Text and Performance Quarterly Introduction

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Introduction Laura A. Lindenfeld & Kristin M. Langellier Published online: 07 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Laura A. Lindenfeld & Kristin M. Langellier (2009) Introduction, Text and Performance Quarterly, 29:1, 1-4, DOI: 10.1080/10462930802514289 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930802514289

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Text and Performance Quarterly Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 1
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Introduction

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Laura A. Lindenfeld & Kristin M. Langellier

As a complex system of performance practices and epistemologies, food, cooking, and eating invite consideration into the rituals and practices that shape lived experience. Sidney Mintz writes that food is ‘‘always conditioned by meaning’’ (7). Food preparation, consumption, and the narratives we create about and through food are, by their very nature, performative. A ‘‘bridging substance between nature and culture, the human and the natural, the outside and the inside’’ (Atkinson 11), food’s liminality invites us to study the performance of crossing from one boundary to another. Performance ‘‘cooks’’ raw food, making it both edible and aesthetic (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 26). The very same issues with which performance studies scholars concern themselves echo through the study of food, and the realm of the alimentary invites new insights into performance and performativity. We believe that food studies and performance studies have much to gain from interacting with and informing each other. Intrigued by some of the unexplored interstices of food and performance, we set out to map and inspire new developments in food and performance studies scholarship in this Special Issue on food and performance. Like performance studies, food studies has undergone tremendous growth over the past decades. Multidisciplinary food studies explore relationships among food, culture, and society. Drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, this body of scholarship examines a wide array of topics such as everyday food practices, the gendering of feeding families, the phenomenon of food television, and the relationship of food to nationhood. A number of academic journals are dedicated to food studies (Food & Foodways, The Journal for the Study of Food, Culture, and Society, Gastronomica), and several organizations focus specifically on food studies (e.g., The Association for the Study of Food and Society), and others explore food in the context of their fields of inquiry. Increasingly, panels on food have appeared at the National Communication Association, American Studies Association, Popular Cultural Association, and the Cultural Studies Association, marking the growing interest in food studies across a range of disciplines. Studying the intersection of food and performance is not new. In 1999, Richard Gough edited a special issue of Performance Research, ‘‘On Cooking,’’ that built on older bodies of scholarship and laid groundwork for future research. In this collection, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defined three junctures at which food and performance intersect: doing, behaving, and showing (1
2). To perform food is ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10462930802514289

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to do, to get something done: the performing kitchen is a site where domestic cooks, professional chefs, and performing artists make and serve food. To perform food is to behave, to present the self in daily life by acting out and within the repetitions of habits and rituals, and in accord with protocols and poetics as instructions for doing something: how to make and eat food, and how to make do with food. To perform food is to make a to-do with food, to show the processes and products of cooking and eating, and to offer them for evaluation and appreciation in a movement toward the theatrical and spectacular. As doing, behaving, and showing, in ordinary and extraordinary acts, food and performance are embodied and visceral*the charged ingredients of survival and pleasure, of nourishment and the nuances of taste and power relations. Following the work of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and others, we wanted to learn about and support a new body of scholarship that builds on and extends beyond previous inquiries into food and performance. This Special Issue of Text and Performance Quarterly examines some of these possible intersections and adds some new themes, concerns, methodological approaches, and theoretical premises to this body of scholarship. The essays in this collection consider food as embodied narrative; environmental performances of food and food production; food as spectacle and tourism; hunger and its complicated relationship to excess; and food, media, and performances of identity as gendered, sexual, racial, classed, and transnational. Drawing on a range of contexts, topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches, the essays in this collection provide new insights into the complex, varied, and ever-changing relationship of food and performance. Our hope is that this issue will promote the growth of more scholarly interest food and performance and that it will stimulate more discussions about what these two fields of inquiry offer each other. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett articulated, ‘‘all three senses of performance*to do, to behave, to show*operate all through the food system, including production, provisioning, preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal, but vary according to which sense of performance is focal, elaborated, or suppressed’’ (12). The first two essays treat food production and presentation as performative. Cindy M. Spurlock’s essay, ‘‘Performing and Sustaining (Agri)Culture and Place: The Cultivation of Environmental Subjectivity on the Piedmont Farm Tour,’’ opens the collection with an analysis of food-centered advocacy tourism in Central North Carolina’s Piedmont Farm Tour. Spurlock argues that the rhetorical and performative potential of place-based tourism offers a challenge to discourses of consumerism. Linking the touristic experience to the New Deal Department of Agriculture’s desire to create access to food sources, Ann Folino White’s essay on the 1933
34 World’s Fair food exhibits studies the embodied experience of food security by visitors to the World’s Fair exhibits on agriculture and food. This embodied experience, she argues, became part of hegemonic discourses that linked food security to American identity, even though many went (and still go) hungry amidst the state of abundance. In its poignant consideration of ‘‘food insecurity’’ at America’s supposed bountiful table, the third essay, by Eileen Cherry-Chandler, interweaves personal narratives of hunger

