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Beyond the Intersection: A New Culinary Metaphor for Race-Class-Gender Studies Author(s): Ivy Ken Reviewed work(s): Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 2008), pp. 152-172 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20453102 . Accessed: 08/10/2012 19:37

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Beyond the Intersection: A New Culinary Metaphor for Race-Class-Gender Studies

IV K N

George ashington University

ew would argue that race, class, and gender are unrelated, now that scholars of ine uality have spent decades aking the once devalued but now widely accepted case that structures of oppression like these cannot be understood in isolation fro one another. et the i agery on which the field has relied-race, class, and gender as intersecting or interlocking has li ited our ability to e plore the characteristics

of their relationships in e pirical and theoretical work. In this article I build on the gender fra ework articulated by Leslie Sal inger to articulate new i agery-via a etaphor of sugar-which highlights how race, class, and gender are produced, used,

e perienced, and processed in our bodies, hu an and institutional. This etaphor allows us to e phasi e structural and individual forces at work in their continual and utual constitution.

island in the sun discovered by Colu bus

devoured by the British recovered by the rench

stripped and searched by Spanish not-so-noble en uncovered for the touch of erchant utch en passed across tables hidden in the silken sleeves of states en island stone that the builders refused but we lift it still (I see wo en on bended knee

Cutting cane for their fa ily I see en...) living and dying, it was cane only we could know how bitter it was how deep its roots went those wo en knelt to feed a dragon there was no fa ily

Address correspondence to: Ivy Ken (for erly Ivy Kennelly), epart ent of Sociology, 801 22

Street N , Phillips all 09, ashington, C 20052. Tel.: 202-99 -1886 a : 202-99 -3239. - ail:

ivyken gwu.edu. I a grateful to Gerald Johnson Ken, Margaret Andersen, Michelle Beadle, Susanne

Beechey, Ka au Bobb, Cynthia eitch, Meta u wa Jones, Mike Kennelly, Robert Penney, Gregory S uires, Lisa Torres, Gail allace, Misha erschkul, e bers of the G u an Sciences Collo uiu , e bers of the C Sociological Society, and the reviewers and editors of Sociological Theory for sugges

tions that greatly strengthened this work.

Sociological Theory 26:2 June 2008 A erican Sociological Association. 1 30 K Street NVV, ashington, C 20005

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 153

only successive crops of children reaped crushed distilled till the ratoons e hausted the selves into dried old wo en.

Kendel ippolyte (1997) e cerpt fro Island in the Sun-Side 2 fro Birthright

ood is never si ply food-it does not start out as food, and it does not re ain food. ven beans and beets straight out of the ground usually have to be organi ed, packaged, shipped, and displayed in order to reach the people who will consu e the , and they ust also be prepared so ewhere along the way, either as ready-to eat ite s (think candy) or as ingredients in the individual kitchens of the people who have bought the for use in particular dishes (think hot-out-of-the-oven cookies). Before these food products are consu ed, I argue, they have no flavor. e have fairly accurate e pectations about what particular products will taste like when we put the in our ouths, which would e plain why a far er would go to the length of hilling her potatoes on the third round of cultivation to prevent the fro getting sunburned and producing bitter potato chips. But those potatoes do not carry flavor around with the . Rather, the flavor occurs in interaction with the person whose teeth asticate the chip to prepare it for distribution a ong the taste buds. The flavor lasts only a short while, however, co pared to the effects the ite will have on the body of the person who tastes it. ne potato chip, one spoonful of beans, one sugar cookie will travel through various parts of the body to be absorbed as nutrients, broken down into a ino acids that will be carried to organs in need of repair, stored as fat, and e pelled as waste. These foods -the sugar in the cookie, for e a ple-first get produced, and then prepared and e perienced, as flavor, and finally, as a collection of nutritional substances, they structure the body that interacts with the .

So, too, do race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression and privilege. These products, which each enco pass categori ation sche as, processes, sets of e bed

ded relations, histories, structural locations, practices, social institutions, distortions, products of discourse, ele ents of sy bolic representations, structural arrange ents, tropes, di ensions of identity, and opportunities to e press power, get produced and used, occasionally in isolation but usually in interconnected ways. Both people and institutions then interact with and e perience the co binations that have been pro duced and prepared-we taste the . And, having received the into our institu tional and hu an bodies, either voluntarily or as the result of force or hege ony, these co binations co e to structure us. A researcher who wants to understand the relationships a ong race, class, and gender, then, can e plore, analogically, how particular foods bu p up against each other throughout the production process, inside the i ing bowl, on a person s tongue, and within the cells of his body.

I develop the contours of the approach that can guide such e plorations by con centrating on one particular food: sugar. I e plore how sugar is produced and used, how it can be e perienced, and how it co es to shape the entities with which it interacts, in order to illustrate so e of the pri ary points at which race, class, and gender co e together. Sugar here is a etaphor, not for race or class or gender in their entirety, but for any big or s all part of any one of the . hat is i portant about sugar is that it is produced, used, e perienced, and digested in ways that help

15 S CI L GICAL T R

illustrate how ele ents of race, class, and gender are produced, used, e perienced, and processed. or sugar to be useful as a etaphor, however, an e a ination of it needs to reveal aspects of the relationships a ong race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression that are obscure(d), as well as provide ethodological guidance for a field that ost sociologists agree is vital but few agree on how to approach con cretely. This etaphor de ands that we acknowledge, in both theory and ethod, that there is no one, single relationship a ong sources of oppression. These rela tionships e erge in different and so eti es very si ilar ways because of how oppression is produced, what people and institutions do with it once they have it in their hands, what it feels like to e perience it, and how it then co es to shape us. nly by e a ining these very conte t-specific relationships will our studies of race,

class, and gender flourish. The i ediate foundation of this approach is the e pirical work of Leslie

Sal inger (2003), whose incisive study of factory workers in Me ico reveals how gender gets produced in distinctive ways in different a uiladoras, and how gender, thus produced, co es to shape the lives and perceptions of the participants in the production. I build on this dyna ic foundation to understand not ust gender but the relationships a ong race, class, and gender. Using the production, use, e perience, and digestion of sugar as a way of guiding this understanding oves us further away fro i agery that unwittingly akes these sources of oppression and privilege see static, and allows us to focus instead on the structural and individual forces at work in their continual and utual constitution.

