Hi, I remember reading a really interesting post relating the “purity” of foods and linking it with racial purity, and I have a good feeling I read it on your blog. If so, could you kindly repost? Also, about “Anger, feminist ethics, action,” have you read “Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum” by Atreyee Sen? It’s about “violent women” forming gangs to protect their community. It touches upon the “women as gentler” rhetoric. I could go on and on about it, great book.

I had heard about the book, yes, but never got to actually read it. So, thanks a lot for your tip! This seems to be pretty much along the lines of what I am looking for.

As for the food and racial purity, I think you might referring to my rants here (which is just a very brief comment) and here (but check the notes on this post because someone, if I recall correctly, said that the piece at The Atlantic I linked to was quite bad and not entirely accurate. So, there’s that).

I’ve been meaning to write more about this topic but between work and life and everything, I don’t always have the time to sit down and really put what are initially just inarticulate ideas into a properly thought out post. But yes (and this is yet again, not a novel idea by any stretch of the imagination), I truly believe that the way we talk about food, the way media uses food and how certain “eating practices” are normalized is highly racialized. I am thinking of the discourse around organic food, the exotification of “foreign” cuisines, how reactions to food preferences can mask certain racist notions of what is tasty and “apt for consumption” and what is not, etc. Also, how the media discourse around food is one of the ways in which we are disciplined (in multiple ways, racially, ethnically, sexually, gender-wise, etc.), because each of these axes can be related to some normative idea about the production and consumption of food.

So yes. Ideas. Little time and discipline to think of them further. Which come to think of it, pretty much sums up my life!

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