My generation has a curious problem. Many of us did not have children until we were relatively old. In my case, that meant having kids at 36 and 38. This means that we are older than most of our moms were and that our parents are older grandparents than ours were. It also means that, as we are still dealing with taking care of relatively small kids, we might be faced with taking care of elderly parents. In my case, I have not been called upon to take care of my parents -- another feature of our generation is that we often do not live nearby, so I am thousands of miles away from my parents. But my father has been ill and I have been visiting a lot in the last few months.
I have been thinking about this sandwiching, as a friend calls it. I am conscious of being a mom and a daughter, both older than some and younger than some. I am especially conscious of this lately as many members of the older generation in my family have passed away recently. My mother lost two sisters and a brother-in-law. I lost two aunts and an uncle. Suddenly the top layer is disappearing. I am beginning to envision a time when we are the oldest. Aside from the panic that induces (because, as I said in a previous blog, I do not yet feel grown up), I feel sad to know that my kids will lose that contact with an older generation. This is perhaps where thinking of ourselves less in terms of bloodlines comes in handy.
We casually refer to a lot of our friends as aunt and uncle. This is probably because we didn't know what else to call them. Mr. and Mrs. or the southern Miss did not seem right. So, we made our friends aunts and uncles. And mostly they refer to us the same way. Straight aunts and uncles to be sure, and gay and lesbian aunts and uncles, too. Some married, some single, some in long term relationships without being married. I have always liked that they have knowledge of different possibilities in this life -- including among my family, in which we have a bachelor, a single mom by choice, a now gone lesbian aunt. But my broader family, that circle of friends, presents a more diverse array of lifestyles and racial diversity, too. They can see interracial relationships, gay and straight, working moms, stay at home dads, and other structures that quietly step outside the conventional norms of society and that, in my kids' minds, are as normal as the rest. Already, our holiday table is more populated with these aunts and uncles than with blood family (again, because we do not live near most family). Over the years, as we all age, I hope that this extended queer family can serve as the top layer for my kids, the older generation that can model the future for them.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Mulvey
Last week, I had the opportunity to host Laura Mulvey on campus. For those who don't know, Mulvey is a famous feminist film theorist. She is the one who developed the idea of the male gaze. In brief, the idea that in classical Hollywood films -- and often other kind of films, including more recent ones -- men have the power to look (they get point of view shots), and women represent to be looked-at-ness; men control the action and women are acted upon; women do not have the power of the gaze (they do not generally get point of view shots and are usually punished if they look) and men do not represent the same kind of fetishistic spectacle.
Now, I have been teaching not only Mulvey's famous "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" for years, but also other essays by her on cinema space, Psycho, melodrama, and more. So, it was great to be able to speak with her, learn more about the origins of her work, revisit her early films, and hear more about where her work is now.
But the even more tremendous pleasure was in seeing the reception she got on campus. Her talk was jam-packed with faculty and students from across the college. And faculty and students were all giddy! Mulvey is a rock star, it's true. And, in fact, while she was speaking at Notre Dame, she was being discussed in an episode of "Parks and Recreation," in which one of the male characters is taking a feminist theory class and was quizzed about Mulvey:
http://youtu.be/vDj9sAMfeW0
The best part was seeing young women, who do not often, at Notre Dame at least, identify as feminist, come up to Laura Mulvey and thank her for her work, tell her about how her essay changed their lives. These were my students, students whose feminism had not been revealed in film class, who seemed like typical post feminists. So, it was shocking and wonderful to discover their secret passion. But, gals, the secret is out! You love Mulvey! You love Mulvey! Now, we'll get you hooked on the rest of the feminist gals who have rocked my world.
Now, I have been teaching not only Mulvey's famous "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" for years, but also other essays by her on cinema space, Psycho, melodrama, and more. So, it was great to be able to speak with her, learn more about the origins of her work, revisit her early films, and hear more about where her work is now.
