Keywords: food; feminist, trans, and queer ecologies; mess, race, migration; critical pedagogies; world-making
Abstract
This roundtable brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to think through the significance food holds for queer and trans ecologies. With wildly varying backgrounds, we share overlapping interests in food, as well as in feminist, queer, and trans studies. We ask how and with what effects food assumed significance to us over our life course and educations and how it has shown up in our scholarship and teaching. We also ask how critical engagement with food can usefully challenge assumptions of gender and sexuality studies, and vice versa. Our answers emphasize the potential of food to unsettle categories and to imagine liberatory futures. Themes include the “messiness” of queer food; the varieties of household formations, socialities, connections and isolation that keep people alive; the ways that food has emerged as a site of joy as well as challenge; efforts to account for labor in growing, processing, procuring, serving, and sharing food; and the materiality as well as evocativeness of food. Throughout, we contend with what distinguishes food as an analytic object. Finally, we speculate on how and where food might become an “ingredient” in queer and trans ecologies.
Contributors
Tracey Deutsch, Martin Manalansan, Lorena Muñoz, Anahi Russo Garrido, Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen
Food as an “Ingredient” in Queer and Trans* Ecologies: A Roundtable
How have each of you used food in your work in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies? How did you come to work on food?
Martin Manalansan
I approach food in terms of queerness as mess (Manalansan 2014, 2015). Mess is not only about multiple forms of dis-order or clutter (emotional, moral, social, physical, etc.) but, as many theorists such as Fred Moten have suggested, mess is also a portal of possibilities, sustenance, and sustainability. From the African American vernacular, mess is about food and an open-ended unbounded unit of measure (e.g. a mess of greens). By triangulating food, queerness, and mess, we can discover creative avenues to engage with and confront long-held normative beliefs about ways of life, tastes, and senses of being in the world.
My forthcoming book is about six unrelated undocumented working class queers of color living in cramped quarters. I am thinking about the paradoxes of proximity and conviviality. While most of the 12 years that I spent with this group, I mention the one lone time when during a snowstorm, they hunkered down in their small domicile and shared food. It was a rare event since they discourage eating and cooking for fear of infestation. That said, it was a moment of accidental conviviality where they reflected on how little they knew of each other since they were all busy trying to survive an anti-immigrant world. Despite that event, it did not lead to spontaneous feelings of camaraderie, kinship, and solidarity. Queer as analytic here questions and disrupts the kind of teleology of food that is aimed at a seamless form of sociality and togetherness.
Food is a form of queer world-making as well as queer world-unmaking. Thinking queerly of food, we also think how food enables moments that distort or funk up ideals of harmony, deliciousness, and pleasure, especially as it directs us outside the world of foodies and culinary dilettantes to the world of famine, food stamps, and starvation.
I discuss this more in my response to the second question.
Lorena Muñoz
Food has always been at the heart of my research. When I began studying street food vendors in Los Angeles, my aim was to grasp how immigrant street vending cultures are perpetuated in the city. As a geographer, I approached the concept of space production (in line with Lefebvre, 1991) as a set of social and cultural processes intricately intertwined with physical space, resulting in spaces rich with fluid and adaptable meanings. Essentially, people continually shape and reshape meanings in relation to the spaces they inhabit. However, my initial understanding of these public spaces lacked an analysis of the role of the food sold by vendors in the spatial production processes. Specifically, I overlooked how queer Latinx immigrants in Los Angeles utilize sidewalks to connect their homes, whether imagined or real, to their present reality, while also conforming to heteronormative norms as street vendors. The traditional foods that vendors sell, draws from heteronormative and gendered imaginaries of street food vendors in Latin America, what Blunt (2003) calls “productive nostalgia.” The traditionally prepared foods the vendors sell and what the customer purchases is more than the ingredients carefully put together and cooked to create hot food that tastes good. It is what the food does, that is, how the taste, smells and the way it is sold, creates meaning and activates memories that shape how immigrant vendors and their immigrant consumers create belongings and rights to the social worlds re-created in these vending sidewalks.
Food is central to understanding the concept of Latinx queer worldmakings—temporary productions of social worlds that facilitate navigating life in the present while being queer/Latinx (Munoz 2023). As such, in my recent study of food and family dinners in a female federal prison, I explore how food not only facilitated but also organized temporary productions of social worlds, aiding participants in navigating their present lives while being queer and Latinx. Moreover, food/dinners served as a tool to resist and reconfigure disciplining heteronormative and white supremacist processes within the prison system. Incarcerated Latinx individuals utilized food to create alternative social worlds or queer worldmakings, forming chosen families and organizing family dinners as means of resistance. This process highlights the importance of performing a present oriented towards the future, shedding light on how Latinx queer worldmakings offer insights into the spatial ways in which incarcerated women negotiate their present to resist systems of mass incarceration and white supremacist oppression.
Carly Thomsen
My entry into thinking critically—that is, in my case, in ways that are informed by feminist, queer, disability, and critical race studies—about food has been long and drawn out. I first took a Sociology of the Politics of Food class as an undergraduate student at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota more than twenty years ago. There, under the guidance of Dr. Tracy Ore, I was introduced to the ways in which food reproduces the conditions within which inequality occurs and also contains possibilities for challenging various oppressive systems and ideologies. That class informed how I think about food as well as feminist and queer pedagogy. We took field trips. We engaged with a lot of different kinds of texts: journalistic texts, pop cultural texts, and traditional academic texts. We ate together. One assignment required us to bring food to share with classmates, with a written reflection on why we chose this particular food or dish. I knew immediately that I would make homemade bread. I inherited a love of baking and cooking from my Grandma Lavonne. Each summer, every grandkid got to spend a week with my grandparents. We’d go to their little community garden spot and garden, we’d help my Grandpa collect aluminum cans to recycle from the dumpsters, and, best of all, we’d make homemade ice cream with my Grandpa in the garage and all kinds of homemade yeasted breads—cinnamon rolls, caramel rolls, dinner rolls, bread loaves and on and on—with my Grandma. A bakery of epic proportions all from a tiny kitchen in a one bedroom apartment in a complex for low-income seniors. At the end of the week, we’d take those items home and share them with our parents, who would “oooooo” and “aaaaahhhh” over our creations. One year, my father, who was a truck driver, picked up my little sister and all of her treats in his semi truck; he happened to have a route that took him through the town where my grandparents lived. Our dog, Brutus, had a few more minutes in the semi after my Dad and sister exited, and Brutus quickly decimated the bags of baked goods. My sister cried and cried and cried. Today, this is one of the family stories on repeat, one that always generates a lot of laughter. This is all to say that when it came to choosing the food I’d prepare for my classmates, a food that reveals something about myself and my origins, the choice was simple: Bread. It’s always bread.
Unlike the breads I prepared alongside my Grandma Lavonne, I made this bread in a machine. But much to my dismay, my bread did not turn out like my grandma’s. It was not fluffy. It didn’t have a nice crumb. Instead, it was a bizarre dense blob. Perhaps had I, at that time, had an understanding of queerness as mess, as Martin articulates, I could have avoided crying as I stared into the bread machine. I remember looking down into this sad little machine at my sad little loaf and feeling defeated, ashamed, and confused. While I was too exhausted from working full-time while going to school full-time to make a new loaf, I couldn’t imagine serving this to my classmates, especially while sharing the story of learning how to bake from my grandma, who, not so incidentally, was named cook of the year in South Dakota twice in her life, something I did not learn until her funeral. I decided to cut up my loaf, if you can call it that, into small pieces that I tried to pass off as crackers, and I whipped up some artichoke dip to try to mask how awful my bread was. In some ways, it worked. My classmates seemed to enjoy it. But unlike my classmates, who often reported how proud they were to share the food they had prepared, I felt deep sadness and a sense of failure. Had I just tended to my bread, like my grandma did, so that I could feel, with my hands, when the dough was ready, I could have served something that I, too, was proud of. I shared these feelings with my class, and my professor commented that food is a commodity that illuminates, perhaps more than most others, what we lose when we focus on the final product. In other words, it wasn’t about the bread. She was right, of course.
