“Art What Thou Eat”: Food in Literature, Art, and Culture
Session Coordinator: David E. Schoonover, Curator of Rare Books
University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections Department
david-schoonover@uiowa.edu

“I’ll Gossip at this Feast”: Gender Politics of Dining in The Comedy of Errors

Situating Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1592) amid the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourse of dining, this paper will explore the ambivalent role of woman at table and examine the ways in which new domestic and social orders can be established through the differential stratification of food access and division of labor between genders.

The importance of early modern Englishwomen in the preparation and service of food is attested by the many publications of cookbooks and household manuals, but the contemporary response to their growing influence is ambivalent.

In popular literature such male anxiety is sometimes expressed through dismissal or collective cannibalism of women. In The Comedy of Errors, the problem is solved by displacing it unto the marital conflict between the husband and wife, which is in turn displaced unto the competition between women for the favor of men. As women are clamoring to feed the men, the latter can finally enjoy the service and the food in peace, and the unity of the community is restored.

Huey-ling Lee
National Chi Nan University (TAIWAN)

Queer Food—Gender, Film, and Sexuality

Almost since film began, one function of cinematic representations of food has been as a stand-in for sex: but traditionally that has been straight sex. Whether it’s the wild banquet in 9 ½ Weeks, the chicken-eating scene in Tom Jones, the couple in Tampopo slowly and sensually passing an egg from mouth to mouth, or Tita’s cooking igniting the fires of love in others in Like Water for Chocolate, food has repeatedly represented some aspect of heterosexual passion.

But when the passions are homosexual, we observe a variety of interesting changes. This presentation, which uses a number of film clips, will explore how filmmakers use food iconography to introduce an element of campiness; demarcate characters as queer; symbolize the “health” or “perversity” of gay and lesbian relationships; and to either normalize the queer characters or position them as completely Other. Among the films we will discuss are Woman on Top, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Wedding Banquet, and Big Eden.

Thomas Piontek and Anne Bower
The Ohio State University
Piontek.1@osu.edu, bower.2@osu.edu

Got Milk?: Homogenization and Multi-Cultural Consumption

My paper will examine a number of contemporary women writers in relation to what I term “multi-cultural consumption”.  Authors such as Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Laura Esquival, Fannie Flagg, and Marlene Nourbese Philip variously employ images of food, eating, and cooking to examine cultural, racial, and gendered identity.  The consumption and creation of food is a simultaneously enabling and delimiting project. 

Multi-cultural consumption is thus a double-edged consumption.  On one side, characters consume, create, and resubstaniate devalued cultural heritages through the communal creation and ingestion of diverse food (from Esquival’s Mexican wedding cake to Philip’s Jamaican Burnt Sugar).  On the other, those characters deemed as inferior Others (due to race, class, gender, sexuality) are shown as vulnerable to being consumed by the machinations of the homogenizing, capitalist world (most aptly symbolized by the pervasiveness of white milk in American culture and the racially marked add campaigns that surround this food staple).  My paper will argue that multi-cultural consumption is far preferable to the ingestion of white homogeneity.

Natalie Wilson
nkwc@earthlink.net

Rationing, Consumption, and Morality in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent

Since Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent takes place in post-World War II London, there are many references to rationed food throughout the novel. The restrictions on food affected everyone due to the flat-rate individual rations, and in her autobiography, Spark observes that if one “didn’t eat the whole of the allotted rations one was in trouble.” For that reason, food takes on a special significance in Loitering with Intent as the characters must decide how to distribute their rations, and given that each person gets so little food, even small gestures such as sharing a meal or inviting someone to tea can be a real sacrifice. Accordingly, my paper examines the implications of the characters’ choices regarding food and other rationed goods. For example, while Fleur Talbot (a young writer with little money) tends to use food to nurture her friends, Sir Quentin Oliver (a rich aristocrat) uses his black market delicacies and diet pills to manipulate others. Eventually, it becomes clear that each character’s treatment of food can shed light on his or her overall integrity.

Christina Cottrill
University of Akron
cc21@uakron.edu