BUIL ING T RAM RK

Studies of race, class, and gender,1 which have blosso ed over the last two decades, have focused on the ways these sources of oppression intersect or interlock within the real s of personal biography, co unity, and institution (Collins 1991). This

atri of do ination approach insists that we can only get an accurate analysis of any one for of oppression when we e a ine how it interacts with other sources (e.g., gendered and raciali ed for s of class) in various conte ts. As the field of race-class-gender studies has atured it has yielded rich e pirical analyses of issues such as child welfare (Roberts 2002), labor arkets (McCall 2001), political activis ( Brien and Ar ato 2001), the perils of high school (Bettie 2003), and igration and citi enship (Glenn 2002), a ong any others, and we are now at a o ent when it akes sense to articulate and build on what these studies, in aggregate, have

taught us about how to study oppression. ro the beginning, race-class-gender scholars have insisted that we analy e the

co ple structures and processes that ine uitably confer disadvantage and oppression on so e and privilege on others, which has allowed us to hear with uch greater clarity, in Anna Julia Cooper s (1892) ter , the voices of the oppressed. Beyond

he phrase race, class, and gender has co e to serve as a cu berso e shorthand that is so eti es eant to co unicate a focus on race and class and gender, specifically, and is so eti es eant to

denote the practice of si ultaneously taking into account ultiple sources of oppression, also including se uality, nation, ethnicity, age, body ability, religion, and others. I invoke the phrase to signal the place of y work within the arena of what has been established as race, class, and gender studies, and also to

acknowledge that y own studies to date have, in fact, focused ore on these three sources of oppression and privilege than others. In these pages I do not discuss se uality and religion as uch as race and

gender, so in that respect the phrase is accurate. hat I do not ean to assert by using the phrase, however, is that the theoretical principles I e plore here are only ger ane to these particular sources of

oppression.

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 155

this, though, there is little consensus a ong these scholars about what to listen for, where to look, and how to detect and articulate what is going on. hen scholars want to re ain true to the principles of race-class-gender theory, they so eti es start with categories: poor wo en of color, for instance. This allows us to focus on the lives, e periences, and perspectives of those who are arginali ed by race, class, and gender, but it also, in the anner detailed ost elo uently by ueer theorists (Ga son 1996 Green 2007), reifies the categories. e can, instead, e a ine specific cru es at which sources of oppression are related. As a starting point, I propose we ask how-and under what conditions, for what purposes the for s of race, class, and gender under consideration were produced, and what ties their production together. Institutions such as the law, education, and fa ilies, as well as local, conte t specific processes of interaction, are likely to be heavily i plicated in answers to this uestion. Second, once race, class, and gender have been produced, what do people

and institutions do with the Third, in keeping with fe inist scholars insistence on the i portance of wo en s standpoints in the world, we ay then ask how people e perience race, class, and gender. And finally, how do race, class, and gender affect our lives and who we are, or, our sub ectivities

or Michel oucault (1978), the sub ect is a site of power and, we ight add, a place where agendas can be furthered. The agendas of ultinational capital, for in stance, find their way into the conceptions of fe ininity and asculinity in the Me ican a uiladoras Leslie Sal inger studies in her 2003 book Genders in Production. ith nobody able to naturally eet corporations desire for alleable, trainable,

unde anding asse bly workers, Sal inger (2003:2) argues: Capital akes rather than finds such workers. The characteristics of the ideal worker, though, vary fro plant to plant, which enables Sal inger to analy e how gender is produced in each setting. ployers in one a uila constantly watch ga e on young wo en work ers, and reward se uali ed behavior fro the . The anagers speak through the language of evaluation: Their approval arks good worker and desirable wo an in a single gesture (2003:66). In another plant, anagers reward wo en who dis play decisiveness and leadership the way the other factory s workers wear lipstick and flirtatious s irks. In both plants, the wo en beco e, in part, the sub ects (ob ects) the anagers want, but they also resist the co plete for ation of their sub ectivity around their anagers wishes. o en in the second plant ay be assertive and welco e responsibilities that are otherwise unavailable to the , but any also face pressures to e hibit passivity and co pliance to husbands and boyfriends who work fro a different set of aterial realities than the plant anagers, who are focused ost on productivity. The workers at these plants are not si ply acted on by an

agers together, the workers, the anagers, the other people in their lives, and the conditions and conte ts under which they all work, produce these aspects of gen der, and they all co e to be shaped by the .

The evidence that gender (1) is produced, and then (2) co es to shape us, pro vides the start of a fra ework that allows us to understand not ust gender, but the relationships a ong sources of oppression and privilege like gender, class, and race. Like Sal inger, I argue it starts with production-every aspect of race, class, and gender has been and is produced under particular social, historical, political, cultural, and econo ic conditions. The production of race, class, and gender occurs as deliberately as the production of crops, in related ways that can be novel but tend to be institutionali ed through ti e-tested structural and discursive techni ues. e learn fro the history of sugar production that the techni ues available for pro

ducing one source of oppression ay be borrowed for the production of others,

156 S CI L GICAL T R

which reveals one of the funda ental ways these entities are related to each other in production.

Sal inger sets her work apart fro earlier scholars who assu ed that anagers in the syste of global production si ply use fe ininities and asculinities that are al ready there, rather than constituting those fe ininities and asculinities on the shop floor, as she argues. er successful isolation of the local practices and rhetorics (2003:27) within which this production occurs is a real theoretical acco plish ent. This focus on production rather than use, though, could obscure the i portance of how a product like gender does get used, especially within the conte ts of other en tities such as race and class that are both si ultaneously and separately produced. I argue that analy ing the use of race, class, and gender akes us attentive to di en sions of their relationships not apparent in their production. hen an ingredient like sugar is used, for instance, it is typically i ed together with other ingredients to produce so ething new so ething that would not e ist if that i ing had not oc curred. hat entity is being produced because of the co bination of race, class, and gender hat for of oppression and privilege what institution, event, reaction, decision is the result of their co bination And further, how do race, class, and gender influence and change each other when they are i ed together uivalent attention to both the production and use of not ust gender but gender and race and class within the conte ts of each other will reveal dyna ics of their relationships that a sole focus on the production of gender hides.

urther, Sal inger does not directly address the e perience of that which has been produced and used. The sugar analogy re inds us how i portant the ele ent of e perience is. To understand the co binatorial e perience of race, class, and gender, we ust rely on the individuals-si ilarly located groups of the and institutions that develop both uni ue and collective interpretations of their e periences. I argue that the e perience of a co bination of race, class, and gender, ust like the taste of a cookie, occurs in interaction with those who are engaged with it, which akes it i portant to listen to the ways they describe the flavor. And finally, we co e back to Sal inger s very clear understanding that what gets produced co es to shape constitute those involved. et Sal inger focuses on ust a single di ension of

oppression: gender. In this pro ect I seek to understand the process of the shaping of sub ectivities, and liken this process to the activities of digestion, in which particular co binations of race, class, and gender shape the social body in patterned ways. Just as the sugar fro a beer will do different things to the body when eaten with

peanuts than with pret els, the ways gender constitutes our sub ectivities are shaped and influenced by the presence of for s of race and class in the diet. By body I

ean to refer to both the sub ectivities of the people who interact with race, class, and gender, and the nor s and functioning of institutions.

Throughout y elucidation of this etaphor I rely pri arily on e a ples fro the data Sal inger presents to illustrate the theory s points, supple enting these with other brief e pirical illustrations. I ust stress that I do not atte pt to reanaly e Sal inger s data here not possible, in any case, via their secondary presentation. Instead I use illustrative e a ples fro Sal inger s work and other e pirical aterial in order to further e plicate the argu ent.

