"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.

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.