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Introduction

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with cultural theories of performance and food provisioning, preparation, and consumption. Referencing the biblical story of Ruth who gathers food ‘‘After the Reapers,’’ Cherry-Chandler traces race and class disparities that create ‘‘culinary ruptures’’ for citizens who were not privy to the promise of plenty: how they make and make-do with food. The next two essays focus on the strong presence and meanings of a particular food substance and how it is provided, prepared, marketed, and consumed. Lori Danielle Barcliff Baptista considers bacalhau*salt cod*as the nexus of performance practices for many Portuguese-Americans in ‘‘Peixe, Pais e Possibilidades Portuguesas: Fish, Homeland, and Portuguese Possibilities.’’ Studying the Ironbound community in Newark, New Jersey, Baptista tracks the history and experience of Portuguese immigrants and the performance of ‘‘Portugueseness’’ through bacalhau, a food through which one can map cultural continuity and assimilation and the relationship of ritual to history and identity. C. Wesley Buerkle turns to the marketing of food in burger franchise advertisements to study the role of beef and beef consumption in the performance of masculinity. Through a close analysis of Burger King’s ‘‘Manthem,’’ Buerkle argues that this and other burger ads celebrate a retrograde form of masculinity and cement it as a biological imperative in order to counter the contemporary image of the effeminized metrosexual. The final two essays explore resistant performances and performativities of food to personal, social, and cultural frameworks. Leda Cooks links Foucault’s history of technologies of the self to performativity in everyday life and draws on de Certeau to investigate two sites in which food serves to reconfigure the dominant order: the ProAna movement (food as body) and the permaculture movement (food as land). Although their strategies and goals are vastly different, both movements use performances of public solidarity to challenge and promote resistance to dominant cultural values. Concluding this Special Issue in The Performance Space is a review that describes an experimental performance of halo-halo, a Filipino dessert and comfort food. In ritualizing the Passion of Christ in a food laboratory*an explicit kitchen theatre*the performance narrates and explores contemporary and historical Filipino identity as a means of decolonializing historical memories. The linkages among performance and food provide fertile ground for analysis, discovery, and narration, both food for thinking and food for doing, behaving, and showing. The essays that appear in this special issue would not have been possible without the dedication of the contributing scholars whose patience and commitment made this experience both a pleasure and a remarkable learning experience for us. In many ways, these scholars have navigated through uncharted territory, and we thank them for their willingness to integrate performance studies and food studies in new and meaningful ways. This project required the assistance and support of many scholars from the worlds of food and performance who served as manuscript reviewers. We wish to express our thanks to them (see List of Guest Reviewers) for their support of this endeavor, and to Myron Beasley for his contributions to the project. We extend special appreciation to Shane Perry at the University of Maine for his efficient, able, and enthusiastic editorial assistance. Finally, we wish to thank

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Bruce Henderson for granting us this opportunity to till the soil of this project. We hope that these essays are just an opening to many future conversations on food and performance. References

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Atkinson, Paul. ‘‘Eating Virtue.’’ The Sociology of Food and Eating: Essays on the Sociological Significance of Food. Ed. Anne Murcott. Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1983. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. ‘‘Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium.’’ Performance Research 4.1 (1999): 1
30. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon P, 1996.