But first: hy sugar The etaphor I develop here is really about food about how foods are related to each other, and what that can tell us about the ways race,

class, gender, and other sources of oppression are related. In order to e a ine this with so e consistency, I wanted to sink y teeth into one particular food with all its co ple ities and nuances. Sugar has a long and well-docu ented global history, and

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 157

it is currently in very heavy use in A erican diets, which gives e a lot of e a ples to work with. In what follows I begin with production-the production of sugar to orient the reader to the production of race, class, and gender. I then ove on to baking, tasting, and finally, digesting it all of which reveal i portant aspects of the relationships a ong sources of oppression like race, class, and gender.

SUGAR: RAC , CLASS, AN G N R

Production

Sugar has to get fro the cane or beet into the little packets available at coffee shops. The planting, cultivating, and harvesting-that is, the production-of sugar is an ongoing, deliberate, institutionali ed enterprise. There was a first ti e, to be sure. So ebody, possibly so ewhere in New Guinea, perhaps about ten thousand years ago (Mint 1985:19), broke open a stalk of cane, or, aybe in Greece, dug past the chard-like leaves of the sugar beet plant to the root below, and was then able to ake use of the sweet substance he or she discovered. So ebody so ewhere also decided to take a naturally occurring plant like cane and deliberately grow it, in order to be able to use the resulting product on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. hat is i portant, for our purposes, is the deliberateness of the enterprise. alking by a plant, investigating it, and aking use of it constitute one kind of activity. Turning that plant into a crop is another. It is as if you can i agine so ebody, taken by the taste he e periences when he puts the broken cane to his outh, thinking, Now here s so ething And then he plans and e peri ents and flails and refines until he is able to capture that so ething in a deliberate process, rather than si ply hoping to co e upon a plant like that again in his travels across the ground. or sugar to be produced, people have to decide to ake it happen. or the to decide this, they have to believe there is so e use in what they are going to produce. or the to actually do it, they also have to have institutional support, in the for of capital, infrastructure, labor, and a arket. The production of race, class, and gender is no less deliberate, and re uires no less

hu an ingenuity. It is al ost i possible to track the first ti e these were produced, especially because they have taken such different for s in different historical-cultural conte ts throughout the world. Indeed, searching for the origins of their production assu es that we share a co on understanding of what race, class, and gender are, which, as scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) and yeronke y ewiu i (1997) have argued, is not si ply i possible but presu ptuous. The production of so ething I ay understand today to be race, for e a ple, ay, to so ebody else, be the production of religion. Ivan annaford (1996) argues that while there have al ways been conflicts between groups, such conflicts only took on racial di ensions once religious and political differences were churned through the ill of science and associated with so atic characteristics dee ed racial in the 19th century. thers, though, re ind us that conceptions of blackness and whiteness are even in fused in edieval uropean Christian te ts (La pert 200 ). hiteness appears as the nor ative arker of Christian identity (La pert 200 : 10) and the color of salvation ( olsinger 1998), as set apart fro the blackness the color of hell designating Musli s and Jews ( uoted in La pert (200 : 03) fro the translation of the 13th century opera Par ival, by olfra von schenbach).

hat is ore i portant than the origin and inception of any of these sources of oppression and privilege, for our purposes, is the ongoing nature of their production.

158 S CI L GICAL T R

owever and wherever this production started, it continues, in old and new for s, with old and new ai s, using old and new infrastructural supports. It takes a lot of work to produce race, class, and gender, which indicates a deliberateness to the enterprise. In e phasi ing its deliberateness, I a not arguing that the production of these structures of oppression and privilege is necessarily rational. Nor is it si ply a choice. The production process is also, i portantly, institutionali ed. As the pro duction of sugar has continued on since its inception, it has occurred without the need for constant, conscious decision aking. So e degree of decision aking is re uired along the way, perhaps when a stor hits and threatens the cane crop, say, or when sugar loses value on the world arket because of the introduction of other sweeteners. ecisions on issues like these are the very things that keep sugar s produc tion institutionali ed because they provide this living institution with the fle ibility needed to adapt to a changing environ ent. But underneath day-to-day decisions, the process of production, itself, has a force of its own.

Si ilarly, when we consider the production of race, class, and gender, we ust be attentive to both its deliberate and institutionali ed di ensions. Scholars of ine ual ity have uncovered how these production processes have typically (and deliberately) relied on grander ideological supports in the for s of religion and science to buttress their institutionali ation. ith their activities of coloni ation and nation building al ready underway in the late 18th century, uropeans and North A ericans bent on e ercising their new powers of enlighten ent easily transferred the scientific fra e work of classification fro plants and ani als onto hu an beings. Race ca e to be produced as a biological concept ( i and inant 199 ). Philosophers, in cluding Voltaire, egel, and Kant, and states en like Tho as Jefferson participated in the production of race with their pronounce ents of the relative superiority of white s nature, ideas, i agination, and reason. The production of these scientific ustifications of race provided the necessary ideological support for continued col oni ation and even slavery, solidifying both ngland s and, eventually, the United States world econo ic positions and the co on understanding of race as anal ogous to species.

The production of race re uired deliberate activity, even as it was beco ing, in a way that now see s inevitable, institutionali ed. e need not look back three cen

turies, however, to witness the production of oppression. ven on Sal inger s a uila floors, gender is being produced within the conte t of specific local practices and rhetorics. Shop anagers do not si ply fill their floors with ale and fe ale bod ies, e ploiting previously established fe inine traits and asculine traits, Sal inger argues (2003:31). Rather, anagers take what is available, such as a labor supply of rural wo en accusto ed to sub ission and docility, and turn it into so ething ore useful for their factories. Their ideal worker in one plant is one who takes charge and feels e powered to ake shop floor decisions, so they construct this worker out of the labor supply, and in doing so, actively produce fe ininity (i.e., gender).

hile the production of individual di ensions of oppression and privilege like race and gender has received careful, interdisciplinary study, the story of sugar also gives us rich aterial to help tease out the co plicated relationships these di ensions have with each other. ne such relationship, apparent in the production process, has to

do with how the techni ues of the production of sugar are related to the techni ues of the production of other foods, including bananas, rice, citrus fruits, sorghu , and olives. Sidney Mint (1985) argues that early sugar production was spread ost rapidly by Arabs who brought it fro Northern Africa to the Mediterranean in the 17th century and westward to Spain decades later. ocu entation of the Arab

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 159

agricultural revolution (Glick 1970, 197 Idrisi 2005 atson 197 ) reveals that, in Mint s (1985:26) words: verywhere, the Arabs showed a lively interest in irrigation, water use, and water conservation. They took with the , wherever they went, every watering device they encountered. Irrigation techni ues that had been in use for centuries in the Mediterranean for cereal crops and carob trees, for instance, were the basis for the technological innovations that enabled Arabs to introduce sugar cane into dry parts of the area, and on into Spain (Glick 197 ).

