Queering Food Justice

Keywords: agriculture, queer, justice, farming, food
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Food justice scholarship and activism are only on the verge of interrogating the roles of sexuality and gender in food consumption and production, despite burgeoning research on LGBTQ+ food insecurity, heterosexism in farming, and queer resistance strategies. We bring a queer theoretical lens to food justice to explore how the movement has related to queerness, heterosexism, and cissexism in the agrifood system. We argue that the intersecting ideologies and material manifestations of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy have contributed to the food justice movement overlooking queer marginalization and resistance strategies across the agrifood system. For example, the settler-colonial state's use of the heteropatriarchal family farm model to hold and transfer private land; the erasure of queerness in racial justice and agrarian social movements; and white heteronuclear respectability politics have discouraged queer-centered approaches within the food justice movement. This exclusion ultimately undercuts the movement's goals toward justice more broadly and toward racial justice specifically. However, queer agrifood activism offers tools like "chosen family" as an alternative to the heteronuclear family farm; Indigenous queer approach that questions how land ownership—even by marginalized groups—may reproduce inequity without considering the relation to Indigenous peoples; and the prioritization of joy, celebration, and sex to strengthen community resilience in the painful march toward justice. By examining how the queer community in the food system disrupts common anti-intersectional notions of queerness as whiteness and food justice as racial justice, we offer queer lenses and strategies for realizing food justice movement goals