Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Racial Indigestion

How deviant materials figure resistance

Yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition.

Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories-- gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication--to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art.

Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.

Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot (Sexual Cultures)

Sharon Patricia Holland

Marcia Ochoa

Using the gut as a starting point, this special issue focuses on the idea of the visceral as a trope for the carnal and bloody logic that organizes life. It brings together scholars working in food studies, American studies, sexuality and queer studies, and critical race theory who are keen not only to understand patterns of bodily production and consumption but also to propose new theoretical scaffoldings for our understanding of the intersection of race, food, the human, and the animal. These essays highlight the moments, texts, and processes that link food, flesh, and the alimentary tract to systems of pleasure--as well as to historical and political systems of inequality. The contributors seek to unearth structures of feeling, sensing, and embodiment that have been obscured either by colonialist historiography or political prejudice.

Race, Sex, and Other Gut Feelings

On the Visceral, Part 1

The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children's literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture's vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

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