This history can help us understand one of the echanis s that relate race, class, and gender to each other, na ely, the techni ues used to produce the . Carob trees had long been irrigated using a particular techni ue, and then new people ca e along, saw how the techni ue worked, shaped it up a bit, and used it in new ways, including in the production of sugar cane. a ples of how the techni ues used to produce race or class or gender ine uality are borrowed to produce other kinds of ine uality abound. Nancy Leys Stepan ( 1986 1996:122), for e a ple, argues that the science that was used in the 19th century to rationali e racial ine uality was then used for the sa e purpose regarding gender ine uality.

Thus it was clai ed that wo en s low brain weights and deficient brain struc tures were analogous to those of lower races, and their inferior intellectualities e plained on this basis. o en, it was observed, shared with Negroes a nar row, childlike, and delicate skull, so different fro the ore robust and rounded heads characteristic of ales of superior races.

The relationship between race and gender here is evident in the co onalities and uses of one of the techni ues that produce the : science. This techni ue in particular, along with any others, can be used to produce any for s of ine uality, not li ited to race and gender, ust as the sa e borrowed and enhanced irrigation techni ues allowed far ers to grow crops such as sugar in addition to carob, and then oranges and olives in addition to sugar (Glick 197 Idrisi 2005). or e a ple, efforts to ap a gay gene with science have followed an analogous path.

The contributions the story of sugar akes to our understanding of the produc tion of race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression are that it is deliberate, ongoing, and institutionali ed, and the techni ues of production ay be transfer able. hy, though, do race, class, and gender get produced They certainly would not co e into being if they were not going to be used. I discuss the use of race, class, and gender in the ne t section.

Baking

Ji odge: And I have a little trick here when I cook sugar and water. And that s first to easure everything and stir it into this bowl so that I dissolve the sugar crystals. e re starting with two-thirds of a cup of water. And then I going to add a cup and a half of sugar. Julia Child: ou re very careful with your easure ents, I noticed. J : Very i portant in baking. JC: Very i portant. J : And the last ingredient before we stir is the light corn syrup.

And we need ust a uarter of a cup. JC: hy do we need that J : This helps to prevent the sugar fro crystalli ing while we re cooking that. JC: h, because a lot of people have trouble with that.

160 S CI L GICAL T R

Chef Ji odge preparing Chocolate udge rosting with Master Chef Julia Child

A thousand years ago, sugar was not available for everyday use around the world. Its production first developed on a large scale in the Mediterranean, but it was hun dreds of years before wealthy uropean households would begin to use it sparingly as a spice for eats, fish, and vegetables physicians would use it edicinally and the nobility would co ission elaborate decorations to be ade fro it (Mint 1985). Sugar s substantial use as a food (Mint 1985:78, e phasis in original) was only established in urope in the late 1700s, and in the United States in the id 1800s, after production had ceased in the Mediterranean but spread via coloni ation into the Caribbean and Latin A erica. Today, the U.S. epart ent of Agriculture esti ates that the average adult A erican currently consu es over 6 pounds of refined

sugar e uivalent to the a ount in about 5,000 sugar cookies-each year ( aley et al. 2005).2 About three-fourths of this sugar co es in products prepared co er cially such as cereal, pastries, candy, and fruit drinks. The rest is prepared in-ho e as a co ponent in cooking and baking, which are the activities on which I focus here.

To understand the use of sugar as an ingredient in baking, i agine so ebody preparing to ake sugar cookies. This could begin with a trip to a food arket, where the baker selects ite s off the shelves within the constraints of the recipe for what she wants to ake. She ay grab a sack of sugar, a pound of butter, and a carton of eggs, which she will use along with the flour she bought on a previous

trip and the vanilla e tract she borrowed onths ago fro her neighbor. hen she gets to her kitchen, the baker unites these ingredients in very specific and prescribed ways-she has to beat the sugar and butter together first, until they are inseparable and have a whipped te ture. Then she adds the eggs, one by one, aking the i ture even lighter and fluffier. The recipe instructs her to stir the flour in gradually, but she du ps it all in at once like she usually does and stirs slowly at first to keep fro aking a ess. She could have added the drops of vanilla e tract at al ost any

stage, but forgets until the end. hat is in the baker s bowl now is not a separate section of sugar, one of flour, and one of eggs, but a dough a cohesive ass. By i ing all these ingredients together and baking the , she akes cookies she uses the ingredients in a way that results in the construction of a different for of food.

Race, class, and gender often inter ingle like the sugar, eggs, and flour in this baker s bowl. The sugar cookies are her creation, but they result fro her following the instructions of a recipe-a script3 that she ay have enacted so any ti es it feels like second nature to her. She knows to start with the sugar and the butter, and has a feel for what the i ture s te ture should be. Likening these to race, class, and

gender, we ay think about a particular i ture in Sal inger s Partici e shop. Most of the anage ent staff is ade up of young en ost white A erican fro the co pany s U.S. head uarters, and a few Me ican who typically started their careers in Ciudad Ju are and oved up the ranks. The Me ican en are influenced and i peded by the race-class-gender scripts white A ericans apply to the , as

Sal inger (2003:77) e plains:

2This does not include consu ption of other sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup or honey. Total sweetener consu ption in the United States is around 100 pounds per person per year ( aley et al.

2005). 3Thanks to Lisa Torres for pointing e to this parallel.

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 161

isparaging co ents about Me ican anagers are routine a ong their North A erican superiors and counterparts. In Sal inger s interviews with transnational anagers throughout the industry, Me ican anagers and an agerial prospects are described to e without apology, itigation, or even circu spection-as variously unsophisticated, underdeveloped, authoritar ian, infle ible, acho, and se ually predatory.

Part of the way these anagers deal with such i ages of the , since they have to prove how odern they are to their white A erican superiors, is to apply race-class-gender scripts to their own workforces, ade up pri arily of Me ican peasant wo en. The anagers de onstrate willingness to further A erican

goals by helping workers in their plant overco e the local custo s that restrict their opportunities, yet they perceive resistance when they try to place wo en in supervisory positions.

