass scale, filling the English landscape with images that individual and collective actors interact with and maneuver through. The spatial language is appropriate to thinking about images if we are to consider images as more than Platonic abstractions. Images occupy space, a type of topological space, perhaps, not conceptualized metrically but as a network. A space beyond our local, common-sense experience of a given place. Imagined communities are image communities that take humanity into previously uncharted territory, producing cohesive collectivities out of spatially and even temporally distant actors.
In a word, images are distributed, "divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment" (Syverson 7). Really, images extend our sense and concept of the environment outwards. En"viron," a closed circuit, becomes ever larger as images introduce new encounters that extend the real and imagined boundaries of our world. It works at all scales too. Electron microscopes reveal cellular topographies, while the Hubble Space Telescope relays pictures of interstellar gas birthing new stars. We maintain social lives over rivers of information flow, a Facebook page connecting Texas to Thailand.
Images of Distribution
An image, as in a webpage, offers an image of distribution: those networks of friends that make up a given "community." Facebook remains constrained, however, by its templates, centralized by a company, centered around a spectator (me). An image of distribution would display Facebook under new light, a highlight of its material distribution among electrical circuits, laptops, houses, living rooms--simultaneously a socio-economic distribution among middle-classes and its deviations.
Food, a highly condensed social fact, as Arjun Appadurai says, and a material necessity, offers a potentially densely-connected, widely-dispersed image of distribution. Within complex systems of food are lines of flight connecting multiple scales and varying actors, material and social, organic and inorganic. In a nuclear age, to echo Timothy Morton, food is a plutonium hyperobject with a rate of decay beyond any individual human time scale. (Even generations may not live to tell the tale of plutonium decay, 24,100 years). The now famous commodity biographies on cod, spice, bananas, coffee offer a snapshot of this radioactive decay, but not the whole story. Not the endless flares of distribution perpetually heating up and burning out. But capturing the entire distributed quality of a commodity is impossible, a perpetual fractal machine dynamic to the core.
An image of distribution may be enough to spark a new fire trail, a fire walk in the David Lynch sense.
Enough of a cult following has sprung up around Lynch's early-90s drama, Twin Peaks, to demonstrate the power of a new path, a new line of flight out of rote TV dramas. Down the rabbit hole we go with images of distribution.
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.
From Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images 84
-networks "tend to obscure the fact that the range of choices is ultimately pre-designed and limited"
-"the network is modelled on a form of social organization which is a vast labyrinth of intersecting [85] local relations in which each node is related in many different ways to other nodes in its immediate environment, but in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to form a coherent view of the whole"
85
-"may obscure the globalizing tendencies"
99 -"When analytical structures are topological, theyare read as accurately representing the 'logical' relations between participants, the way in which participants are connected to each other...but not the actual physical size of the participants or their distance from each other"
154
-modality is about "the reliability of messages"
-"we regard our sense of sight as more reliable than our sense of hearing"
-modality markers, "cues for what can be regarded as credible," help us to make decisions
155
-modality "refers to the truth value or credibility of (linguistically realized) statements about the world"
-modality markers in language: may, will, must, possible, probable, certain
-modality is composed of "shared truths"
156
-"while the photograph restricts itself to representing what would normally be visible to the naked eye, the diagrams do not: they make visible what is normally invisible"...."they take recourse to abstract graphic elements"
158
-"A 'realism' is produced by a particular group"
-"Each realism has its naturalism--that is, a realism is a definition of what counts a real--a set of criteria for the real"
-"photorealism"...."how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting and [159] what we can see of it in a visual representation"
159
-picture of coffee is clearer than soft background, and so holds higher modality
160
-abstraction relative to the standards of contemporary naturalistic representation
160-163
-types of modality markers
163
-"The world 'as we see it' (rather than 'as we know it', and certainly not 'as we hear it' or 'as we feel it') has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'"
164
-"the 'hyper-real' does not have the decreased modality it has in 'photographic' naturalism. Magazine photos of food are one example....the more a picture can create an illusion of touch and taste and smell, the higher its modality"
165
-"a realism that takes subjective emotions and sensations as the criterion for what is real and true"
171
-"a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are depicting and 'define' reality in general"
-food photos both abstract and sensory
I know Peter Elbow has covered the similarities between cooking and writing, but I'm compelled to recite my personal experience.
I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.
Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.
Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.
I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.
Explaining my project to "non-specialists" always helps me address basic issues that I tend to overlook. My mom asked me what I mean by "food image," a compound phrase I couldn't unpack very clearly for her. So here goes.
First, the institution of food studies has generally taken a more social, economic, and political perspective on food, rather than attempting a wholesale definition. One of the most quoted definitions comes from Arjun Appadurai, who sees food as a "highly condensed social fact." He points out that when we convert a part of our environment into food, we create a "powerful semiotic device." The boundaries of edibility and palatability often separate cultures, serving as grounds for perceived exoticism, primitiveness, or disgust. So food has a complex material and social DNA.
