Eating Ourselves Into Being: Navigating Identity Through Queer Foodways

Lee, Jordan Toshimi

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Eating Ourselves Into Being: Navigating Identity Through Queer Foodways Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/kw52j962s

Abstract

Queerness, along axes of both gender and sexuality, is socially constructed and constantly negotiated through everyday social and cultural practices like foodways. Food’s centrality in culture makes it a largely normalizing force that circulates moral regulations on bodies while also providing us regular opportunities to engage in moral considerations about how we relate to one another through food. This research explores how queer individuals understand food as a signifying practice for conceptualizing and negotiating their intersectional identities, and how identity formation is influenced by biopolitical regulation of bodies, health, and relationships. Based in critical feminist and food geographies, I conducted semi-structured, food-situated interviews with 12 LGBTQ+ identifying young adults. These were qualitatively analyzed using a combination of inductive and deductive thematic coding. Using these methods, I found that participants navigate a complex landscape of queer identity in response both to normative frameworks and LGBTQ+ politics that manifest through anxieties about gendered eating, cooking, and exercise practices. Participants also orient to strong moral conceptualizations of health and food provisioning, like pressures to be vegan/vegetarian, to present themselves as ‘ethical eaters’. Tensions between gendered foodways, health expectations, ideas of what ‘ethical eating’ is, and the structural limitations on these practices lead to anxiety around foodways while also demonstrating the myriad ways that food is used as a tool in the process of identity-formation In the midst of these complex moral and ethical identity landscapes, participants ultimately turn to frameworks that are more expansive and potentially liberatory to guide their decisions, such as queer terminology or health frameworks rooted in moderation and balance.

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