Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism

“Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste and Metabolism” is a food studies workshop, organized by Dr. Rachel Vaughn and Dr. Sarah Tracy of CSW and the Institute for Society and Genetics, that will culminating in a special issue of the journal Food, Culture, and Society.
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 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?
Schedule and speaker details forthcoming.
This event is supported by the Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership.
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