ABSTRACT
The chapter explores how cinematic images are accessed beyond sight, and how the solicitation of senses such as taste and smell creates new systems of social and cultural meaning that affect how queer subjects and communities are constituted on screen. Moonlight (2016) and Call Me by Your Name (2017) provide two examples of food becoming communicator and object of kinship, eroticism, and queer feeling. In Moonlight, sharing a meal exposes its protagonist’s vulnerability as a gay man, and enables him to accept love from other men. In CMbYN communal eating bonds the Perlman family and signifies the rift caused by the arrival of Oliver. In one of the film’s more controversial scenes, food as fetish object allows Elio to explore his sexuality in private, given his anxieties about his burgeoning queerness. The foodways lens particularly lends itself to subversive readings of queer films, where any romantic or sexual activity is already charged with tension and illicitness due to the persistence of homophobia. These images are able to translate queer experiences with great nuance, whilst emphasizing the universality of bodily affects that can engage a wider audience.