Supervisors rarely suggest wo en workers for coordinator obs, but co plain at length that no atter how uch they encourage their wo en workers to be coordinators, They won t ake the leap. Jesfus (a supervisor) says that he thinks half the supervisors should be wo en, but unfortunately, la cultura e icana .. . e looks pained. (Sal inger 2003:97)

This script, this recipe for anaging the Me ican workforce, instructs the an agers actions and the beliefs that for the basis for those actions. The recipe tells the anagers how to i Me ican culture with the capitalist shop floor, and helps the anticipate the te ture of the resulting i ture as a enable to partic ular for s of both productivity and e ploitation. The anagers add the eggs of autono y-allowing/re uiring the wo en to feel responsible for their tea s pro ductive output-bit by bit, in each work shift, as they pit tea s against each other and publici e both the best and the worst each day. The dough is now at its lightest, and they strengthen it with a heaping helping of flour in the for of unise unifor s that cover all the workers fro head to toe. The result of these baking activities-the dough-is a fairly cohesive ass of race,

class, and gender in and around a a uiladora. This dough re uired ingredients like ideologies about Me ican peasant wo en that have been as painstakingly and elaborately produced as sugar in the fields of Guyana. Sugar cookies do not result fro the si ple addition of a separate section of butter with a separate section of sugar, but are the result of what happens when sugar and butter eet and transfor each other. In one respect, this eans we are focusing on the product of their co bination: the cookie. ne of the bedrock pre ises of race-class-gender theory is that di ensions of race, class, and gender depend on each other (Collins 1991), but it is unclear e actly what they depend on each other for. In the production phase, they ay depend on each other for their e istence, in an indirect way. That is, a particular techni ue that helps produce a di ension of class (like irrigation in a sugar field) ay, in another conte t, be used to produce a di ension of gender. But in the baking phase, di ensions of race, class, and gender do not si ply depend on each other for their e istence. Rather, sugar depends on butter and flour for the new

Sugar and butter ay have already et any ti es in their production (e.g., they ay be produced for si ilar reasons, using related techni ues, for connected reasons), and they eet again in this baking stage.

162 S CI L GICAL T R

entity they create together that entity would not e ist if not for their co bination. A chef interviewed for Rick olphi n s book oodscapes (200 ), e phasi es that his sole interest is

in what happens between the ingredients . . . on how, within the confronta tion, one ele ent is related to the other. e is not interested in the different ingredients the selves, but rather in what happens between the when they are confronted with one another. Between the Port wine ripened in oak barrels, and the salty bitterness of an aged cheese between the soft te tures of Japanese tofu and the orange that per eates it with its sweet freshness. ( olphi n 200 :97)

olphi n argues that this helps us to think fro the space between ... They teach us to think not in ter s of the ualities to be found within each ele ent, but in how ualities are created between the ele ents (200 :97). So ething new e erges because these particular ele ents have co e together, and the new entity ay be a once-in-a-lifeti e creation, or an institution that we would be surprised not to find in the cookie ar. hen they are being used, race, class, and gender depend on each other for the for s (events, situations, institutions, actions, feelings, sub ectivities, bodies, structures) of oppression and privilege they produce because of their co ing together.

In another i portant respect, though, these baking activities reveal the ways butter changes sugar-what happens to the structure of sugar when it co es in contact with roo -te perature butter. Sugar is ade up of active olecules, and when those olecules get cold and slow down, they oin together in a precise for al pattern

called a crystal (Corriher 1997: 22). Crystals can be big, such as those in rock candy, or s all, in crea y fudge frosting, and their si e depends on the a ount and type of interference the baker introduces. Corn syrup, like that used by Ji odge and Julia Child, interferes with sugar s crystalli ation, so when sugar dissolves in heated water and co es in contact with the corn syrup, that corn syrup affects the structure of the sugar-it keeps the crystals very fine. at (butter) has a si ilar effect on sugar s process of crystalli ation, since it coats tiny sugar crystals and keeps the fro co ing together to for big crystals. The ingredients affect each other. Butter and sugar co e together in so e ways that are partially prescribed, in the for of scripts, and also original to the baker, who has both choices to ake about how to bring things together and constraints on how she is able to do so. And when these ingredients co e together, they transfor each other. No ingredient in the resultant cookie has the sa e s ell, the sa e te ture, the sa e look or feel as it did before it went into the bowl. This illustrates very nicely the race-class-gender theory pre ise of utual constitution, which eans, in the words of velyn Nakano Glenn, that each develops in the conte t of the other (1992:33). Sugar s structure is changed

by the conte t of butter. Ideologies about Me ican wo en change and develop when

they co e in contact with work tea s ai ed at increasing capitalist production. These ingredients, like sugar and butter, change each other.

The bringing together of sugar with other ingredients in a baker s bowl is, in part, a atter of the structural availability, i position, and institutionali ation of the in

gredients. But the baker also has choices. She can use vanilla e tract or al ond whole wheat or white flour. The baker interacts with various di ensions of race, class, and gender in so e knowing and so e unknowing ways, and without her ac tions, decisions, and o ents of knowledge and ignorance about the structural forces that shape her opportunities to use particular ingredients, the specific dough the

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 163

particular co bination of race, class, and gender would not e erge. The baker her self has to be there buying or growing ingredients, easuring and rolling, turning on the oven, and taking the cookies out when she has udged the to be done. Managers at Partici e had to assess both local and international work processes, and buy into the strategies of work tea s and gender de-differentiation. Because the baker is not alone in her social location, and because any of the sa e categories, processes, and other di ensions that ake up race, class, and gender e ist for her or anybody else to grab onto, it is likely that others would produce si ilar prod ucts. In fact, lots of people bake sugar cookies. But this baker, in concert with all of those people, institutions, and forces that have ade these particular ingredients both available to her and so eti es uninvited influences on her, produce this co bination of race, class, and gender. The dough is not si ply there, as an aspect of workers or anagers bodies or identities. Rather, it gets processed in everyday activities, in anagers e pectations of workforces, in the postures one ethnic group of anagers

takes over another, in choices about unifor s and work organi ation, and in the rewards or lack of rewards individuals receive for enacting scripts applied to people in their structural locations. This highlights how the eanings and e pressions of race, class, and gender are

locali ed. ach batch of cookies is prepared in one specific place, ti e, and set of circu stances. There is no collective cookie baking across the world every week at an appointed hour. Race, class, and gender do have te poral consistency, but sociologists ust beco e uch ore adept at articulating how their consistent aspects co e

together with particulari ed aspects, and this etaphor ay help. Analysts ust specify the conditions under which a particular dough was prepared: here did the baker get the ingredients ho helped her bake id she beat the eggs by hand or use an electric i er Is this a recipe she has ade before The conte t atters because, as the principle of utual constitution reveals, the sa e ingredient ay generate different flavors under different conditions.

It certainly atters who does the baking. hen so eone can bake cookies for herself, she ay have uch ore control over which ingredients she will use and which she will avoid. f course, so e of the ingredients she uses ay actually have been baked or prepared elsewhere, by others, so she has to create her own food using those prepared foods. hen we eat ite s that are either entirely prepared by others, or ade fro ingredients that were co pletely prepared and processed in real s outside our own kitchens, we are uch ore sub ect to race-class-gender di ensions outside our own control. This really speaks to the structuring aspects of race, class, and gender. It is very hard to avoid using those preprocessed in gredients when we bake, and it is hard for social-structural reasons, akin to not being able to aintain one s own garden and grind one s own spices. This is so difficult that ost people (in the United States) do not even think about it on a daily basis they si ply get the ingredients they need at the arket or fro their pantry and prepare eals fro the , regardless of how, where, or for what reasons they have been prepared. ast-food conglo erates and co ercial cookie co pa nies typically use ingredients that fit within their production processes, and that they have had success with-in order (of course) to ake a profit rather than ingredi ents that are in any way good for consu ers (unless providing healthy foods is one of their strategic, profit-generating niches). Just as people so eti es en oy con for ing to race-class-gender stereotypes, so e people will prefer nten ann s over ho e ade. It is to this en oy ent or lack thereof the e perience of flavor-that I now turn.