Food often generates outsized affects—something that became clear to me through another assignment in that same Politics of Food class. Throughout the course of the semester, each student picked one food to research. Our final project included writing a significant research paper, presenting our findings in a formal presentation to our class, and contributing an item to our class potluck that incorporated the food we had researched. Informed by the reproductive justice activism I had been involved with for the past few years, I chose breast milk. Throughout the semester, there were a lot of jokes about the food I was going to bring to the potluck. At one point, it became clear that my largely feminist and queer identified classmates assumed I would use another kind of milk in my dish for the potluck. When they learned that I did, indeed, intend to make my caramelized apple cake with breast milk, they made clear that they were horrified. They made equally clear that they would not eat it. I found this ridiculous. I asked how eating human milk is so different from eating any other animal’s milk? And I commented that it wasn’t like I was bringing a lactating human to the party and asking people to eat directly from the human teat. In the end, I used soy milk. My classmates loved my cake. At the potluck, I remember feeling proud (of my cake) and perturbed (with some of my prudish classmates).
Shortly after graduating from college, I got a job at the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP), an Indigenous and environmental justice non-profit run by Winona LaDuke. I ended up with this job because of my interest in breast milk. LaDuke was trying to get a project off the ground that explored toxins in the breast milk of women who lived on or near the reservation. Our unsuccessful grant applications meant that we didn’t make much headway on this particular project, but I did get the opportunity to work on various other food justice projects, including supporting a campaign to keep wild rice from being genetically modified, working in the cafe that featured traditional Indigenous foods, and harvesting maple syrup. At one point that year, 2006, I took a week off from working on these food justice projects and returned home to South Dakota to contribute to the campaign to overturn the state’s abortion ban. Later, I published an essay about how Indigenous women’s responses to the South Dakota abortion ban were different from the approaches of both the anti-abortion and abortion rights campaigns (Thomsen 2015). This article would have been inconceivable had LaDuke not seen reproductive justice as central to Indigenous, environmental, and food justice.
It also would not have been written had I not gone to graduate school. While in my M.A. and Ph.D. programs, in Tucson, Arizona and Santa Barbara, California, respectively, food was a way to escape the endless reading, writing, thinking. A break from feminist and queer theory. It was a way to develop new relationships and spend time with new friends. Many of my closest friendships revolve around shared interest in food—planting, procuring, preserving, preparing, and the pleasure of sharing it. My fondest memories of my time in graduate school involve food. In Tucson, my friend Heather Fukunaga and I participated in wild food workshops and made delicious syrups out of the flowers of desert plants. We also tried to craft a Chex Mix recipe that could win us $10,000—until we realized one night, weeks into our culinary adventure, if you will, that we were eating a whole lot of Chex Mix and neither of us even like it. In Santa Barbara, I would look forward all week to my Saturday morning trip to the farmers’ market with my friend Maryam Griffin. There, our ruminations about an academic idea that was giving us pause would be halted over and over as we excitedly spotted produce that was not available even the week before. Although our friendship began through a Radical Thought seminar we took with Avery Gordon, it was solidified through our shared love of beans and pickles. At the time, a decade ago now, we anxiously joked that if the academic “job market,” if you can call it that, didn’t work out, we’d start a pickle company called “PHermenteD.”
We didn’t start our pickle company—yet!—but it was at that farmers’ market, in conversation with Maryam, that I worked out many of the ideas in my dissertation, through which I examined LGBTQ rights groups’ simultaneous fetishization of visibility and their disdain for rural life. My dissertation, and book that emerged from it, explores what Jack Halberstam terms “metronormativity,” or how the urban came to be imagined as the only possible place where queer life could flourish, through the lives of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest (Thomsen 2021). Through this process, I realized that very little of feminist and queer studies takes place seriously—in terms of having a serious impact on how one identifies in or experiences the world and also how place itself is imagined and constructed.
I took this insight with me to the various alternative food spaces I gravitated toward. And it wasn’t long before I realized that the same self-righteousness evident among urban based LGBTQ activists, who are so sure that they are the liberated ones, is also apparent among food justice advocates. I started to question what necessarily goes unexamined when we feel like we’ve got it figured out. How had buying “sustainable, organic, and local”—the full name for the SOL Food Festival in Santa Barbara, for instance—become synonymous with working for food justice? What do these terms even mean? Informed by my work in rural queer studies, I started to think about how the rural is imagined, how the local is imagined, and how they are often conflated—points I expand upon in response to later questions. In short, my engagement in alternative food spaces provided me with endless opportunities to practice thinking in feminist and queer ways about food, just as my conversations that transpired during my weekly farmers’ market trips sharpened my feminist and queer thinking.
That’s a long story, I know. But each of the parts of it seem crucial to articulating how I came to think critically and carefully, in feminist, queer, and trans ways, about food at all. Inspired by my professor’s now two-decades old response to my comment on my bread (er…crackers?), I have been thinking for a long time and with many people about what makes food a unique thing to think with and through and alongside—often as I stretch a galette crust, knead bread dough, and cut butter into biscuits. I love food and so much of what it enables. And I’m also disturbed by the ways in which this love and its byproducts conceal the harms that are perpetuated not only by the industrialized food system, but also by discourses associated with alternative and ostensibly justice-oriented approaches to food. My thinking about these paradoxes, as well as the affects of and discourses surrounding food, has been deeply informed by the feminist and queer thinking of the scholars in this roundtable, so I’m delighted to be a part of this conversation in which we begin to articulate what bringing critical theory to bear on food and bringing food to critical theory can open up.
Tracey Deutsch
I am compelled to study food as a site of reproductive labor, specifically by looking at provisioning and cooking as critical junctures for political, gendered, sexual, racial, and economic systems. For instance, I’m interested in how the political possibilities of consumption expand if we see provisioning as skilled labor, in which people deploy their knowledge to act in profoundly ungovernable, unpredictable, and troublesome ways. I learned this from my first book (Deutsch 2010), which documented how efforts to control grocery store shopping via a gendered rhetoric of apolitical, passive, satisfied housewives shaped modern grocery stores. Attending to the long history of women’s failure to behave as grocers wanted them to revealed the precarity of even (maybe especially) the most “natural” institutions.
Although my first book was about supermarkets, it took awhile for me to realize that I was in food studies to stay. In particular, it took a short essay about how a romanticized history of women’s home cooking permeates the local foods movement (2011). Writing that made me realize that the trope of women’s unpaid but joyful home cooking, in addition to being a grossly inaccurate representation of both women’s history and the nature of cooking, was also a tell. And what it tells is the structural importance of home cooking. There is a lot at stake in everyday eating. Shifts in where and how food is served, to whom and by whom, and what is made, is at the center of rethinking kinship, households, and our relationship with the natural world.
My new project, on Julia Child and the evolution of gourmet cooking as a preoccupation of middle and upper-class Americans in the mid-20th century, has taught me a lot about the possibilities of change that are nascent in everyday meals. Food reveals the sturdiness of “the family,” capitalism, racism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, but also their limits. People’s efforts to reinscribe, reimagine, undermine, and reject hierarchy and belonging occur through the most mundane, everyday, acts of cooking and eating.
The precarity and the possibility that food holds runs through my work because it has run through my life and the lives of my colleagues, friends, family, and comrades as we survive this historical moment. Like so many others here, I was drawn to food because it draws from the experiences of everyday life to theorize. It uses the mundane to create more inclusive, more just and more generative futures. I have learned, over and over again, that feminist, queer, and anti-racist food studies draws its power from its ability to make clear the structural resonance and significance of personal experience.
Anahi Russo Garrido
I am working on a research project that explores how activists, particularly in racial justice movements, use contemplative practices to sustain their work. One of my book chapters focuses on a community garden in a gentrifying neighborhood in North Denver, where Black and Brown people have formed an organization that nourishes their neighbors. This organization holds a weekly farmer’s market where fresh produce is sold at an affordable cost for the community. Additionally, the garden provides space for yoga classes, music, and gathering. Such space is conceptualized to nourish and care holistically beyond the traditional body/mind, or individual/community binary. The community garden offers a space for queer forms of care, and perhaps in this context food is fruits and vegetables, but metaphorically speaking, food that nourishes can take so many forms.
