ABSTRACT
In her short story, “A Lesbian Appetite,” Dorothy Allison writes, “I remember women by what we ate together, what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I’ve only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long” (276). By recalling past lovers and remembering what they ate together, Dorothy Allison’s autobiographical story offers an alternative way to conceptualize food preparation within the domestic sphere. While Allison’s text severs the seamless link between heterosexuality and food preparation, it is not enjoined to any particular definition of nationhood. She tells a story of love and desire mediated through food that transgresses the logic of the domestic space, but her story does not place sexuality within a national or transnational framework. Nevertheless, I begin with this story because it radically reconfigures the relationship between food and desire within the domestic space. Allison’s story suggests that food consumption and preparation in the domestic space is not circumscribed by compulsory heterosexuality. Instead, her story sutures food and sexuality, engendering affiliations that necessarily transgress the implicit heteronormative logic of the home. 1
