Season to Taste with Queer Forms

Elizabeth Blake ’04 explores desire, gratification, and embodiment in her first book.

Imagine “tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink” alongside “white grapes covered with a silver bloom” as part of a decadent spread and try not to salivate. Katherine Mansfield created these vivid descriptions in her short story “Bliss,” but it is Elizabeth Blake ’04 who uses them to set the table for an exuberant conversation about desire, gratification, and embodiment in her first book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms.

An assistant professor of English at Clark University in Massachusetts, Elizabeth sets out “to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself,” yet this is not a dyspeptic look at modes of consumption. It is a joyous exploration of texts that convey the pleasure of eating while also pushing against or reshaping formal constructs of style. She analyzes “an abundance of edible imagery” and how it functions to illuminate sensory experience as well as how such representations can transform narrative conventions.

In one chapter, Elizabeth looks at scenes of refusal and ambivalence in women’s literature to consider how eating can subvert notions of propriety, beauty, and status; in another chapter, she shows how feeding can be a means of nurture or a mode of control. Elsewhere, she goes beyond Rabelaisian tropes to argue that satire and obscenity, when “animated by queer gustatory pleasure,” can compel readers to acknowledge their own appetites (and their responses to them).

This dinner party brings together Barthes and Benjamin with contemporary theorists like José Esteban Muñoz and Sara Ahmed. Freud and Foucault figure into discussions of disruption and critique, joined by Langston Hughes and Djuna Barnes, author of the 1936 novel Nightwood. Novels by Richard Bruce Nugent and Virginia Woolf “theorize a sensibility of otherness” that functions to resist systems of aesthetics and gastronomic taste. By enriching our literary palate in this era of regulated behaviors, Elizabeth serves the most piquant insight of all: “. . . embracing the ordinary fact of being ‘very fond of eats’ might, in fact, be a little queer.”

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