Stina Soderling
In my work, food has first and foremost been a practice of thinking: growing and making food, especially together with others, helps me think in more generative and generous ways, and ask better questions. I often pose my main research question as “Why do queers love sauerkraut?” Of course it’s a joke, but also dead serious. I write about food production and consumption practices in (mostly rural) queer communities in the US South, and fermentation projects are common in these spaces. The early thinking for this writing happened late at night in the kitchen of the (urban) queer household I was part of at the time – queer in terms of gender and sexuality as well as having a household unit that was not formed around a couple. The bagel store across the street put out their rejects at 11pm, so we’d go for a walk and get a bagful, which we’d slather in Earth Balance, sriracha, and nutritional yeast. We’d make yogurt out of dumpstered milk from outside the grocery store down the street. We all worked odd hours, in temp jobs, strip clubs, and TAing/adjuncting, and the times when all three of us were at home and awake at the same time were precious. We’d have long rambling conversations about feminist theory as the milk for the yogurt simmered on the stove. That was the place where I started formulating theories of fermentation not just as a practice queers engaged in, but as a queer practice, and a metaphor for queer temporality. Similarly to Carly’s recounting of conversations with friends while at the farmers’ market, it was theorizing over food. Food was the subject of the theory, as well as the substance that fed my body and allowed it to theorize.
I slipped into the academic field of rural queer studies (shortly before it was articulated as a field, with a name) in an attempt to get away from academia for a little while. After my first year of graduate school, I did a gardening internship at a “Queer Land Project,” a rural space intentionally created and maintained for queer and trans folks. I wanted to spend time away from New York City and my long commute to Rutgers in New Jersey, and learn to grow tomatoes. I knew nothing about growing vegetables. Early on in the internship, I “harvested” rows and rows of not-yet-ready garlic, about which MaxZine, the intern “supervisor” – I put that in quotes because such hierarchical roles were anathema to the space, yet we learned so much under MaxZine’s guidance – was amazingly gracious. I did learn some gardening skills that summer, and even more so I learned about trans and queer worldbuilding, including how food facilitated that worldbuilding. The experience raised many questions, ones that combined the theoretical and the very practical, as I think the best Feminist Studies research does. So rural queer worldbuilding became not a break from my scholarship, but my area of research.
The embodied learning that I experienced at queer land projects influenced my teaching, and I include food in courses whenever possible. When teaching LGBT and Queer Studies, I sometimes ask students to cook. Maybe we cook in class, if we have access to a kitchen, or maybe everyone brings a queer or trans food item to a finals-week potluck. I love seeing students go from “But that’s a ridiculous assignment! Food can’t be trans/queer!” to bringing the most imaginative dishes a few weeks later. I love the work that food does for our thinking.
How do feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies disrupt taken-for-granted ideas in, or expand the contours of, food studies and related food justice activism?
Martin Manalansan
The triangulation of food, mess, and queerness is precisely about disrupting long held notions of propriety, hygiene, difference, and power inequalities. In a world where food has long been seen as the medium of power and distinction, the queerness of food is precisely set against a foodie world of hierarchies. Queering food is to mess up, funk up, and upend strictures of proper tastes, manners, and composures. In other words, food is not just a means to satiate hunger, promote positive “familial” feelings, or to fulfill aspirational desire for uplift, but rather to attend to negative and long-disparaged emotional states such as sadness, solitariness, disgust, and bitter failure. This is a way to open up and break apart from “liteness” and the immediate “happy” appeal of food for promoting attachments and differences.
Lorena Muñoz
Queer is about disruption. Like Martin says, “it’s messy” (Manalansan 2014). Queerness and food allow for rethinking the way we think about food in relation to the way we sell food informally. I have worked with street vendors across the globe for more than 20 years. While street vendors exist in almost every country in the world, their work is still considered (with a few exceptions) a non-normative economic practice. Street vending is often understood as a classed, marginalized practice. Embodied street vending practices are also read as outside of, messy, crime-inducing, economies of last resort, pre-modern, and these ways of understanding the practice are ways that we understand the people who practice this economic form as well as the food they are selling. This is important because urban policies that claim to be generated from progressive, eco-friendly ideas of the future of cities extract the way street vendors operate in urban spaces and discipline them by incorporating vendors into the so-called normative economy while trying to eradicate a way of life that is outside the framework of sustainable urban development. By challenging these popular urbanization frameworks, street vending activists across the globe have claimed rights to street vending (food traders) as a necessary and thriving cultural/economic way of worldmaking in urban spaces. For example, food vendors in Los Angeles have a systematic and complex organization of food vending economies in the streets. The food they sell is more than food and the way they sell it is more than an economic transaction. Immigrant street vending practices are entangled with foodways systems, immigrants’ transnational journeys, and rights to sidewalks that queer the social worlds of those who create and recreate immigrant vending landscapes.
Tracey Deutsch
As Martin says, feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies usefully make a mess of conventional approaches to food. Certainly, this is true in the realm of affect, as Martin notes. In my own work, I’ve also encountered this disruptiveness in the realm of labor. Fully describing the dynamics of a meal, the process of cooking, or even the steps involved in procuring food escapes the words we use to describe these activities. These fields confront the way that gardening can simultaneously be joyful and sustaining, and also annoying, requiring daily labors and negotiations with nearby gardeners, non-human beings, etc. Shopping can be informed by desire and yield a lot of pleasure, but it also is embedded in constraint caused by our political commitments, financial resources, and obligations to others. Even when people eat alone, food is necessarily the result of other beings’ labors and lives. Is that dependence? Interdependence? Obligation and reward swirl around the same meal, the same activity. Food is not something that can be neatly categorized as oppressive or liberatory. Because scholars in feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies, along with critical disability studies, take care work seriously as a font of theorizing, these scholars help us, in fact, they require us, to rethink food. We need to reconceptualize labor, family, solidarity, community, etc., to encompass the dynamics that food reveals.
Similarly, these fields disrupt the importance of the nuclear family as a site of food distribution. People survive through robust connections beyond biological kin. Conversely, robust connections confer accountability; we also are obligated by these non-biological ties. Social formations outside of the nuclear family (e.g. friends, neighbors, lovers, faith community members) are sustained by food that is bought, cooked, shared, etc. In my own historical research, I’ve seen how even seemingly normative households produced and bought food for friends, neighbors, and family who did not technically live with them. Food definitively shows that there’s very little “there there” when it comes to nuclear families.
Carly Thomsen
I think that there are many ideas in food studies that could and should be disrupted by critical work in feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies, but so far the potential for this disruption has been thwarted by superficial engagements with critical theory. I attempted to publish a manuscript in a food studies journal in which I argue that we need more precise ways of articulating what constitutes feminist food studies. Such a position is inspired by the edited volume Feminist Food Studies, which notes that “the work comprised by the label ‘feminist food studies’ is not always clear-cut, and drawing boundaries around what counts as a contribution to a defined area of scholarship is inherently political” (Parker et al. 2019). To support their claim that “many contributors to food studies include feminist analyses, but…do not necessarily name their work as such,” the editors cite several texts that offer “important contributions to understanding women’s relationships with food,” and “the complexity of women’s embodied and material relationships with food” (2). Here, as throughout much of the literature that ostensibly constitutes feminist food studies, feminist food studies is conflated with analyses of food and women. Clearly, scholars can and do write about women without advancing feminist thought or engaging in feminist studies. This is not to say that women cannot be central to feminist analyses, of course, but it is to say that examining women is not enough to make an analysis feminist, nor to claim an engagement with feminist studies. We could and should say the same thing about analyses of LGBTQ+ identified people and queer and trans studies.
