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.

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...

Queering Foodways

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.

What to Drink When Writing

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.