But the even more tremendous pleasure was in seeing the reception she got on campus. Her talk was jam-packed with faculty and students from across the college. And faculty and students were all giddy! Mulvey is a rock star, it's true. And, in fact, while she was speaking at Notre Dame, she was being discussed in an episode of "Parks and Recreation," in which one of the male characters is taking a feminist theory class and was quizzed about Mulvey:
http://youtu.be/vDj9sAMfeW0
The best part was seeing young women, who do not often, at Notre Dame at least, identify as feminist, come up to Laura Mulvey and thank her for her work, tell her about how her essay changed their lives. These were my students, students whose feminism had not been revealed in film class, who seemed like typical post feminists. So, it was shocking and wonderful to discover their secret passion. But, gals, the secret is out! You love Mulvey! You love Mulvey! Now, we'll get you hooked on the rest of the feminist gals who have rocked my world.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Self-Ageism
I have become obsessed with my age. I am constantly aware, as if the number floats around my head. 47. 47. 47. Part of this relates to being a mom, and knowing that, to my kids, I am old. More has to do with teaching. When I started teaching in grad school, I was less than ten years older than my students. We had shared tastes and points of reference. Now . . if I refer to something from my youth, I am pointing them back to the 1970s or 1980s. As my husband has noted recently, when he talks about a restaurant or store he went to in the 1980s, we are now the people who talked to us about stuff from the 1950s. Not uninteresting, but not of our generation. Not only do I come from the olden days, but my tastes and points of reference always went back to a period before I was born -- films from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, music from the 60s, fashion from the 20s, 30s, 50s, 60s. So I am doubly outdated by my own anachronism.
Part of it, certainly, is about the body. I feel the years. I feel them when I worry that if I fall skating, I will break a hip. Or when I buy a new bra because "the girls" seem to be hanging lower all the time. Or, fighting a few pounds, that would have dropped easily even ten years ago, but now cling to me like barnacles on a ship. But, at the same time, I look at my friends and think we all look pretty good, younger than our folks did when they were our age. We don't, on the whole, have the thick middles and pot bellies of earlier generations. We still wear our 80s black pants, cool boots and decent haircuts.
But we also seem less settled, less sure than our folks seemed when they were our age. My folks were almost done with child-rearing then -- I was the youngest of four kids and I was 17, almost off to college when my mom turned 47 (and she was old compared to most of my friends' moms, who had them at 18 or 20). They hadn't moved house in 15 years. They had only changed jobs out of necessity -- the recession in my dad's case. My friends, though, mostly have small kids. Some have long term jobs. (My husband and I have been in the same jobs for 14 years, in my case, and longer in his.) But some of our friends are still looking, changing careers, figuring it out. Most of us do not fully perceive ourselves as adult, or as the same as people we refer to as grown ups." For my husband and I, "grown ups" wear suits, work in skyscrapers and vacation at resorts. We don't.
We do not really want to be grown ups, in that sense, and likely never will be. But our view of them as grown ups, even while we think ourselves old, suggests that we still feel like imposters, kids playing dress up. And maybe all grown ups do. Maybe the guys in suits I see at my kids' school are not any more certain or settled than we are. And maybe our parents were not either.
And maybe that is why I am so conscious of that number, 47. Because 47 doesn't mean what I thought, doesn't mean I am grown up, or complete. It is just another place on the road, no more nor less significant than 21, or 35, or 10. Only now, I can more clearly see what was great and not so great about those stops -- 21, 35, and 10. And only later, perhaps will I see 47 for what it really is.
Part of it, certainly, is about the body. I feel the years. I feel them when I worry that if I fall skating, I will break a hip. Or when I buy a new bra because "the girls" seem to be hanging lower all the time. Or, fighting a few pounds, that would have dropped easily even ten years ago, but now cling to me like barnacles on a ship. But, at the same time, I look at my friends and think we all look pretty good, younger than our folks did when they were our age. We don't, on the whole, have the thick middles and pot bellies of earlier generations. We still wear our 80s black pants, cool boots and decent haircuts.
But we also seem less settled, less sure than our folks seemed when they were our age. My folks were almost done with child-rearing then -- I was the youngest of four kids and I was 17, almost off to college when my mom turned 47 (and she was old compared to most of my friends' moms, who had them at 18 or 20). They hadn't moved house in 15 years. They had only changed jobs out of necessity -- the recession in my dad's case. My friends, though, mostly have small kids. Some have long term jobs. (My husband and I have been in the same jobs for 14 years, in my case, and longer in his.) But some of our friends are still looking, changing careers, figuring it out. Most of us do not fully perceive ourselves as adult, or as the same as people we refer to as grown ups." For my husband and I, "grown ups" wear suits, work in skyscrapers and vacation at resorts. We don't.
We do not really want to be grown ups, in that sense, and likely never will be. But our view of them as grown ups, even while we think ourselves old, suggests that we still feel like imposters, kids playing dress up. And maybe all grown ups do. Maybe the guys in suits I see at my kids' school are not any more certain or settled than we are. And maybe our parents were not either.