These points seem pretty obvious to me, a person with a Feminist Studies PhD, but they have also been contentious. In fact, my article has been rejected repeatedly by scholars who see themselves as doing feminist food studies. The irony is that the editors of Feminist Food Studies seem to agree with my point that we need more precise ways of thinking about what makes certain veins of food studies feminist, something evident in their distinguishing themselves from earlier feminist food studies work because, as they note, it “did not engage explicitly with intersectionality” (3). Intersectionality here operates as a stand-in for doing feminist food studies differently and properly. So, in my quest to understand what those scholars claiming to do feminist food studies see as feminist, I began to trace deployments of “intersectionality” in their work. I found that discourses of intersectionality in feminist food studies often run counter to the ways in which feminist and queer studies scholars use these terms. That is, in feminist food studies, “intersectionality,” always already understood as constituting proper analysis, stands in for examining individual identities that transpire along lines of marginalization—that is, for examining moments when someone’s race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, religion, and/or geographic context collide to inform their lives. But within Black feminist studies and queer of color critique, this approach has been questioned (Nash 2008; 2019; Puar 2007; Thomsen and Finley 2019; Wiegman 2012). Such identity-based applications of intersectionality often conflate acknowledging individual identity with analyzing the institutions producing collective marginalization. Put more simply, acknowledging that race, class, gender, and other identity markers inform people’s lives is different—and much easier—than analyzing the mechanisms of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of systemic inequities. In a similar vein, scholars, including Sara Ahmed (2012, 195), warn that intersectionality can function “as a method of deflection,” a way to re-direct attention away from racism by bringing up other forms of social exclusion. Nash also asks us to consider who and what gets taken up in intersectional analyses. What happens, Jennifer Nash (2016, 13) asks, when intersectionality becomes “a framework that can—and does—speak about all subjects’ social locations”? Further, scholars have argued, broadening the imagined objects of intersectional analysis can result in shifting Black women from the center to the periphery, all in the name of inclusivity (Nash 2016, 12). Nash (2008) also critiques the centralizing of oppression and marginalization in so-called intersectional approaches, arguing that the theory often ignores that people who are marginalized in certain areas of their lives experience privileges in others.
What, we should ask, do we lose when intersectionality becomes incontestable? Feminist food studies’ deployments of intersectionality ignore Nash’s (2019, 36) calls to “refine, nuance, complicate, [and] think through intersectionality’s contours and migrations.” In feminist food studies, intersectionality is that which will “enhance, enliven, and deepen critical perspectives in food studies” (Brady et al 2018, 1). To this point, Psyche Williams-Forson (2011, 11) asks: “What happens to food studies if you put intersectionality at the center?” We ought to question what it means that feminist food studies’ deployments of intersectionality have almost entirely disregarded the feminist studies debates around it. As such, I suggest we need to ask a tweaked version of Williams-Forson’s question: What happens to feminist food studies if we avoid taking for granted the place of intersectionality within it—but continue to demand analyses of how food systems can both reproduce social inequities (racism, classism, sexism, ableism, trans- and homophobia, and metronormativity) and also provide opportunities to challenge them? How might feminist and queer critiques of intersectionality create possibilities for examining food otherwise, including its place in aspects of social life bubbling beyond identity, including, for instance, in what Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2012) terms “queer alimentarity”? Or how can food studies help us to think in new ways about commonsensical deployments of intersectionality? These are the questions that go unasked when scholars working on food from their largely disciplinary positions assume that they are doing feminist, queer, trans, and critical race studies analyses simply by engaging in discussions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on.
Stina Soderling
To echo what other contributors to this roundtable are arguing, a queer lens helps us to move away from simplistic ideas of “good” and “bad,” including in how we think about food. As Martin notes, queering food means challenging hierarchies of tastes and manners; it means messing up norms of what we should eat. And, I would argue, in doing so, it helps us question what that food does for us, how it affects our bodies. To give a concrete example: I remember a meal during my fieldwork in a rural trans and queer land project that grew much of its own food. It was late summer, and the gardens were at their peak. There was so much fresh produce right outside the window and homebrewed kombucha and beer in the kitchen, and folks wanted to heat up frozen bagged tater tots and drink store-bought soda. This decision made no sense nutritionally, financially, or even timewise when we had to drive half an hour each way to the nearest grocery store. Yet it was a deeply nourishing meal, as evidenced in part by the fact that I still think of it fondly years later. We got together and had fun cooking (that is, warming up tater tots in the oven) and making rainbow ice cubes out of the soda containing who-knows-what-kind-of-bad-for-you colorings. It was, in one sense, a very good meal, while also being quite a bad one.
Contemplating the tater-tot meal has made me less interested in trying to make sense of behaviors. I’m sure we could write a neat reason for these culinary decisions, but I’m not convinced that this would be the most fascinating, or even useful, project. Instead, I’ve become increasingly curious about the complex ways food makes us feel alive, makes us feel that the world is alive, and creates joy. To apply this to a situation we have probably all heard of, let’s consider the ubiquitous sourdough baking of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is so easy to read this “trend” as a longing for domesticity, a domesticity that is racialized (white) and gendered (feminine). That is a spot-on analysis, but also inadequate. As I was reading the early-pandemic media stories about home baking, I was reminded of a story about one of the people I ate those tater-tots with, who, during a period in the 1990s when her AIDS-related symptoms were especially bad, had started brewing kombucha. At the time, some people claimed that kombucha could cure AIDS. Did my homebrewing dining companion believe this? That is, to me, not the most relevant question. Regardless of what anyone thought might happen, the practice of making kombucha—of interacting with microbes to make something delicious—helped sustain her during a very difficult time. It was a way of interacting with things that were alive and growing, and it was a way of sharing tasty nourishment with others. I think here of what Tracey notes in her remarks, that food can help us see the way people organize social ties, and how this happens in so many different ways. These social ties go beyond the human; we are in relation with animals, plants, and, yes, bacteria and viruses. Feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies give us tools for thinking complexly about the relationships that food fosters.
Most of the key texts I use to think about (queer and trans, but also other) interactions with food are not from within food studies proper. How we choose sources is a key aspect of feminist studies. We ask questions, and then we figure out what evidence we need to gather in order to answer those questions (Glassburn Falzetti 2018). The archives and reading lists we draw on for any project is a core feminist, trans, and queer studies methodological concern. In asking why so many people started baking during COVID-19 lockdowns, I was curious about what these processes did, not just what they represented. The first sources of evidence I turned to were doughs. I kneaded dough and asked myself what was happening to me in the process. I peeked at blobs of flour and water getting bubblier on my kitchen counter, and I breathed. The doughs were breathing, too. Breath, of course, was a central concern in the early-pandemic world; making sure humans could breathe was the whole reason many of us were holed up at home. Who was thinking critically about breath at this time? The scholars I turned to were Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020) and her work on interspecies breathing, eventually to be published in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals; and Achille Mbembe, in particular his essay “The Universal Right to Breathe” (2020). These are not food studies texts in the traditional sense; they are not even texts about food. But they helped explain breathing (and bread) to me, and the way we breathe beyond ourselves.
How does food help us to disrupt taken-for-granted ideas in or to expand the contours of feminist, queer, trans, and ethnic studies?
Carly Thomsen
I didn’t actually go looking for ways that food can expand the contours of the academic scholarship that I engage. But that is, somewhat accidentally, what I found. As I put together syllabi for my “Food and Feminism” class and my “Queering Food” class, I began by searching for texts that located their analyses of food in feminist, queer, disability, and critical race studies. Some texts were enormously helpful, including: Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2012), Kim Hall’s “Toward a Queer Crip Politics of Food” (2014), Gabriel Rosenberg’s The 4-H Harvest Sexuality and the State in Rural America (2015), Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public” (1998), Juana María Rodríguez’s “Viscous Pleasures and Unruly Feminisms” (2015), Eating Asian America, edited by Ku Robert Ji-Song, Martin Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (2013), and the “On the Visceral” special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, which asks food and queer studies “to get in bed with each other” (Holland et al 2014, 396).
But, I didn’t want to just teach a class that explored food in relation to sexism, racism, classism, homo- and transphobia, metronormativity, ableism, and so on. I wanted to teach a class through which students could practice utilizing queer theoretical work to examine something other than gender and sexuality, and all of its attendant racialized, classed, embodied, and geographically inflected components. What might it mean to queer food? And how could we answer this question by reading texts about food alongside queer theoretical texts that aren’t about food but that upend the assumptions undergirding the texts about food?