16 S CI L GICAL T R

perience (Tasting)

T he high fat it akes us feel fuller faster, Capaldi says. And pairing fat and sweet is the agic co bination, she says. Take a brownie-a tasty treat that is full of sugar and fat. Since sugar akes you like whatever you re eating it with, when you eat a brownie, you re teaching yourself to like fat, she says. And

sugar asks the taste of fat, so you don t reali e what you re eating. Moreover, fat akes sugar taste better because it produces so ething called outh feel, she says. ro a 2001 article in the University at Buffalo Reporter by Sue uetcher on the work of psychologist li abeth . Capaldi

Sugar is one thing its sweet flavor is another. Sugar takes on a variety of eanings as it is produced on plantations (e.g., ob source, distributor of pain, i petus for colonialis ) and as it is used in kitchens or factories (e.g., cheap staple, readily available co odity). These eanings are altered again when a person puts a cookie in his outh and the sugar-in its transfor ed state-gets dispersed on his taste buds. Before a cookie hits the tongue, as it sits in the cookie ar, it ight atter for another reason (e.g., it ight attract ants to the kitchen), but it is flavor only once so ebody e periences it.S It can easily be argued that the people and institutions that produce sugar and the people and institutions active in using sugar e perience sugar in those activities. Poets have described sugar s flavor as bitter for those who have sacrificed the days of their lives and the skin of their ar s to produce it. But when sugar is chewed up in so ebody s outh, the e perience is taste. The person on whose tongue the cookie rests participates with the people and institutions that produced and prepared the ingredients to construct its flavor. ach of these parties is present, whether active or not, in the construction of the flavor, and they all depend on each other for the construction.

Because the cookie s flavor is constructed as it collides with the tongue, the pos sibility e ists that each tongue ay e perience it differently. Like sugar, butter, eggs, and flour, which do not si ply interlock or intersect, co binations of race, class, and gender inter ingle like flavors in our ouths. e taste the . e e peri ence the . Race, class, and gender s eanings transfor when they co e in contact with those who taste the , who enact the , who need the , who rely on the , who hate the , who are oppressed by the , who get advantages fro the , who do not reali e they are there, who do the , who use the . Undoubtedly, this eans these co binations end up with any different eanings.

The differential e perience of race, class, and gender is what necessitates, in the words of Anna Julia Cooper, that each voice be heard, that truth fro each stand

point be presented (1892:11, e phasis in original). Cooper wanted a cacophony of voices to be able to testify about how they each e perience the structural advantages, disadvantages, and a biguities of race, class, and gender, and to articulate how those

5This e perience ay originate in the interpretive essages sent between the cells of taste buds and the brain, but the e perience of flavor can also occur in people s e ories and e pectations. So eone

who anticipates flavor and whose outh waters as part of that anticipation is clearly e periencing flavor.

Likewise, so ebody who regrets what they have ust tasted, feels a bivalence about it, is dissatisfied with

it, or has a fond e ory of it is also e periencing the flavor, albeit at a ti e and probably space re oved fro the cookie-to-taste bud interaction. hile I hope to e plore each of these types of e perience, in this article I li it y discussion to the e perience of the physical cookie in the outh. ( or an e cellent

analysis of i aginary food, see d onds 200 .)

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 165

e periences have shaped their perspectives. hile the voices of the participants in Sal inger s a uiladora study are not terribly loud, we gain so e sense of how indi vidual wo en workers e perience their hyper-se uali ation at the Panopti e plant ( The other girls don t like e, I get on their nerves (2003:71)), and the individual pressures of tea work at Partici e ( I help you so that you don t fall behind, but you have to help e too (2003:86)). ach of these wo en has a perspective on how she is treated at work that has been shaped by the conte ts within which she e periences it.

Cooper, though, re inds us that individuals who are si ilarly grouped will e peri ence the world in so e si ilar ways. The white A erican en anagers in Genders, for instance, reveal a shared understanding of their position relative to Me ican en anagers. Cooper focuses on black wo en who, she says, have been particularly arginali ed by whites in the United States, absent fro literature and account

ings of productivity but ade uite visible in statistics on illiteracy and cri inality, for instance (1892:268-69). Because treat ent like this shapes a group s structural location, e bers of that group ay share collective interpretations of life-a col lective e perience of flavor. A people can construct and interpret inter ingling flavors in distinctive, collective ways. People who eat with each other within the structures of race, class, and gender talk to each other about what they eat and see the looks on each other s faces as they chew each bite, or in other words, they con struct their e periences of race, class, and gender together. This is not si ply about what tastes good and what tastes bad, although that is certainly a co ponent of it. Rather, it is about participating in the interpretation of the e perience of co bina tions of race, class, and gender that have been produced, prepared, and presented for consu ption.

e can understand, through the story of sugar, that ust as a people can con struct flavor, a people s tastes can change. In nglish cookbooks beginning in the 1 th century, for e a ple, recipes that use sugar as a spice for eat and fish abound, which is to say, any nglish people liked sugar-spiced eat. By the 19th century, the co bination see ed revolting: veryone is aware ... that nothing is ore sick ening than an oyster sprinkled with sugar. et we have ore than one old receipt reco ending such co bination ( a litt 1886, uoted in Mint 1985:85). Groups collectively e perience life, including the changes that occur to what they had origi nally e perienced together. That such preferences can change over ti e and even at a very rapid rate see s certain (Mint 1985:86).

Groups tastes ay change as rituals evolve and as the eanings associated with particular ingredients and co binations transfor .

rinking tea, eating bread s eared with treacle or porridge sweetened with it, baking sweet cakes and breads were all acts that would gradually be assi ilated into the calendar of work, recreation, rest, and prayer-into the whole of daily life, in su -as well as into the cycle of special events such as births, baptis s, arriages, and funerals. In any culture, these processes of assi ilation are also

ones of appropriation: the culture s way of aking new and unusual things part of itself. (Mint 1985:120-21)

Groups tastes ay also change in part for structural reasons, such as the availability of different products and ingredients. Before sugar beca e widely available, nobody clai ed to have a sweet tooth. Che ists, psychologists, and chefs describe our co on interpretation of tastes as a tetrahedron-an organi ed series of categorical

166 S CI L GICAL T R

u tapositions. et s weet could only be a counter taste to salt/bitter/sour when there was a plentiful enough source of sweetness to ake this possible (1985:17). The categories associated with race, class, and gender ay see as natural as the scie ntifically defined activities of our taste buds, but the structural availability of for s of race, class, and gender influence our e periences and the eanings we construct.