Second, visual studies sees images as a cultural phenomenon. WJT Mitchell provides a widely cited and coherent definition, understanding images as a family that includes graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal forms. He also understands images, or pictures, as "worldmaking" devices, rather than world-reflecting devices. The definition I use the most comes from N Katherine Hayles's book on cybernetics and literature. Drawing from information theories, she claims an image is a condensation of information that can be both visually evocative and invite visualization.
The symmetry between her definition of image as a condensation of information and Appadurai's notion of food a highly condensed social fact offers a pathway into defining food images. A food image condenses social information, affording a way of visualizing the world. Although food proper may be a condensed social fact, it does not necessarily lead to visualization or to visually evocative graphics and language. Here, I think, is the boundary between food and food images: it is not edibility that separates them, we can eat food but not food images; rather, it is visualization. When food allows us to visualize, it becomes a food image.
This definition actually accords with Manuel DeLanda's description of Hume's theory of images. Hume didn't think images were reflections of the world. Rather, images, even in the mind, were low-level reproductions of the world. The difference between the actual world and the image of the world was not that one was real and the other was just mental; the difference between world and image was a matter of intensity: the image is a lower-level intensity of the world. A low-level reproduction or image of an apple allows visualization in ways that the material apple cannot. In Proust's famous description of eating a madeleine, he reveals an image of food that allows us to not only represent the actual world but to also produce a world filled with memories, tastes, and psychological drama.
When food allows us to visualize, then it becomes a food image.
1) Change the font. This practice can spice up routine reading, especially at the sentence level.
2) Read aloud, either by yourself or get someone to read for you. Hearing writing can help you hear unclear sentences.
3) Read backwards, from last sentence to first. The idea here is to get rid of the cohesive picture of your writing that you have in your head, and read for sentence-level clarity.
4) Highlight key sentences in each paragraph and put it into an outline. The best advice I have read from Tara Gray, using key sentences helps to provide a more global picture of your essay and makes you look for coherence. Be sure to organize everything with your working thesis.
In the nineteenth century, photography produced visually evocative images and telegraphy introduced a type of visualizing mechanism in which people and places could be seen as networks. Both technologies introduced new ways of imagining place, drawing boundaries and corroding boundaries between places. More crucially, these technologies contributed to a visual milieu in which the speed of images reached a critical point, transforming places from static topographical materials located on a map into visual spectacles. Place was known primarily through visual means.
This shift did not occur statically, as if all one had to do was look through a camera lens and see place rather than smell or feel place. A place became more than a place, more than a territory or environment. A place became a "scape," a fluid image crossing over and through boundaries. Place melted from a solid to a liquid; the accelerated speed of image transmission pushed place into a new pattern of information, one that no longer relied on presence to figure material reality. Images moving in rapid succession, like a strip of film at the movies, appear fluid: a smooth stream of motion flickers across the screen. Scapes, likewise, are fluid. Not metaphorically, but materially. Places, now scapes, pour into individual and collective bodies, reacting with them as much as any other fluid--water, alcohol, coffee. The foodscape of New Orleans, for example, is at first limited by its material constraints, like a young body of water, but then as time progresses it begins to carve out a deep basin to become a river.
The fluid of places can be trapped, pushed through electric turbines in a dam, a practice that affords actors new capacities to generate complex material like the foodscape. A cookbook is such a dam. It impinges on the flow of a place, stealing image of New Orleans by drawing from the very technologies that created the flow in the first place. A photographic gaze not only accelerates image transmission, but also confines it, directs it, using it to capture scapes and generate new hybrid entities called foodscapes. Fluid place composed partly of food, foodscapes emerge from the intensity of flavor and temperature brought about by visual media. The foodscape capacities had yet to be realized, but they ranged from branding New Orleans an exotic Creole scape at the 1884 world's exhibition to casting Southern foodways as something available to San Francisco consumers in the wake of reconstructionist nostalgia in the U.S.
Photography and telegraphy first accelerated image transmissions, then were modified into machines servicing cookbooks (the photographic or telegraphic gaze). These visualizing machines caught the fluid scapes, converting them into cultural energy that could be used to produce foodscapes of various colors.
As a food studies researcher, I can be highly conscious of what I eat and drink when I write. And typically iced coffee is my drink of choice. The taste of the coffee as much as the caffeine induces focus. At a subconscious level, it tells me "it is time to write." Coffee brings together the experience of writing, folding my ideas into my environment, the computer screen, and, eventually, into language.
I tend to drink coffee for this specific purpose. My "writing drink" introduces a specific pattern of information, affording me certain connections with my environment. I become a rhizome, an assemblage of different things that are given cohesion through coffee. I become an embodied subject, fusing with my material environment.