In working to answer this question, I ended up realizing that food was also helpful for re-thinking debates in queer studies. Let’s take, for example, queer studies’ extensive conversations about futurity, including what the future means, how we imagine our individual and collective relation to it, and its place in LGBTQ+ politics. In his polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee Edelman critiques what he terms “reproductive futurism,” or the heteronormative ideologies encompassed in the image of “the Child.” Edelman describes the “coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity,” questions why political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse and asks what a politics looks like that is not “fighting for the children” (6). For Edelman, queerness must aim to disrupt the assumed connections between the imagined child and an imagined future. Disrupting this linkage is crucial, Edelman says, because the respectability politics that drive concerns “for the children” have so informed contemporary gay rights activism that it has become as difficult for individuals to imagine their future without children as it has for activists to imagine a politics that doesn’t rely on a normative future. Put otherwise, the imagined Child shapes the logics within which the political can be thought. Ultimately, Edelman asks readers to consider the impacts of linking concerns for the future to LGBTQ people and politics, suggesting that the future is always already heteronormative because of its reliance on reproduction. José Esteban Muñoz warns of the limits to Edelman’s argument, suggesting, in part, that it ignores the particularities of race and gender. Put otherwise, developing future-oriented politics—focusing on the then and there, rather than here and now—might be necessary for those for whom the present is particularly depleted. As Muñoz (2009, 27) argues, “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.” At the same time, Muñoz agrees that we cannot ignore the present for an imagined future. Creating a different present is possible, Muñoz says, via utopian imaginings of the future as otherwise.
I won’t rehash this widely discussed debate further here, except to point out that, while the work by Muñoz and Edelman largely has been framed as oppositional, there are overlaps in their arguments. Both scholars, for example, are critical of gay pragmatism, of desires for inclusion in a bankrupt social system. Both scholars also view gay pragmatism as limiting our politics as well as our desires. For Muñoz, pragmatism exists in opposition to future-oriented politics, while, for Edelman, it is symptomatic of these politics. I’m not sure that I would have recognized these overlaps had I not gone back to Muñoz’s and Edelman’s work with questions about food, food politics, and food justice in mind.
Considering the degree to which environmental and food justice advocates utilize discourses of the future, these queer studies debates allow us to raise interesting questions about food and environmental justice. Perhaps even more than most movements, environmental justice activists have deployed concerns about the future in their attempts to inspire people to care about their cause, warning us about what is to come if we don’t change our ways today. Across this work, the future is represented as more ecologically damaged—worse off, to be sure—than the present. Climate change, we know, is leading to increases in so-called natural disasters, the extinction of entire species, and environmental refugees. We need to act differently today, we are told, so that things do not get worse, so that we can preserve what is left of our (natural) world. We hear over and over that consuming local, organic, and sustainable foods is one way to contribute to the preservation of our world because they use fewer chemicals and fossil fuels, produce fewer greenhouse gases, encourage biodiversity, and lead to healthier soil. Eating these kinds of foods is the right thing to do, we are told, because it will preserve the world for “future generations.”
Drawing together the insights of Muñoz and Edelman, we might push back against contemporary deployments of the future while also holding onto dreams of alternative futures. Claiming that we should act in certain ways today to preserve what is left of our world for future generations is deeply heteronormative and ignores that the world is shitty right now for most people. Point for Edelman. But, a belief in the possibility of a different—and better—future undergirds much feminist and queer engagement, and, as Muñoz argues, can be especially crucial for queer people of color. The status quo, rather than the future, is the danger. Point for Muñoz. Recognizing the ways in which different and typically unspoken assumptions about the future inform feminist, queer, and food studies and related activism could allow us to ask new questions that speak to the epistemological and political benefits of feminist and queer thought for food movements and the epistemological benefits for these fields of thinking with food. What would a food justice for the present look like that did not center environmental degradation, an approach that is necessarily future-oriented? How might we deploy the future rhetorically for utopian purposes and without centering the Child? How has a commitment to pragmatism limited food justice movements’ approaches in ways that are similar to and distinct from the pragmatism that has plagued gay rights movements? These are the questions we can ask when we bring food and queer studies to bear on one another.
Eva Hayward’s work, which encourages us to contend with our always already changing bodies and in relation to others’ always already changing bodies, invites responses to these questions that do not play into the public sex panics associated with trans life and, instead, that embrace the trans potential of change and the future (see, for example, 2014 and this issue). Similarly, Abraham Weil’s analysis of the ecological destruction of coral reefs in terms of Black transness also invites us to think anew about the relationships between change and the future. Using Guattari’s notion of transversality, Weil suggests that considering “environmental, social, and psychic ecologies” alongside one another can lead us to develop a “collective awareness of what it means to change life” (2023, 191). Like food, “corals are dreamy, other-worldly, striking, and evocative of a different time and place” (193). They are also, like food, sites of extreme extraction. Their loss, which can be devastating, can also inspire us to “pay heightened attention to how to be otherwise” (194). These insights offer crucial lessons for thinking about how food, like starfish (Hayward) and corals (Weil), might inspire us to think about change and futurity otherwise.
Anahi Russo Garrido
Food has rarely intersected with the texts I visit and revisit in queer and trans studies, or at least not as a central object of inquiry. Nonetheless, in the context of my fieldwork in Mexico City (Russo Garrido 2020), food was central–in much the same way as Lorena discusses below. At the meetings or friendly gatherings I attended, food formed part of the celebration. I conducted many of the interviews for my book on changing forms of queer intimacies in Mexico City at coffee shops or restaurants where participants felt at ease to share about their lives. We could say that food was an essential tool for research, in creating an atmosphere to facilitate conversations on queer intimacies. Food is a common site of cultural knowledge that holds multiple and nuanced meanings, including in queer and trans contexts. For example, I recall, at a Marcha Lésbica (Lesbian March) in Mexico City, a drum band that participated in the parade chanted, “A mí no me gusta el pan, me gusta la tortilla nacional” (I don’t like bread, I like the national tortilla). At a basic level, this chant spoke of a preference for tortillas, instead of bread. Nonetheless, the chant may be read as a preference for Mexican lesbians, at times called “tortilleras,” instead of Global North lesbians symbolized by bread (white foreigners are at times called “bolillos” in Mexico, a white bun bread). The band was chanting in the 2010s, at a moment in which the cost of the tortilla was skyrocketing. Ironically, a large portion of corn in Mexico is now imported from the United States and no longer produced in Mexico (see Galvéz (2018). “A mí no me gusta el pan, me gusta la tortilla nacional” may also be read as a cry to rectify this situation that impacts the most basic staple food in Mexico, ultimately functioning as a decolonial statement.
In my most recent research project, certain types of food grown at a community garden have a “queer effect” as they stand in contrast with the most commonly available foods in the neighborhood. These vegetables are grown in locations in which Doritos from the convenience stores are easier to buy than fresh fruits and vegetables. In the midst of this sea of cheap manufactured foods, vegetables have a “queer effect” in the sense of “bringing an object that is often in the background to the foreground…can have a queer effect” (Ahmed, 2006,116). The vegetables that are usually commercialized and sold for profit in urban contexts, are here sold at a more affordable price to nourish people at a Saturday communal market. And what is perceived to feed people in the neighborhood is not only food at the public market, but contemplative practices that are traditionally geared towards a white affluent elite in United States contexts, but which are here taught and practiced by Black and Brown people. Offering fresh affordable vegetables and contemplative practices, speak of the desire to nourish beings holistically.
Stina Soderling
Some work in feminist, queer, and trans studies ends up reinforcing the notion of an individual body. This is by no means universal, but the individual can be such an important, and therefore not always questioned, unit of analysis in our fields. While this focus on the individual body is by no means universal, I find that it’s especially prominent in how queer and trans lives are presented in introductory and intermediate college courses, which is where the largest number of students encounter this material. Food challenges the concept of the individual. The two teachers who first taught me, in radical ways, to question this concept were Chaia Heller and Ed Cohen, both of whom work in messy feminist, queer, and crip (though both Heller and Cohen use the language of “chronic illness,” rather than “crip”) ways, and who take food and embodiment seriously. I am curious about the ways scholars start in queer, trans, or feminist studies, with legible objects of analysis within these fields, and then move to think queerly about other matters. Heller, for example, wrote her first book, Ecology of Everyday Life, about ecofeminism, while her second book, Food, Farms, and Solidarity, is about the French farmer-led resistance to GMO crops. Cohen’s work started with questions of the naturalizing of gender and sexuality to matters of (state and bodily) immunity. By thinking about our bodies’ relationships with what we put in them, Heller and Cohen taught me to question the perception of a bounded body.
