Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption: Intersectional Rhetorics
Autor Jennifer Lin LeMesurieren Limba Engleză Hardback – 28 feb 2023
Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect theory, and Asian American studies, LeMesurier analyzes messages in US popular culture about Asian eating to develop the concept of gut orientations: rhetorically dominant ways of interacting with food that scale upward to feelings of desire and disgust toward social groups. Looking at examples from fears around MSG to uproar over wet markets as the source of COVID-19, she argues that these “gut” reactions establish certain racial views as common-sense truths rather than cultural biases, reinforcing dominant norms about what belongs on whose plate, or who belongs at what table. In demystifying marginalizing discourse around food and eating, LeMesurier shows how exposing the tacit, felt ideas of consumption is necessary to contest broader forms of discrimination.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215371
ISBN-10: 0814215378
Pagini: 176
Ilustrații: 6 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
ISBN-10: 0814215378
Pagini: 176
Ilustrații: 6 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
Recenzii
“Through deft integration and synthesis of theories and arguments from diverse disciplines, LeMesurier persuasively demonstrates how the racialization and alienization of Asians have long been coded in discourse on food. Inscrutable Eating holds immense promise for rhetoric studies and beyond.” —Shui-yin Sharon Yam, author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship
“Theoretically rich and sophisticated, Inscrutable Eating makes an important contribution to a field that has had to reckon with the way it has approached research and teaching about communities of color. LeMesurier’s novel conceptual work, compelling analysis, and timely rhetorical intervention will make this book a touchstone in cultural rhetorics.” —Morris Young, author of Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship
“In Inscrutable Eating, LeMesurier brings nuance to the ubiquitous maxim ‘you are what you eat’ by unraveling the rhetorical process of how one comes to be defined by how and what you eat. As scholars in food studies, Asian American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies (among others) continue to critically examine ‘how the stories we tell about people and their appetites are inextricable from tacit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality’ (123), her theory of gut orientations offers a fruitful framework that can enhance this work.” —Nicolyn Woodcock, Society for US Intellectual History
“Theoretically rich and sophisticated, Inscrutable Eating makes an important contribution to a field that has had to reckon with the way it has approached research and teaching about communities of color. LeMesurier’s novel conceptual work, compelling analysis, and timely rhetorical intervention will make this book a touchstone in cultural rhetorics.” —Morris Young, author of Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship
“In Inscrutable Eating, LeMesurier brings nuance to the ubiquitous maxim ‘you are what you eat’ by unraveling the rhetorical process of how one comes to be defined by how and what you eat. As scholars in food studies, Asian American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies (among others) continue to critically examine ‘how the stories we tell about people and their appetites are inextricable from tacit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality’ (123), her theory of gut orientations offers a fruitful framework that can enhance this work.” —Nicolyn Woodcock, Society for US Intellectual History
Notă biografică
Jennifer Lin LeMesurier is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University.
Extras
It is difficult to speak about race and the associated axes of gender, sexuality, class, and so on without referencing violence against in some form. Symbolic violence at the macro or micro level. Physical violence enacted via top-down systemic oppression or sidewalk encounters that turn ugly. Abrasive, threatening language. The role of the rhetorical critic is, in part, to point to how the one violent encounter emerges from constitutive rhetorical practices that make hierarchies of brutality seem normal. I see this book as aligning with such critical impulses even as I focus on how the complexity of racial interrelations and associated inequities is not just found in violent extremes but also rooted in the everyday mundane of consumption.
In Inscrutable Eating, I have explored how the stories we tell about people and their appetites are inextricable from tacit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Or, proclivities of the mouth are assumed to signal proclivities of other organs. As such, the stories we tell about foods and eating are never neutral but bear undertones of moral judgment, assumptions about citizenship and belonging, and expectations for proximity and intimacy among bodies. These assumptions become especially evident when analyzing discourses related to Asian food and eaters within the US; the presumed foreignness of the Asian body means that consumption of Asian foods, however pleasurable, is always a potential gateway into outsider contamination.
I have theorized the concept of gut orientations in order to better understand how we are drawn to certain constellations of bodies and objects over others based on presumed habits of consumption. In so doing, it becomes clear how the same flows of affective and rhetorical force that render proximity to as a key part of social hierarchies are intertwined with axes of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Orientations of bodies and gazes are not neutral but are rooted in broader ecologies of judgment about what is disgusting or threatening, who disgusts or threatens. On its own, the use of the term “orientation” as a guiding metaphor might lend itself to understanding this sort of rhetorical work as a mere shift in perspective, a re-placing of the body in a different position with different eyelines and atmospheres. What I have attempted to signal with my choice of the additional term “gut” is how the process of reorienting is itself never neutral but continually underpinned by tacit, affectively powerful accumulations of desire and repulsion. Resetting orientations toward objects and others is a complex resetting of deeply felt boundaries. The sort of reorientation that is necessary to rewrite understandings of appropriate interrelations between racialized bodies and their products (words, foods, smells, etc.) is sometimes not even seen as an option through the mists of repugnance. Part of understanding rhetorical possibilities on a gut level means understanding what happens when empathy curdles.
