Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism

Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism is a project organized by CSW Adjunct Assistant Professors Sarah Tracy and Rachel Vaughn.

Edible Feminisms is a project in three parts:

• A forthcoming special issue of the journal Food, Culture, and Society
• A private writing workshop for contributors to the special issue
• A public panel that brings together scholars and activists

This project was inspired by Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins‘ framing of “critical eating studies” in her award-winning Racial Indigestion (New York University Press, 2012) and reflects on the ways in which American Studies, Food Studies, Sensory Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Postcolonial Studies are speaking to one another. Through the promptings of food science popularization, culinary tourism, food waste, sustainability, and access debates, questions of race, identity, and pleasure are currently as germane as the science of obesity/diabetes, allergy, and chemical exposure. Rather than separate such strands, we wish to forward the proposition of “critical eating studies” through explorations of the theme of Re(Value). How do individuals, companies, and policy-makers deploy science (e.g., evolutionary, genetic, molecular) to do the work of differentiation—where differentiation is an expression of value, whether ethnic, cultural, distinction, or brand? How do such actors center science in their route to positive futures? In other words, how is latent capacity transformed into new sources of value and to what benefit, and through which kinds of violence? How does making explicit the materiality, politics, and symbolism of eating (a mutual, subjective, and intractable affair), as feminist and queer critical practice, help illuminate such questions and to what ends?

Food, Culture, and Society Special Issue Contributors

Writing Workshop and Labs

Details and registration information