In “Out Here,” a film about queer farmers (though not all the people featured in the film see themselves as “farmers”), filmmaker Jonah Mossberg (2013) asks interviewees, what is the queerest vegetable? The most common answers are, predictably, rainbow chard and various phallic vegetables. I was chatting with one of the participants, who questioned the framing – why was he asked which vegetable was queer? Can a vegetable be queer? This is someone who views their food production as a queer matter, but that doesn’t mean this or that individual vegetable is queer; we cannot just map identity politics onto veggies. Food ideally helps us to go deeper—to think beyond our notions of labeling any individual things as “queer” or “trans” and instead ask whether our categories are not horribly un-queer. Which doesn’t mean we can’t have fun and joke around about pride and multi-hued fruits and veggies. It just means that’s not where it ends.
What does food offer queer and trans ecologies? Why should those of us interested in queer and trans ecologies be thinking with food?
Lorena Muñoz
In my journey of conducting fieldwork, food has emerged as the cornerstone of my onto-epistemological approach. Delving into the vibrant tapestry of queer street food culture across Los Angeles, Bogota, and Cancun, I've discovered a profound nexus between nourishment and knowledge acquisition. Drawing inspiration from the concept of queer kitchen table methodology, as elucidated by Haritaworn (2015), I've found that food serves not merely as sustenance but as a conduit for meaningful data gathering.
Embedded within the framework of queer of color methodologies, food assumes a pivotal role, permeating every aspect of the research process. It transcends its physicality to become a repository of memories, a catalyst for emotional recollections, and a locus of shared experiences and conflicts. At the heart of queer kitchen table methods lies the ethos of inclusivity and belonging—a space where participants create community, encouraged to embrace their authentic selves, and engage in dialogue while partaking in the act of dining.
Indeed, the intersectionality of queerness and food prompts a reevaluation of conventional paradigms surrounding informal food vending practices. With over two decades of immersive engagement with street vendors worldwide, I've witnessed firsthand the pervasive stigma attached to their livelihoods. Despite being an integral component of the global economic landscape, street vending remains marginalized, its practitioners often relegated to the fringes of society.
Similarly, the food they offer is unfairly stigmatized—deemed messy, unsanitary, and even illegal in some contexts. This parallel between the perceived "uncleanliness" of street food and the societal prejudices faced by queer individuals highlights the need for a paradigm shift. Contrary to prevailing misconceptions, street vending can be a highly organized and sustainable enterprise, offering healthier alternatives while minimizing waste. By centering food as a conduit for social engagement and knowledge production, I aim to amplify the voices of marginalized communities and challenge the status quo.
Tracey Deutsch
Food studies scholars have long insisted that food must be studied in its context, that it is more than “just” food. That dovetails with an ecological framework. To borrow an idea from this special issue, food is part of an ecosystem.
Food, then, requires full descriptions of the social, cultural, material ecosystems that support queer and trans* life. In other words, studying food is, inevitably, studying systems that support diverse forms of life. It helps us to imagine, or for that matter simply to recognize, all the ways that people have made lives.
I’m also struck by the way that food offers a subject that is both enormously evocative and inevitably material. Food is the place where ideas about what a future can look like, or how people ought to live, are worked out in concrete detail. To make an occupation work, or a meeting last, or a household or an encampment survive, people have to be fed. In that way, food offers a crucial object to study how justice happens. By looking at food, we can notice (and write about, and account for, and research) the multiplicity and possibilities of households, families, joy, desire, etc., and we can also enact it, create spaces where diversity and possibility can flourish, discover how we can be inclusive. We can enact justice through the everyday work of food. Donna Haraway has urged us to “make kin” as a way to get through this environmental moment. Food is one of the best ways I know to do that.
Carly Thomsen
If, at its most simple, ecological thinking means thinking about and with the environment, feminist, queer, trans and critical race studies can help us to think about who and what gets imagined as being a part of that environment. I want to suggest here that food justice advocates’ celebrations of “local” foods work in opposition to developing queer and trans ecologies.
In a moment in which the website of Kroger, a large supermarket chain, reads “We Are Local,” it isn’t hard to notice that local foods discourses have gone awry and that, perhaps, we should be thinking more critically about them. Over the course of the last twenty years, scholars and journalists have done precisely this. Branden Born and Mark Purcell (2006) critique the assumption that local foods are necessarily more sustainable or socially just than non-local foods, terming such thinking “the local trap.” Laura DeLind (2011) argues that locavores’ focus on consumption suggests that structural problems can be addressed through “altered personal behavior.” Others note that no policies or governmental labeling regulations prevent the term “local” from being attached to any product and that its definition shifts based on market needs. Even among those who cannot agree on a definition of “local”—aspirational or otherwise—there is remarkable consensus that “local” refers to the distance a product travels from its point of production to its point of consumption. Disagreements tend to be over what exactly that distance should be.
How would our definitions of “local” change if we thought as carefully about workers as we do consumers, and the hundreds or thousands of miles many food workers travel in order to pick “local” foods? Considering that 50% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented and 70% are so-called “foreign-born” (Wainer 2011), we should be asking what, exactly, does local mean?
Of course, the face of local foods campaigns is rarely Brown sweaty migrant workers bent over picking strawberries marketed as local at California farmers’ markets. Or Jamaican migrant workers picking apples described as local across Vermont. Local foods campaigns ignore the impact of ICE raids, the racism migrant workers experience in the U.S., and the immigration policies that prevent workers from traveling to be with loved ones. This is the reality of local and non-local food production alike. Celebrating local foods does nothing to address these issues.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to ignore the impact of the alternative food and food justice movements; encouraging consumers to think about where their food comes from could lay the groundwork for more critical reflection on the politics and materiality of production and consumption. I see the Marxist feminist debates over work, labor, and capitalism that Tracey engaged above and queer debates over the future as allowing this reflection to take new forms. We can draw from these discussions to think about, as Miranda Joseph (2002) has, community in more capacious ways, as necessarily shifting and enabled by those we cannot see. Here, I do not just mean those farmworkers who move about surreptitiously out of fear of ICE, those who, of course, will never be the face of calls for local foods. I also mean those doing the feminized domestic and reproductive labor that enables migrant workers to leave their homes. What political possibilities might open up by imagining oneself as in relation to those who local foods champions will likely never see? Queer studies debates over the future implore us to answer this question without relying on imagined heteronormative desires and related family structures. A Vermont dairy farmer, worrying about how changes in immigration policies under Donald Trump would impact undocumented workers, told me that it had become increasingly difficult for workers to return home for their children’s birthday parties, their cousins’ weddings, and their parents’ funerals. Drawing from queer studies insights, we might resist the temptation to advocate for immigration reform through centering these types of heteronormative familial relationships. We might resist that which seems pragmatic so that we can imagine and actualize more capacious approaches to food justice. I see this latter point, in particular, as a crucial one for thinking about how we articulate the place of food justice in our understanding of queer and trans ecologies. That is, for holding onto Marxist feminist post-work utopian visions and queer articulations of utopianism as on the horizon while we move to articulate the relations among various living things and their surroundings. And while articulating these relations, figure out queer and trans ways to undo the commonsensical geographical imaginaries—including the local—that lead us to think about our surroundings in anti-queer and anti-trans ways.
