R1 07/07-08/13 08616 ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS MOLINA
Women Who Eat: Food, Deviance, Pleasure, and Power in Black Women’s Writing
Black women in the United States have historically experienced a complicated relationship to food. At once, food represents the nation’s violent consumption of Black women’s bodies and labors while also serving as the means for political action, autonomy, and joy. This course focuses on Black women—writers and characters—who eat back at dominant society’s racialized, gendered, heterosexist, and dehumanizing assumptions about them. How do Black women use food to counter “normal” standards and rules that cast their oppression as “natural”? Why are Black women who cannot or will not submit to society’s “ought-tos” so often labeled as deviant? How do Black women who live according to their own terms transgress and unsettle the disciplinary systems of power that they inhabit? We will explore the ways that Black women exercise power against state and institutional control by nourishing their physical and/or spiritual hungers. The authors we will read approach food as a field of creative and political expression through which they depict deviant modes of being and surviving in the “normal” world. Using an interdisciplinary framework that combines Black feminist theory, queer of color theory, and food studies, our texts will include short fiction, poems, recipes, songs, and essays in a variety of genres including, realism, autobiography, and Afrofuturism. Authors may include Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae-Smart Grosvenor, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Jewel Gomez. Together, we will develop our creative-critical reading, writing, and thinking skills to consider how deviant hungers lead to everyday choices that accumulate and expose the violence of conforming to the “normal.”