Weirdest Abstract I Read Today

30 December 2006 at 12:32 am Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

From the April/June 2006 issue of Food and Foodways:

Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing

Julia C. Ehrhardt
University of Oklahoma Honors College, Norman, Oklahoma, USA

As the nascent field of food studies takes shape, insights from queer studies have the potential to enrich our understandings of the interrelationships among food, gender, and sexuality. The project of queering food studies invites us to consider how food practices and beliefs reinforce and resist heterosexual gender ideologies. In this article, I analyze foodways in recent Chicana lesbian literature, examining writings that illustrate the cultural endurance of heteronormative constructions of gender even as they demonstrate how these beliefs are disrupted, destabilized, and transformed in queer literary kitchens. Poetry and essays by Chicana lesbians challenge dominant models of Chicana culinary roles by emphasizing women’s efforts to satisfy their physical and sexual appetites.In particular, Carla Trujillo’s 2003 novel, What Night Brings, highlights the figure of the hungry lesbian as a provocative counterpoint to the literary image of the Chicana as cook. Literature by Chicana lesbians not only invites scholars to question heteronormative assumptions about food, gender, and identity, but also demonstrates the potential of queer studies to enrich a variety of topics in food scholarship.

Food and Foodways 14, no. 2 (April-June 2006): 91-109.

(Thanks to Pierre Desrochers for the pointer.)

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Ephemera, Food and Agriculture.

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2 Comments Add your own

1. akinto | 30 December 2006 at 9:19 am

Chill. This will not make the earth stop revolving around the sun.

Different from Orgs and Markets, certainly.

Incomprehensible or beside the point to most of your readers? Very likely.

But it’s probably not helpful to ridicule academic work in entirely different disciplines. It reduces the scope of legitimate work for all of us.

Be glad she’s doing what she’s doing. It makes papers on Maghribi traders look much less eccentric to the untrained eye.
2. Peter Klein | 30 December 2006 at 10:07 am

akinto, I agree that a certain degree of humility is called for when evaluating the work of another scholar, particularly outside one’s own discipline. For all I know, this is the best paper ever written in Chicana lesbian culinary science. But I am less tolerant than you regarding the genre itself, which looks like something dreamed up by Alan Sokal.