And maybe that is why I am so conscious of that number, 47. Because 47 doesn't mean what I thought, doesn't mean I am grown up, or complete. It is just another place on the road, no more nor less significant than 21, or 35, or 10. Only now, I can more clearly see what was great and not so great about those stops -- 21, 35, and 10. And only later, perhaps will I see 47 for what it really is.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Happy Parentine's Day!
Having kids affects your romantic life in myriad ways. Less time alone, more fear of noises (for what Kenneth on "30 Rock" calls "grunting naps"), exhaustion, and becoming more mommy and daddy (or mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy or just mom or just dad) than the sexy individuals you once imagined yourselves to be.
Valentine's Day, in the context of family, is party about the kids -- getting them cards, gifts and chocolates, helping them make their Valentines and making sure they get one for their other parent. But you try to hold on to a little space for Valentine's to be about you as a couple. At worst, this devolves into stereotypical roles -- the guy brings flowers or candy or an expensive piece of jewelry and the woman accepts these gifts. The gendering plays out in ads, which always hail the man as the giver and the woman as recipient and always suggest that Valentine's Day is a test for the man, that if he fails to please his woman he will have hell to pay (or, as many have noted regarding a Telaflora Superbowl ad, they suggest that he better pony up if he wants any sex, ever). Even the President reminded men on Tuesday that it was Valentine's Day, made some typical joke about how he learned his lesson after forgetting once, and suggested to men that they "go big."
I actually got engaged on Valentine's Day, as hokey as that is. So my husband and I regard it as a sort of anniversary. This year, to celebrate, I ordered fresh lobster and clam chowder from Plymouth, MA, where some of my family lives. I thought this would be a lovely gesture -- a great meal with a little Annie Hall whimsy thrown in as we would laugh and chase live lobsters round the kitchen. So, imagine my surprise when my husband called me as I was commuting home from Indiana to tell me there was a problem. I thought perhaps the Fed Ex box had not arrived. No, it had arrived. But my son had discovered that the lobster were alive which meant that we were going to kill them. Now, understand, my son loves food and loves meat. He even cooks meat. The night before Valentine's Day, he cooked our dinner (a scheme I adopted from a NY Times article I'd read in which each of my kids plans and cooks a meal each week, even doing the chopping and sauteing themselves.) He made a pasta with sausage, slipped the sausage out of its casing and put it in the pan. He eats soft boiled eggs. He is not squeamish. But he can get sentimental. Once, after eating a rabbit stew and loving it, he found out it was rabbit and wept for hours. So, the lobster set him off. He began sobbing as soon as my husband picked him up from school, and continued off and on for hours until I got home.
When I got home, both kids were snuffling upstairs, asking if I was going to kill the lobsters, "Can't we keep them as pets?" I explained that even if we didn't eat them, they would die, that there was nowhere to take them, and that all the meat we eat required killing. My son accepted this, he said,. It was just the idea of US doing the killing that bothered him. (Okay, Michael Pollan, yes, I get it.)
We reached what I thought was a detente in which we would kill the lobster out of his sight but eat together as a family (his sister eating the chowder, him eating some pizza, as he does not like lobster or chowder). We cooked the lobster, less whimsically than I might have hoped, due to the anxiety leading up to it. I took a few pictures but it was felt less like documenting our Annie Hall moment than Abu Ghraib. Then we settled down to eat. My son sat with us for salad, but when the lobster arrived, he burst into tears and went upstairs. His sister followed and my husband and I ate our dinner alone. We got some solo time but it was not the bells and whistles of sexy non-parents, just the depressed after effects of traumatizing our children. So much for romance.
The next night, my son happily ate lamb burgers.
Valentine's Day, in the context of family, is party about the kids -- getting them cards, gifts and chocolates, helping them make their Valentines and making sure they get one for their other parent. But you try to hold on to a little space for Valentine's to be about you as a couple. At worst, this devolves into stereotypical roles -- the guy brings flowers or candy or an expensive piece of jewelry and the woman accepts these gifts. The gendering plays out in ads, which always hail the man as the giver and the woman as recipient and always suggest that Valentine's Day is a test for the man, that if he fails to please his woman he will have hell to pay (or, as many have noted regarding a Telaflora Superbowl ad, they suggest that he better pony up if he wants any sex, ever). Even the President reminded men on Tuesday that it was Valentine's Day, made some typical joke about how he learned his lesson after forgetting once, and suggested to men that they "go big."
