ABSTRACT
Foodways reflect the food practices and customs associated with different cultures. Foodways illuminate what people eat and why through a historical lens wherein food practices are shaped across time and place. In this chapter, I bring a critical lens to examine relationships between foodways and queerness. I use “queer(y)ing” or queering to examine how norms and power are embedded in foodways. Through Ahmed’s (2017) figure of the “feminist killjoy” detailed in Living a Feminist Life, I query four issues that my “agrifood feminist killjoy” interrogates. These issues include: (1) the lack of focus on food as a feminist and queer issue, (2) the assumption that to “feed the world” we need increased food production, (3) the understanding that “the home” is the ideal place to intervene in food consumption, and (4) that non-dominant communities’ foodways are responsible for unhealthy outcomes and these foodways require outside intervention to correct eating habits. I critique these narratives through queer foodways to argue that food access and cultivation must be recentred in movements for queer liberation.