The focus on individual and group taste e periences clearly reveals that people are active and necessary for the construction of the race-class-gender co binations that influence their lives. In addition, institutions e perience race-class-gender. The law, for instance, is seated at the table ust to the side of Cooper s group of black wo en, and slightly behind the individual who unches on a cookie as a idnight snack. This institution, like all others, e periences and interprets the co binations of race, class, and gender that co e its way. They endure attacks on grounds otivated by race, class, and gender they are for ed on the un uestioned privileges accorded on the basis of race, class, and gender they shift and change because of the ongoing dyna ics of race, class, and gender. It is not difficult to i agine an individual tasting sugar, but it is vital to incorporate the i age of living, breathing institutions as consu ers of race, class, and gender, as well.

hether an analysis focuses on how an individual, a si ilarly located group of

individuals, or an institution e periences flavor, it ust delineate how particular in gredients function within the tasting e perience. oes sugar generate the sa e kind of flavor in cookies as it does in oysters This is another way of asking how the

conte t, and the particular dyna ics of the co binations of race, class, and gender, atter at particular points. A co parison of any group of recipes reveals that sugar often serves the function

of sweetening a particular dish, but this is not its sole possible function. Sugar as a spice or condi ent alters the flavor of food as does any other spice saffron,

say, or sage, or nut eg-but without clearly sweetening it (Mint 1985:79). In one particular recipe, sugar ay atter less than it does in other recipes, in ways that do not necessarily correspond with uantity. That is, three cups of sugar in a cookie

recipe are obviously present to produce a sweet flavor, but a sprinkle of sugar in

the cooking of a pork chop ay be present to assist with car eli ation, or to help ake the outside te ture of the chop crunchy. In Mint s analysis of cookbooks

he finds that when sugar was first introduced into the nglish diet, it was rarely used as a sweetener: Sugar and other spices were co bined in dishes that tasted neither e clusively nor preponderantly sweet (1985:85). There is variability in the i portance of any ingredient in different inter inglings, which is to say that an aspect of gender or of race or class ight be there, attering less than it does at other ti es. Co petition that A erican anagers feel with Me ican anagers, which has real effects for all of their career prospects, ay atter not a whit when

added to the recipe of harass ent they collectively bake for e ploited wo en factory workers.

Conte t has a great deal to do with flavor s construction. ow sugar tastes is influenced by the flavors people did or did not e perience i ediately before that flavor, the associations people have with the flavor, the conditions under which they taste it-even whether they engaged in e ercise i ediately before tasting it (Raloff 200 ). This is one of the reasons why e a inations of race-class-gender on the local

level atter so uch. Race, class, and gender can ean a ultitude of things nation

ally and internationally, but their co binations are also given eaning locally on

tongues.

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 167

hen an ingredient like sugar inter ingles with other ingredients, it transfor s the and is transfor ed by the , illustrating the principle of utual constitution. The ingredients affect each other s structures butter akes sugar crystalli e in a particular way. In e perience, sugar akes fat taste a particular way, and fat akes sugar taste a particular way. The e perience of oppression is si ilar: a dyna ic of class akes people and institutions e perience gender in a particular way, for instance. ne s oker na ed Tara in Julie Bettie s (2003) study of young wo en in a California high school, for instance, got in trouble with her dad when two other girls told the school nurse that Tara was regularly throwing up after eating. S okers were white students fro low-inco e fa ilies and they attended their school al ost invisibly, due both to the self-centering obliviousness of the iddle-class students and to their own efforts to go unnoticed. After the school nurse called hi Tara s father told her she was stupid, ost likely because her actions called attention to her fa ily, which unnerved her father who was on probation for dealing drugs. The class dyna ics of both her fa ily and her school, then, influenced how she e perienced gender: hile eating disorders appear to be so ething girls universally, and unfortunately, share as girls, the e periences of the are always shaped in classed and raciali ed ways (Bettie 2003:113).

inally, it is also i portant to e a ine how uch currency an inter ingling flavor has-whether it is a forgettable one-ti e creation or it co es to be part of the weekly eal rotation, or in other words, an institution. So e co binations of race, class,

and gender see very co on, while others startle us. or the ost part I have been describing flavors that any people would describe as good, like sugar cookies, but flavors can also be wretched. Race, class, and gender, too, ay co e together in uni ue ways- good or bad that cannot be found again, or they ay be produced, baked, and then tasted in co binations that beco e institutionali ed and part of people s everyday life e periences. e ay want to or have to taste particular co binations of race, class, and gender, whether they are good for us or not. The uestion of what these co binations do to us once we have tasted the is the sub ect

of the ne t section.

igestion

hen you first consu e any sort of refined sugars or refined carbohydrates (like white flour), the digestion process begins i ediately in fact, it begins even before you swallow the foods. There are digestive en y es in your saliva that go to work on these sugars and start converting the into blood sugar, even before they hit your sto ach. nce they re in your sto ach, they are i ed with acidic digestive uices and physically churned through sto ach uscle contractions so that it creates a li uid paste. This li uid, sugary paste is then very easily absorbed through the intestinal walls, causing a rapid spike in blood sugar levels.

So your blood sugar, which ight have been around 80 or 90 before you drank the soft drink or ate that candy bar, now suddenly starts spiking up to 150 or 200, or perhaps even higher. This creates an e ergency situation in your body. igh blood sugar is very dangerous for hu an beings. If it is allowed to continue, it will cause sy pto s that are ore classically known as diabetic neuropathy, which eans the nerves that feed various li bs in your body (feet, ostly) start to die. iabetics who aintain high blood sugar over a long period

168 S CI L GICAL T R

of ti e often have to have their feet a putated because the nerves in their feet are wasting away. http://www.newstarget.co /002038.ht l

News Target A: hat s the real story about sugar, does it turn into body fat, how does it affect health Posted Sunday, ctober 2 , 200 by Mike Ada s

ou are what you eat. ood that has been produced, prepared, and tasted has effects on the body that consu es it. hen sugar, butter, and flour inter ingle in so eone s outh and she tastes and eats the , they beco e her they constitute her they create and feed what is in her cells and her blood. e eat food every day, and our bodies are forever influenced by what has been ade possible and what has beco e restricted because of these food co binations. In the sa e way, we snack on the inter ingling flavors of race, class, and gender fro o ent to o ent, all day, each day. hether so eone eats a cookie lovingly baked by her father or an apple pie in a bo fro Mc onald s, she takes in the co binations of race, class, and gender that she and others have produced, prepared, and e perienced, and those co binations shape who she is.

ere, at the stage of digestion or, in ore conventional sociological ter s, internal i ation and structuration, the do inant nor s and structures of society get in us, with our participation, and beco e us. hat we beco e as sub ects, in oucault s ter s, depends on the products that are available for our consu ption and digestion. e participate in the production and preparation of those products to so e degree,

but we largely use and adapt what is already there. e beco e who we are on the basis of the foods that nourish and har us. As Judith Butler e plains:

part of what it eans to be a sub ect is to be born into a world in which nor s are already acting on you fro the very beginning . . . you re given a na e, you re ordered in that particular way you re assigned a gender, and very often a race you re inculcated uite uickly into a na e and therefore a lineage ... And there are a set of fantasies that are i ediately i posed: what this will be if it is a boy, what it will be if it is a girl, what it will be, how it will relate to the fa ily, how it will or will not be the sa e as others. ( 2000 200 :3 1)