The four examples of gut orientations discussed in this book show how the judgment of appropriate distance from racialized Others, whether related to miscegenation, cohabitation, or citizenship, is inextricable from judgments of appropriate expressions of eating, sex, and emotion. In labeling Chinese immigrants as rats and rat eaters, anti-Asian advocates in the 1800s were able to encourage more distance between races as a prophylactic measure, a thread that emerged again in the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and derogatory narratives about eating bats. Even beyond overt discrimination, these embedded ideas of Asianness as subtly contaminating reproduce fixed distances among racialized bodies as normal at best, but these topoi can also provide validation for overt violence against Asian bodies. As seen in the discourse on MSG and wellness, those with control over the framing of food products can create conditions for racist distancing all while proclaiming a nonracist stance through a focus on unclean or otherwise undesirable foods. Similarly, the rapidity with which an emotional Asian is cast as an overemotional Asian, a “too sensitive” rhetor, is part of this overarching understanding of a flawed Asian embodiment that needs to quietly submit to racial hierarchies as the price for continued membership in US society. Throughout these examples, the underlying assumption is that a violation of consumption is linked to an inherently flawed performance of race, gender, sexuality, and/or class.
In Inscrutable Eating, I have explored how the stories we tell about people and their appetites are inextricable from tacit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Or, proclivities of the mouth are assumed to signal proclivities of other organs. As such, the stories we tell about foods and eating are never neutral but bear undertones of moral judgment, assumptions about citizenship and belonging, and expectations for proximity and intimacy among bodies. These assumptions become especially evident when analyzing discourses related to Asian food and eaters within the US; the presumed foreignness of the Asian body means that consumption of Asian foods, however pleasurable, is always a potential gateway into outsider contamination.
I have theorized the concept of gut orientations in order to better understand how we are drawn to certain constellations of bodies and objects over others based on presumed habits of consumption. In so doing, it becomes clear how the same flows of affective and rhetorical force that render proximity to as a key part of social hierarchies are intertwined with axes of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Orientations of bodies and gazes are not neutral but are rooted in broader ecologies of judgment about what is disgusting or threatening, who disgusts or threatens. On its own, the use of the term “orientation” as a guiding metaphor might lend itself to understanding this sort of rhetorical work as a mere shift in perspective, a re-placing of the body in a different position with different eyelines and atmospheres. What I have attempted to signal with my choice of the additional term “gut” is how the process of reorienting is itself never neutral but continually underpinned by tacit, affectively powerful accumulations of desire and repulsion. Resetting orientations toward objects and others is a complex resetting of deeply felt boundaries. The sort of reorientation that is necessary to rewrite understandings of appropriate interrelations between racialized bodies and their products (words, foods, smells, etc.) is sometimes not even seen as an option through the mists of repugnance. Part of understanding rhetorical possibilities on a gut level means understanding what happens when empathy curdles.
The four examples of gut orientations discussed in this book show how the judgment of appropriate distance from racialized Others, whether related to miscegenation, cohabitation, or citizenship, is inextricable from judgments of appropriate expressions of eating, sex, and emotion. In labeling Chinese immigrants as rats and rat eaters, anti-Asian advocates in the 1800s were able to encourage more distance between races as a prophylactic measure, a thread that emerged again in the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and derogatory narratives about eating bats. Even beyond overt discrimination, these embedded ideas of Asianness as subtly contaminating reproduce fixed distances among racialized bodies as normal at best, but these topoi can also provide validation for overt violence against Asian bodies. As seen in the discourse on MSG and wellness, those with control over the framing of food products can create conditions for racist distancing all while proclaiming a nonracist stance through a focus on unclean or otherwise undesirable foods. Similarly, the rapidity with which an emotional Asian is cast as an overemotional Asian, a “too sensitive” rhetor, is part of this overarching understanding of a flawed Asian embodiment that needs to quietly submit to racial hierarchies as the price for continued membership in US society. Throughout these examples, the underlying assumption is that a violation of consumption is linked to an inherently flawed performance of race, gender, sexuality, and/or class.
Cuprins
Chapter 1 Gut Orientations
Chapter 2 Rat Eaters: Defining American Masculinity in Opposition to Asian Deviance
Chapter 3 Bat Lovers: The Threat of Asian Appetites to US National Embodiment
Chapter 4 MSG Users: Phantasies of Health as Race Neutral
Chapter 5 “Too Sensitive” Speakers: The Limits on Asian Emotion in the Public Sphere
Conclusion Unmooring Habits of Taste
Chapter 2 Rat Eaters: Defining American Masculinity in Opposition to Asian Deviance
Chapter 3 Bat Lovers: The Threat of Asian Appetites to US National Embodiment
Chapter 4 MSG Users: Phantasies of Health as Race Neutral
Chapter 5 “Too Sensitive” Speakers: The Limits on Asian Emotion in the Public Sphere
Conclusion Unmooring Habits of Taste
Descriere
Investigates how the rhetorical framing of cultural food and eating practices underpins our understanding of race and gender in contemporary America.