Food blurs social, physical, and spatial boundaries and borders in ways that feminist, queer, and trans studies scholars have long found useful for messing with the social order. Cleo Wölfle Hazard (2022), for instance, demonstrates how rivers and water are useful for thinking about transness and trans life. To trans means to cross, and not simply crossing a boundary or border for the sake of creating another (ibid.). In no world can we create the conditions in which mutualisms form without crossing boundaries, something enabled by water, as Wölfle Hazard makes clear, as well as food. We need to dismantle commonsensical geographical imaginaries that allow righteousness to attach to food consumption and that make it difficult to recognize that, regardless of the scale at which food production occurs, the bodies of consumers are touched by the bodies of the many people involved with that food’s production—just as producers’ bodies are maintained by consuming foods others have produced. Thinking with food requires taking seriously these messy entanglements, as well as the dangers and possibilities they generate, and it makes clear that who and what constitute our environments are bigger than most of us ever imagine. Riffing on Eva Hayward’s and Jami Weinstein’s insights in their Tranimalities (2015) special issue that brings trans and animal studies to bear on one another, I want to suggest, as Hayward and Weinstein do in relation to animals, that the “prefixial nature of trans—across, into, and through: a prepositional force” can and should also inform how we think about food. Hayward and Weinstein encourage us to move beyond thinking about the animal in terms of “difference and ethics,” instead asking us to think about how the animal and animal studies are “transformed, transacted, or transduced by trans studies” (2015, 196). Drawing from these insights, we ought to ask what might open up in our thinking about food and our approaches to food justice if we, too, moved beyond a focus on difference and ethics and instead centered how food and related movements could be transformed, transacted, and transduced through engaging feminist, queer, and trans studies?
Stina Soderling
I don’t know that we should think with food. Food has been enormously generative for me, but many other things can be generative, too. With that caveat—that food is not necessarily uniquely useful as an object of study or methodological concern—one of the places where I find thinking with food helpful is in relation to queer and trans joy or happiness. This topic came up in our conversations leading up to this roundtable, and I appreciate learning about the various ways we are grappling with it. I have a sense that fermentation practices can be spaces of happiness, and I think this has something to do with fostering life. Yet I am reluctant to make claims around fostering life making us happy; it resonates uncomfortably with anti-abortion sentiments, ideas of motherhood as a level of happiness that supersedes everything else. I don’t want to in any way play into such rhetoric, and I certainly do not want to claim that sourdoughs are a replacement for babies, a scenario where trans and queer people are inadequate imitators of cis-hetero existence. Engaging with fermented food as a messy theory and methodology opens up space to approach joy and happiness in complex ways (for a great example of this messy theory and methodology, see Sean Nash’s “Transfermentation” contribution to this issue). In fermentation, processes of decomposition help create delicious food. Unsavory matters can actually be tasty. The interstitial space where life and death meet might be a place of joyful life-fostering. These questions of the messy spaces where life is sometimes challengingly joyful, and where life and death meet, would be a wonderful ground for conversations between queer and trans ecologies and feminist work on reproduction. I think, for example, of Sophie Lewis’s (2022) argument that abortion does involve killing, “and that’s OK!” I am curious, then, among other things, about what queer ecological thinking could bring to a post-Dobbs scholar-activism.
Anahi Russo Garrido
Queer and trans ecologies have always questioned narratives of the natural/unnatural. This critique may be applied to food in a society in which labels on packaged food claiming a product or ingredient to be natural pervade on the shelves. What might we learn about the ways societies create boundaries between the natural/unnatural when studying foods? What type of characteristics do we attach to the natural? How is this “natural” ingredient produced as a natural ingredient?
Queer and trans ecologies have also been concerned with pointing out the ways in which regimes of power and violence seek to control, tame, and categorize what is seen and perceived as “natural or close to nature.” How does food production, consumption, preservation, and marketing let us see the workings of power to control “nature?” What types of policies, norms and rules are put into place to preserve this order? What types of rebellions, protests and outcries destabilize the so-called taming of nature?
Finally, when thinking of the ways in which in the 2010s Mortimer- Sandilands and Erickson (2010, 2-3) defined queer ecologies as the “ways in which understandings of nature inform discourses of sexuality, and also the ways in which understandings of sex inform discourses of nature.” In returning to sexuality, I question the ways in which desire functions in food and sexualities. What types of desires do foods, or sexuality, awaken? Can they be thought of as alike in our ways of narrating desire? How does food or sex(uality) mobilize particular bodily sensations in the ways they are talked about, namely pleasure, disgust, intimacy, indifference, etc. How do we think of food and sexuality in relation to one another, in going back to one of the original definitions of queer ecologies?
Martin Manalansan
For this question, I put on my other hat as an Asian American Studies scholar, and remember how both historical and contemporary events and figures involving Asian Americans have both sustained, transformed, rejected, and/or held on to various ecologies (here I conceive ecology as a form of material, psychic, emotional/affective, assemblage). I recall my introductory classes on food and Asian Americans. I start with the statement that Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese people were brought in to work in American agricultural and salmon canning areas in Hawaii, the West Coast, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the slavery as low wage labor after Emancipation. Food was the pivot that propelled the initial migration of Asians to the United States and still continues today with Southeast Asians becoming the dominant workforce in the Louisiana seafood industry in the past four decades. In other words, I think of how Asian American hands and sweat have transformed the agricultural, fishing, and food canning systems as well as shaping urban and small town foodscapes with various Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese restaurants to name a few.
How do the ideas we’ve discussed here inform our pedagogy or our research methods? In other words, what do we do with these ideas?
Martin Manalansan
On a practical granular level, my fieldwork interactions from interviews to observations have always been guided by culinary hospitality and openness. Food was and still is a powerful part of setting up the vibe, if you will, or the affective aura of the so-called research encounter.
I think of fieldwork “methods” not as extractive sessions but rather as episodes where the researcher and the interviewee/informant are involved in offering various forms of sustenance. “Have you eaten” is a word we have always heard in various Asian and Asian American households. The same question is one that jumpstarts the encounter whether it comes from me or the interviewee.
Stina Soderling
Among the things that food offers queer and trans studies is a connection between the matter of our studies and research, and the matter of our bodies that do the studying and researching. It can prompt us to think about the economic and material structures of academic working conditions, which includes students’ learning conditions. Matt Brim opens his Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (2020) with a scene from one of his classes at the College of Staten Island, in the woefully (and unevenly) underfunded City University of New York system: it is a night class, with a short break, and students are getting snacks out of a half-empty vending machine. I recently started working at another underfunded state school, in Texas, a majority-minority institution that primarily serves women students, many of them parents. Our graduate courses are all in the evening, or asynchronously online, as many of our students work full time, or juggle multiple part-time jobs. University funding for graduate students is pitiful. The room where I teach from six to nine pm has a big sign that proclaims “No food or drinks allowed in this classroom.” So here we are, at the end of a long day, during dinner time, and we’re not supposed to eat in class?? When I asked my students how we might approach both studying and being fed (including, I suggested, ignoring the sign), the only suggestion was to meet less often. What if we met every other week? Or turned at least part of the course into an online format? These are doctoral students, working in the overlapping fields of feminist, trans, queer, and ethnic studies, and as a group of teacher-learners, we do not have a good solution for how to both be fed and be able to study.
This is a trans and queer food (justice) issue. And when we start pulling on this thread of dinner-less students and professors, so much comes up. It is not just an immediate issue of buying dinner or tearing down that obnoxious sign. I have considered bringing food for the class, but feeding eight students would be a significant expense on a faculty salary at this institution. So now we can talk about why university employees were excluded from the recent raises that Texas state employees won after a hard fight. We can talk about limits on unionization rights for public employees here. State budgets and salaries, as well as labor laws, become feminist/queer/trans food issues. Graduate student funding becomes a queer food issue (along with questions about the ethics of “producing” PhDs, given the state of the academic job market. But I digress). The disciplining mechanisms of the university, with its “no food signs,” become a feminist/queer/trans food issue. Food, with its messy materiality, can remind us that our work is real, that it has real stakes, both within and beyond the university.
Anahi Russo Garrido
I also work at an underfunded state school, but in Colorado. We are a few steps from downtown Denver, and theoretically, students may have several options to get some food in the surroundings. Unfortunately, 67% of our students suffer from food insecurity. You may be thinking, what is it like to teach in a class where almost everyone is hungry, while you try to engage in a conversation or explain to your best ability, concepts, theories and methods? At the Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy (GITA) at MSU Denver, we have a survey to record the reasons why students visit the space when they come in. The number one reported reason is the use of our snack stop that provides free foods, which are donated or paid through university student fees. Seventy-five percent of the students coming to GITA report identifying as women, trans, non-binary, gender queer, or other gender non-conforming, but the main reason for gathering in our space is still food!