I actually got engaged on Valentine's Day, as hokey as that is. So my husband and I regard it as a sort of anniversary. This year, to celebrate, I ordered fresh lobster and clam chowder from Plymouth, MA, where some of my family lives. I thought this would be a lovely gesture -- a great meal with a little Annie Hall whimsy thrown in as we would laugh and chase live lobsters round the kitchen. So, imagine my surprise when my husband called me as I was commuting home from Indiana to tell me there was a problem. I thought perhaps the Fed Ex box had not arrived. No, it had arrived. But my son had discovered that the lobster were alive which meant that we were going to kill them. Now, understand, my son loves food and loves meat. He even cooks meat. The night before Valentine's Day, he cooked our dinner (a scheme I adopted from a NY Times article I'd read in which each of my kids plans and cooks a meal each week, even doing the chopping and sauteing themselves.) He made a pasta with sausage, slipped the sausage out of its casing and put it in the pan. He eats soft boiled eggs. He is not squeamish. But he can get sentimental. Once, after eating a rabbit stew and loving it, he found out it was rabbit and wept for hours. So, the lobster set him off. He began sobbing as soon as my husband picked him up from school, and continued off and on for hours until I got home.
When I got home, both kids were snuffling upstairs, asking if I was going to kill the lobsters, "Can't we keep them as pets?" I explained that even if we didn't eat them, they would die, that there was nowhere to take them, and that all the meat we eat required killing. My son accepted this, he said,. It was just the idea of US doing the killing that bothered him. (Okay, Michael Pollan, yes, I get it.)
We reached what I thought was a detente in which we would kill the lobster out of his sight but eat together as a family (his sister eating the chowder, him eating some pizza, as he does not like lobster or chowder). We cooked the lobster, less whimsically than I might have hoped, due to the anxiety leading up to it. I took a few pictures but it was felt less like documenting our Annie Hall moment than Abu Ghraib. Then we settled down to eat. My son sat with us for salad, but when the lobster arrived, he burst into tears and went upstairs. His sister followed and my husband and I ate our dinner alone. We got some solo time but it was not the bells and whistles of sexy non-parents, just the depressed after effects of traumatizing our children. So much for romance.
The next night, my son happily ate lamb burgers.
Friday, February 10, 2012
My job, my pill
Right now, we are in the midst of a national debate about whether the administration overstepped in demanding that Catholic institutions provide birth control to women who work for them. I work at a catholic university. I opted to get my health care through my husband's business years ago, in large part because I was fed up with paying exorbitant out of pocket prices for birth control.
The right wants you to think that it is about religious freedom. It is, but freedom is not a one way street. It is about acknowledging that not everyone who attends a Catholic school, works at a Catholic hospital, or teaches at a Catholic university is a practicing Catholic. Catholic institutions have non-discrimination policies in place and allow for religious freedom within the institution. This is about the religious freedom of those who do NOT want to follow Catholic church guidelines, then.
Let's be clear. Catholic women who choose not to use birth control are not being forced. Nobody is saying that priests have to hand our pills in church.
Rather, this is about health care coverage and women's access to health care. It is about allowing women who work and study at Catholic institutions to have access to perfectly legal drugs that they should be able to access like any other woman. It is about promoting wellness and giving women access to key tools that will hopefully prevent them from having to resort to abortions. And it is about money, about the church seeking ways to not pay for this.
The law is for all the gals at Catholic places of work who, Catholic or not, choose to use birth control. Many use it for family planning, some probably use it to allow a sex-filled single lifestyle, some use it to deal with hormonal imbalance, or other health issues. All have a legal right to it and none should have to pay insane amounts of money for it, like they are buying ingredients for their meth lab.
The right wants you to think that it is about religious freedom. It is, but freedom is not a one way street. It is about acknowledging that not everyone who attends a Catholic school, works at a Catholic hospital, or teaches at a Catholic university is a practicing Catholic. Catholic institutions have non-discrimination policies in place and allow for religious freedom within the institution. This is about the religious freedom of those who do NOT want to follow Catholic church guidelines, then.
Let's be clear. Catholic women who choose not to use birth control are not being forced. Nobody is saying that priests have to hand our pills in church.
Rather, this is about health care coverage and women's access to health care. It is about allowing women who work and study at Catholic institutions to have access to perfectly legal drugs that they should be able to access like any other woman. It is about promoting wellness and giving women access to key tools that will hopefully prevent them from having to resort to abortions. And it is about money, about the church seeking ways to not pay for this.
