Abby Wilkerson

Intersectionality and Food Studies

From the eds – How does the “interdiscipline” of food studies intersect with other interdisciplinary fields, such as women’s and gender studies, African studies, African American studies (and other racial and ethnic studies), disability studies, and other emerging and interdisciplinary fields? How should it intersect with those fields? How might it? We put these questions to Psyche Williams-Forson and Abby Wilkerson, two food studies scholars who work at several of these intersections. Their answers are found below, in this issue’s Focus. While the topic of intersectionality is one I’ve wanted to see discussed ever since we created this section of the journal, it pushed itself to the front of the line as the result of a discussion about Michael Pollan and feminism that appeared on the ASFS list in April 2010. The discussion left me very curious to learn more about how food studies scholars understand the ways they negotiate the borders and the shared territories, the obligations and the challenges between and among the fields of food studies, gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, and disability studies. Who else is in the kitchen? Who should be there, but isn’t? These papers invite and challenge us, as scholars, students and teachers of food studies, to consider those questions for ourselves.

I Want to Hold Your Hand: Abstinence Curricula, Bioethics, and the Silencing of Desire

The abstinence approach to sex education remains influential despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness. One bill forbids the “promotion” of “gateway sexual activity,” while requiring outright condemnation of “non-abstinence,” defined so loosely as to plausibly include handholding. Bioethics seldom (if ever) contributes to sex-ed debates, yet exploring the pivotal role of medical discourse reveals the need for bioethical intervention. Sex-ed debates revolve around a theory of human flourishing based on heteronormative temporality, a developmental teleology ensuring the transmission of various supposed social goods through heterosexual marriage (Halberstam, 2005). Heteronormative temporality also constitutes a moralized discourse in which the values of health and presumed certainties of medicine serve to justify conservative religious dictates that otherwise would appear controversial as the basis for public policy. Overall, this analysis explores how moralized medical discourses compound existing injustices, while suggesting bioethics’ potential contributions to moral and political analysis of sex-ed policies.

Composing Disability: Diagnosis, Interrupted

Writing is central both to the medical diagnostic codification of disability and to disabled people’s efforts to interrupt, complicate, or disrupt dominant medical narratives. This Symposium, like the George Washington University conference from which it takes its name, creates space for diverse modes and genres of claiming authority regarding diagnosis and its cultural and material effects. “Queer” and “crip” interrogations of diagnosis illuminate its status as a cultural phenomenon, embracing culturally disavowed embodiments and embodied experiences as tools for diagnosing inegalitarian social relations and opportunities for cultural interventions. This Symposium traces the workings of diagnostic normativity manifested in experiences such as “disruptive deafness,” unstable bodily materialities, pathologized grief and other forms of affective distress, and “surgical assemblages.” It presents a diverse array of compositions, articulated on each writer’s own terms, addressing a range of embodied experiences through multiple genres and voices, ranging from conversation transcript to scholarly essay, poetry, graphic memoir, and personal essay. Here, laypersons interrupt monologic medical diagnosis, claiming space to compose themselves. Together, the authors trace instances of corporeal “correction” back to the noxious agents, both environmental and political, that consistently breach the boundaries of corporeality.

Disability and Depression

Here, Ann Cvetkovich, interviewed by Abby Wilkerson, brings Cvetkovich’s influential cultural studies analysis of depression explicitly into conversation with disability studies. Cvetkovich understands “feeling bad” (a term she prefers to “depression”) as a defining affective state under neoliberalism. Drawing on a distinctive historical/cultural archive, she challenges the atomism of the neoliberal medical model that frames depression and affective distress more generally as the result of faulty brain chemistry—individual organisms gone awry. Instead, she traces these common experiences to sociopolitical phenomena ranging from current neoliberal demands for productivity as exemplified in university life, to histories of colonization, slavery, and displacement. The conversation considers the value of disability frameworks for understanding mental health diagnoses and the intersections of social institutions, bodily practices, and everyday affective life.

Judging, Tasting, Knowing “Good” Food

Abstract Though public discourses of “good” food exert a powerful influence, cooks and eaters construct our own understandings in ways that may simultaneously reflect and resist these norms. Our knowledge of “good” food may sometimes present itself as “vague” (Schaefer et al., this issue), yet is often quite nuanced, based on disparate factors—economic, logistical, nutritional, temporal and political, along with individual preferences—as the articles featured in this special cluster illustrate (Thomas et al., Tsui, this issue). Cooks (and also eaters) often exhibit sophisticated epistemic functions not unlike those of judges. They navigate multiple modes of knowledge—lay and expert, embodied, situated spatially and relationally—between eaters and food environments, between eaters and cooks. Cooks’ and eaters’ discussion of good food reveals moral imperatives translated into foodways, a range of interpersonal and institutional interactions and the traces of social hierarchies, as we see in these articles. Thus, “good” food is less a series of discrete choices by individuals than a domain in which cooks, eaters and their environments constitute interdependent networks. Through the emerging picture of these processes, this special cluster advances our knowledge of the cultural politics of “good” food, the epistemic politics of food “choices,” the workplace as an underexplored site of food cultures and just and sustainable health promotion efforts through food.

Family Pictures: A Philosopher Explores the Familiar (review)

the framework within which she can articulate her moral understanding of herself as someone who is doing the best she can under difficult circumstances. Walker’s analysis of moral understandings reflects the “messy state” of our moral lives. Because our responsibilities to others and ourselves are many, complex, and continually changing, we need to slow this Heraclitean flux down enough to achieve the kind of personal integrity that permits genuine intimacy with others. But, cautions Walker, we must not slow down this Heraclitean flux too much, lest we congeal it into a Parmenidean cement to pour over everyone in our lives. In other words, to say that moral understandings are not only expressive but also collaborative is to recognize that ethics is about more than refusing to be dominated; it is also about refusing to dominate. Moral people have the strength to create a moral world that reflects who they are and who they want to become. However, they also have the courage to move in and out of the worlds of people who see reality differently than they do, and to change as a result. For such people, and I desire to be among them, ethics is not an instrument of control; it is instead, as Walker suggests, a way for each of us to empower and free each other with the collaborative synthesis of our separately expressed moral understandings.