This also brings to mind how academic spaces tend to be disembodied, and perceived as spaces to cultivate the intellect. Our (hungry) bodies are invited to be left at the door in academic spaces where we are invited to develop critical thinking and logic, and not necessarily have feelings, or tune into sensations. What is the role of the body in the classroom? It is a question that I explore with students in the course Meditation and Activism, in which we consider what we may learn when the body is involved too. What do we learn through bodily sensations when we engage in a difficult topic? What do we learn by paying attention to our feelings when we study injustices, for example? How to bring back the body into educational spaces? Food definitely is part of this conversation.
Tracey Deutsch
My experience really encapsulates what so many others have said. I came to food studies via other commitments (in my case to feminist studies and histories of capitalism); food emerged at first, for me, as a useful object through which to talk about consumption and consumerism—a site I felt (and still feel) is undertheorized.
And yet I find that my students, my lived experience, and my research bring me back to food itself over and over again. Even when I am teaching classes that don’t have “food” anywhere in the title, students introduce it, literally and figuratively bring it into the classroom. And when they don’t, the ideas that food studies has taught me still show up in what and how I teach (e.g., the centrality of reproductive labor). Conversely, in my food-in-history class, the most powerful moments are not the ones where we talk about food itself, but where we talk about the systems that food, eating, and commensality, hold together. For instance, students learn to acknowledge the complexity, the “mess” (to use Martin’s phrase) of their families’ celebratory meals, the restaurant work they do, or cooking experiments with roommates. Food engenders the precarity and fluidity of households, of social relations, and of capitalism. I have slowly come to see food as important in its own right.
This realization of food’s centrality also reflects its broad visibility in my own historical moment. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, food emerged as a widely visible object of policy, class politics, political statements, adult sociality, identity formation, resistance (as Lorena so powerfully writes about below), and of course also a tool of inequality and violence. It feels like it is everywhere. In my research and teaching, I take food seriously even as I also think critically about why I, and so many others, take food so seriously.
Lorena Muñoz
Incorporating food-centered approaches to my research and teaching was not intentional. Like Carly, I analyzed food vending landscapes without paying much attention to the traditional foods sold by vendors as more than a representation of cultural geographies in place. Yet, in the field, I began to understand how food has been intrinsically linked to my own life experiences, particularly the becomings of my multiple identities. Food is entangled with my personal experiences, my teaching and research, and in my activist practices. I see food as an intersection that connects multiple social worlds that fluidly collide with one another. Personally, my fondest memories of childhood were spending the summers with my grandmother in San Ysidro, California. She lived in a mobile home park right across the U.S.-Mexico border. Her mobile home was the place where my cousins and I spent the summers as our parents worked as transnational laborers. Abuelita Lupe was a master chef in my 8-year-old eyes. She was a round, hefty woman, always with a smile on her face. Her love language was food. Abuelita Lupe always prepared the most amazing Mexican dishes from scratch. We would eat breakfast with handmade tortillas, mole for lunch that was carefully prepared for more than a week, and hot hand-made buñuelos for dinner. She often would have us kids prepare the shed in her backyard with blankets, hot burritos, and hibiscus water. The next morning, we would help her clean the shed and pick up the plates only to tidy up and do it all again that evening. I knew that people slept and ate the food we would leave in the shed. I also understood that my abuelita was giving shelter and food to people that needed it. It was not until I was much older that I understood that she was part of a mutual aid network that provided shelter in sheds for immigrants who just that day had crossed the border. My abuelita’s activism smelled like warm freshly made flour tortilla beef burritos and sweet hibiscus tea water, smells that are forever linked with my own immigrant activist practices. As such, food is not just sustenance; it carries cultural, social, economic, and political meanings. In my introduction to ethnic and race studies course, I encourage students to explore the role of food in shaping their multiple entangled identities, resistances, and activisms. These entangled intersections help students critically engage with how food is used to queer normative structures and create alternative social worlds. We explore these themes through storytelling and sharing food, in class.
Carly Thomsen
When we contributors met by Zoom to discuss our progress on this very roundtable, focusing in part on what we’d include as the final question in order to wrap it up, our conversation led me to think that I’d focus on one of two things. The first is the place of food in the interviews I conducted with LGBTQ women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota that eventually became the foundation for my first book—and not just that we’d often share a meal, coffee, or beer during the interview but also the degree to which interviewees used food as evidence of being accepted and welcome in their rural communities. The second thing I thought I might reflect on was how some of the students in my Queering Food class at Middlebury College, where I was previously employed, resisted the assignment where they had to bring some kind of food item to class to share with the ten or so other students in the seminar—an assignment similar to the one my classmates and I at St. Cloud State University embraced excitedly many years before. Middlebury is a private liberal arts school with a current price tag of $90,000 per year. 76% percent of students are from the top 20% of income earners. Perhaps even more shocking, 23% of Middlebury students come from the top 1% of income earners, a share that means that Middlebury has more students from the 1% than all but one of the sixty-five colleges that made up the New York Times’ dataset of elite colleges. It is also a residential college, so almost all students live on campus. They eat in the dining halls, which means that most students do not do the labors that are required for life sustenance, outsourcing that work to low-income workers. They do not spend their time grocery shopping, cooking, or washing dishes. Interestingly, Middlebury students in Queering Food critiqued the assignment by calling up the specter of the poor student. How, they asked, could students afford to pay for the ingredients to create something for the class?! I was shocked by this response to what I saw as a really fun assignment that would allow us to eat together and to learn about one another while examining the history and politics of a particular food item—not only because students could literally get free ingredients from the dining hall to repurpose into an item for class, something they likely would have thought of themselves if they had ever had to scrape by, but also because so few Middlebury students are actually poor or even working class (2.7% of Middlebury students come from the lowest tier of income earners, to be precise). When I was preparing to contribute to this roundtable, I thought I might reflect here on the differences between this response and that of my classmates and myself at St. Cloud State University, a school where the majority of students are first-generation, working-class, and/or hold full-time jobs outside of the institution, where we took such pride in creating food to share with the class. But then the unthinkable happened, just days before I was to sit down to write this final response. A trans woman student who was a Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies major died unexpectedly on campus. GSFS faculty organized an open house so that students could have the time and space to collectively grieve this loss and to celebrate her life. Food was central to this grieving. As part of planning the open house, my department chair and I discussed what food we would have available. The owner and an employee of a local coffee shop where this student worked and spent a lot of time attended the event and talked about wanting to collaborate to create more spaces where students can connect off campus. They also served free LGBTQ+ themed cookies the following day at their coffee shop in honor of this student. And as the student’s mother and friends planned her formal celebration of life, food was a key part of imagining what it would look like. Her friends and family drank coffee, ate pastries, and enjoyed pizza from her three favorite local businesses, which she also had worked at at different points. In this moment, full of pain, devastation, anger, and confusion, I was reminded of what others have articulated so beautifully here: Food can create connections and pleasures in unlikely and unimaginable places, it can store memories and activate memories, it can allow people to live on in a world that doesn’t seem to want them to. It can also help us to think in trans, queer, and feminist ways about what it means to live, who and what gets imagined as part of an ecological unit, and the paradoxes that orient much of life.
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About the Contributors
Stina Soderling is assistant professor of multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman's University. She is, together with Carolina Alonso Bejarano, the author of “Against Grading: Feminist Studies Beyond the Neoliberal University.”
Tracey Deutsch is Associate Professor of history at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and was PI of Minnesota Transform, a Mellon Just Futures Initiative. She is the author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (2010).
Anahi Russo Garrido is an Associate Professor and Chair/Director of the Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy at MSU Denver, She/they is the author of Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship and Sex in Queer Mexico City (2020).
Lorena Muñoz is Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic and Race Studies at California Lutheran University. Lorena's current research focuses on the production of Latine queer (im)migrant worldmakings across the Americas.
Carly Thomsen is Associate Professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming (2021). Her book Queering Reproductive Justice is forthcoming.
Martin F. Manalansan IV is Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003). His book Queer Dwellings: Mess, Mesh, Measure is forthcoming.
Citation
Deutsch, Tracy, Anahi Russo Garrido, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Lorena Muñoz, Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen. 2024. “Food as an “Ingredient” in Queer and Trans* Ecologies: A Roundtable” in Queer and Trans* Ecologies: A Roundtable.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/food-as-an-“ingredient”-in-queer-and-trans-ecologies-a-roundtable
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