The law is for all the gals at Catholic places of work who, Catholic or not, choose to use birth control. Many use it for family planning, some probably use it to allow a sex-filled single lifestyle, some use it to deal with hormonal imbalance, or other health issues. All have a legal right to it and none should have to pay insane amounts of money for it, like they are buying ingredients for their meth lab.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Mothers of Sons
In my gender theory class, we have been reading some of the "oldies" -- Wollstonecraft, Stanton, De Beauvoir, Friedan, Orton, Angier, Wittig. They all have slightly different ideas about the hows and whys of female oppression, but they all agree that women are oppressed and it is men who do the oppressing. As I have said before, I love the clarity of early feminism, its ability to point a finger at an enemy and a victim. Of course, third wave feminism is less sanguine about enemies and victims and offers much more complex and contradictory pictures of the world. It is harder to call a contemporary feminist a man-hater but it is also harder to call her a feminist.
So, as we have been discussing the ideas about men in these theories in class, I have been thinking about whether I think men oppress women today. I mean, I do not doubt inequities and imbalances. But I tend to view these as structural, not individual. Still, the buck has to stop somewhere, right? And, as we know, the institutions that structure the patriarchy are themselves often run by men, so I know that while individual men seem to have changed a lot, men still by and large oppress women.
But then I look at my husband and son. Are they part of the problem or do they somehow escape the logic of the patriarchy? Wollstonecraft said that we were often blind to our oppression as a class because we focused on our individual relationships with individual men. And I am sure she is right. But a different way to think about it is that our awareness of ourselves as a class can help us help the individual men in our lives to change their ways, and hopefully help change those structures from the ground up. In my life, I know that my husband was already something of a feminist when we met, raised by a feminist mother, attached to two strong sisters, proud of his female family. But I know that as we have faced the changes and challenges of marriage and family he, like me, has been awakened to some of the imbalances, some of his own assumptions. I think he walks the walk more now than when he was younger.
My son is being raised by two feminists, then. And he grapples with gender issues all the time -- mostly trying to figure out why girls can have girl power and he cannot claim boy power, or recognizing that his sister can play video games, read graphic novels, use Legos, wear pants and other once-upon-a-time masculine pursuits whereas he has internalized some sense that his liking for cuddly toys, kitty cats and little Japanese figures might be seen as feminine, and therefore bad. He sees a woman working and a dad who cooks. He has a sister he admires. But what will happen as he gets older. Will the social pressure he already feels take control. Will he stop playing with those toys? Will he have to pretend to care about sports? Will he "man up" and lose his internal sense of fairness and equality? And what is my role? How do I shape him without warping him? I suppose that we will continue to talk about all of this, as we have done since he was little -- to acknowledge the ways it is hard to be a boy, but remind him of the tough history that girls have had, to acknowledge the distinction being his individual behavior and ideals of the patriarchy, but also to make him aware that while being a boy carries some responsibility, too, to change the system.
So, as we have been discussing the ideas about men in these theories in class, I have been thinking about whether I think men oppress women today. I mean, I do not doubt inequities and imbalances. But I tend to view these as structural, not individual. Still, the buck has to stop somewhere, right? And, as we know, the institutions that structure the patriarchy are themselves often run by men, so I know that while individual men seem to have changed a lot, men still by and large oppress women.
But then I look at my husband and son. Are they part of the problem or do they somehow escape the logic of the patriarchy? Wollstonecraft said that we were often blind to our oppression as a class because we focused on our individual relationships with individual men. And I am sure she is right. But a different way to think about it is that our awareness of ourselves as a class can help us help the individual men in our lives to change their ways, and hopefully help change those structures from the ground up. In my life, I know that my husband was already something of a feminist when we met, raised by a feminist mother, attached to two strong sisters, proud of his female family. But I know that as we have faced the changes and challenges of marriage and family he, like me, has been awakened to some of the imbalances, some of his own assumptions. I think he walks the walk more now than when he was younger.
My son is being raised by two feminists, then. And he grapples with gender issues all the time -- mostly trying to figure out why girls can have girl power and he cannot claim boy power, or recognizing that his sister can play video games, read graphic novels, use Legos, wear pants and other once-upon-a-time masculine pursuits whereas he has internalized some sense that his liking for cuddly toys, kitty cats and little Japanese figures might be seen as feminine, and therefore bad. He sees a woman working and a dad who cooks. He has a sister he admires. But what will happen as he gets older. Will the social pressure he already feels take control. Will he stop playing with those toys? Will he have to pretend to care about sports? Will he "man up" and lose his internal sense of fairness and equality? And what is my role? How do I shape him without warping him? I suppose that we will continue to talk about all of this, as we have done since he was little -- to acknowledge the ways it is hard to be a boy, but remind him of the tough history that girls have had, to acknowledge the distinction being his individual behavior and ideals of the patriarchy, but also to make him aware that while being a boy carries some responsibility, too, to change the system.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
"Food Networks: Gender and Foodways," the conference that I organized at Notre Dame ended yesterday. It was amazing. Our goal was to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to talk about food from many different angles. We had papers on topics as diverse as male cookbooks, Martha Stewart's magazine, suffrage starvation tactics, migrant workers, racism in food activism, student activism, Candy Darling, feminist critiques of Michael Pollan, Julie Child (she got a whole panel), Babette's Feast, Little House on the Prairie, food deserts and dollar stores, slow food, new Nordic cooking, and more. My panel was on Queer Food. I talked about The Gay Cookbook, a cookbook aimed at "the limp wristed" from 1965!
Interestingly, though, outside my panel and a paper on food insecurity (a polite academic term for poverty and starvation) among AIDS patients, the discussion of gender seemed to me to often stay within very heterosexual frameworks. Much of the discussion seemed to be about men/women, masculinity/femininity as if those terms were relatively stable. It isn't that people didn't have the capacity to think about queerness or the complexity of gender, not at all; it was, on the whole, a very sophisticated discussion. But, coming from gender studies, I was struck by the way in food and food issues did not seem to raise issues of transgender, say, or homosexuality, or gender parody, or camp (except in my panel). I think this may be because 1) people more or less take for granted that you know that they know that these categories are complex and do not feel compelled to spell it out, tiring perhaps of figuring out the full range of LBTG initials; and 2) food tends to bring people back to ideas about family, stereotypes of femininity, mothers, kitchens, etc. -- and there is a kind of reversion to old formulas in many discourses and representations of food and the papers reflected that, in a way. (Many papers mentioned or discussed the tendency on The Food Network, for instance, to schedule female shows in the daytime, male shows at night, with female shows presenting cooking as homely, everyday, care work and male shows presenting cooking as competition, gourmet fare, action).
While queerness was not on the plate throughout the conference, as it were -- or, not often explicitly -- it did come up in a very interesting way. One of our plenary speakers, Alice Julier, critiqued the mantra that you have to sit down and eat with your family -- she said there are other kinship systems. She did not put it in queer terms, but she was queering the table, and agreed with my characterization of her as queering food. Her comment made me realize the degree to which many food movements dovetail with "family values" and that I had bought into much of it myself. I will continue to sit down with my family to eat because I love the conversation, and I want my kids to think of food as an activity not a mindless intravenous feed. But I will recognize that there are other kinship systems, other "families," like friends, co-workers, and fellow travelers that should be at the table, too.
Interestingly, though, outside my panel and a paper on food insecurity (a polite academic term for poverty and starvation) among AIDS patients, the discussion of gender seemed to me to often stay within very heterosexual frameworks. Much of the discussion seemed to be about men/women, masculinity/femininity as if those terms were relatively stable. It isn't that people didn't have the capacity to think about queerness or the complexity of gender, not at all; it was, on the whole, a very sophisticated discussion. But, coming from gender studies, I was struck by the way in food and food issues did not seem to raise issues of transgender, say, or homosexuality, or gender parody, or camp (except in my panel). I think this may be because 1) people more or less take for granted that you know that they know that these categories are complex and do not feel compelled to spell it out, tiring perhaps of figuring out the full range of LBTG initials; and 2) food tends to bring people back to ideas about family, stereotypes of femininity, mothers, kitchens, etc. -- and there is a kind of reversion to old formulas in many discourses and representations of food and the papers reflected that, in a way. (Many papers mentioned or discussed the tendency on The Food Network, for instance, to schedule female shows in the daytime, male shows at night, with female shows presenting cooking as homely, everyday, care work and male shows presenting cooking as competition, gourmet fare, action).
While queerness was not on the plate throughout the conference, as it were -- or, not often explicitly -- it did come up in a very interesting way. One of our plenary speakers, Alice Julier, critiqued the mantra that you have to sit down and eat with your family -- she said there are other kinship systems. She did not put it in queer terms, but she was queering the table, and agreed with my characterization of her as queering food. Her comment made me realize the degree to which many food movements dovetail with "family values" and that I had bought into much of it myself. I will continue to sit down with my family to eat because I love the conversation, and I want my kids to think of food as an activity not a mindless intravenous feed. But I will recognize that there are other kinship systems, other "families," like friends, co-workers, and fellow travelers that should be at the table, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)