These are the ingredients, which do not enter one s body without her sensation (of e perience) at the least, and possibly also her preparatory and production work. To so e degree, digestion happens to us, but at the sa e ti e, it is us-we are not alive if we are not digesting, not constantly beco ing sub ects.

hich particular foods are co bined is e tre ely i portant in digestion. More iron, for e a ple, is digested if it is eaten with acidic foods like citrus fruits, which have vita in C, while cows ilk inhibits the absorption of iron. Conversely, so e different foods, when digested, can have any of the sa e effects on the body. The white flour and the sugar in the cookies are both partially broken down into glucose in the body, which, if digested in the appropriate uantities, serves the ulti ate purpose of providing energy to cells. If ore glucose is produced than the body needs, it is converted into fat. These digestive processes provide so any interesting points of analysis for the relationships a ong di ensions of race, class, and gender. An ele ent of class, for e a ple, ay have ore effect if it is digested with one ele ent of race than it would be if it were digested with a different ele ent of race.

r, different ele ents of race, class, and gender ay have the sa e effect on people s lives.

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 169

It is so ewhat unfortunate that this aspect of the etaphor describes, in part, a process found in nature: the biological process of cell generation and odification based on the content of the nutrients present in the food we eat. A depiction of race, class, and gender s relationships should have little in co on with natural, biological processes, given the decidedly unnatural character of these structures of oppression. espite that fault, though, it does capture the back-and-forth process Sal inger describes: we produce things (collectively and individually), and those things co e to ake up who we are. e produce co binations of race, class, and gender, and I e phasi e how we also use and e perience those co binations, which in turn shape us as we digest the . The cell odification in the etaphor depicts how race, class, and gender shape how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us (i.e., our sub ecthood), and therefore what opportunities we have. Managers at Panopti e contribute to the production and preparation of gender through their e pectations of what clothes wo en workers should wear, how they should wear akeup, and how they should behave. The workers then begin to understand the selves through the logic of this product-they confor to and participate in this raciali ed, class-specific, and very gendered set of e pectations, and even encourage newly hired workers to do the sa e. In this process of interpellation, the workers take in the product they participate in creating, and it beco es who they are. Their ideas about the selves and their behaviors then co e to confor to the negotiated and agreed upon ter s of their sub ecthood: rather than feeling like good workers because they are assertive or prioriti e their tasks well, they co e to believe they are good workers because they are rewarded for wearing short skirts and flirting with the en anagers.

Race, class, and gender not only shape each other, as discussed in the use and e perience sections, but they also shape people. Race, class, and gender are e tre ely i portant because they constitute each other, they constitute the institutions and uni ue for s that result fro their co bination, and they also constitute people. This etaphor allows us to analy e how the social products we know as race, class, and gender beco e us, shape us, constitute us.

ISCUSSI N AN IR CTI NS

Sugar is a co ple substance. It is generated fro a variety of sources. It takes an a a ing array of for s. It has innu erable uses. And it affects our bodies and institutions in both debilitating and sustaining ways. Just as co ple is every inute di ension of race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression and privilege.

Clifford Geert (1983) observed that ost theori ing arises fro etaphor, since ordinary situations help us understand the co plicated features of social relation ships. Metaphors are particularly useful if they yield new insights, and while the i agery of race, class, and gender as intersecting and interlocking has been use ful to a point, I argue here that conceptuali ing the di ensions of these structures as inter ingling foods that get produced, used, e perienced, and digested enhances our theoretical understanding of their relationships. It has uncovered at least a nu ber of theoretical di ensions of the relationships a ong race, class, and gender that deserve further e pirical elaboration.

irst, one of the pri ary ways race, class, and gender are related to each other is in the techni ues used to produce the . Like irrigation on sugar fields, the tech ni ues used to produce one di ension of oppression (e.g., science) can be transferred to other real s to produce other di ensions. Second, in preparation activities, race, class, and gender co e together like ingredients in a baker s bowl, aking so ething

170 S CI L GICAL T R

new that is ore than the su of parts, and also influencing the structures of the parts the selves. A third theoretical point centers on why one particular set of ingre dients, rather than others, co e together in that bowl, and reveals the i portance of the structural relationships between the de and for one ingredient and the availabil ity of another. In ter s of e perience, a fourth theoretical contribution this etaphor e phasi es is that the eanings of race, class, and gender are constructed, in part, in interaction with the people who e perience the . lavor only really beco es flavor when a food hits the tongue. As in the baking stage, ingredients influence each other when co bined, but in this tasting stage it is the e perience of those co binations that is highlighted. ifth, in the digestion of sugar, the functions of race, class, and gender are apparent different co binations affect us in different ways.

Backing up fro the four stages and considering the together, two additional theoretical contributions beco e clear as well. irst, ust as sugar eans so ething different fro stage to stage, the eanings of race, class, gender, and other sources of oppression change all the ti e, fro their production to their use, e perience, and digestion. In addition, their eanings at any one stage influence eanings and the e istence of possibilities of eanings at other stages. Never do gender or race or class ean so ething that is per anently fi ed but, rather, they each take on eanings

that are interdependent and utually constitutive. And finally, fro production to digestion, race, class, and gender take on an a a ing variety of for s, fro stalks of cane to brown and then white crystals, to cookies, to nutrients.

This account ay see too linear, as though there is a o ent in ti e when race, class, and gender are produced, and another in which they are prepared, and so on. In reality, race, class, and gender inter ingle in essy ways that ight go back and forth between, for instance, e perience and use. nce so e aspects of race, class, and

gender have been produced, people do a lot of things to the . They co bine the in uni ue and institutionali ed ways. People taste the and spit the out. They try new co binations and then go back to get different ingredients. It is not a si ple four-step kind of process.

The etaphor reveals that it is i portant to take into account all these aspects of how race, class, and gender co e together, and ore. It is not eant to be e haustive. So eone ay want to include uch ore about the distribution process in his investigation of race, class, and gender. So e ay want ore e phasis on the eli ination of body waste. It is y hope that this etaphor will spark these kinds of elaborations, so we can find out ore about which of the cru es at which race, class, and gender eet tend to ost influence the others (e.g., once race, class, and gender are produced, is there uch we can really do to influence how people will e perience the ). And, of course, it is only one etaphor. ostess Twinkies, challah bread, and sausages ay have a lot of si ilarities in how they are produced, used, e perienced, and digested, but y guess is that we will learn a great deal by e ploring the dissi ilarities in analogical production processes as well.

I hope that the pursuit of this etaphor has added two ingredients to Leslie

Sal inger s analysis: first, that we attend to the relationships a ong disparate sources

of privilege or oppression and second, that we e plore the co ponents of use and

e perience. Sal inger e pertly pushes us to understand the local ways gender is pro duced and conse uently shapes us, but we are left to wonder how ele ents like

la cultura Me icana are used, in global and institutional as well as interactional

ways. And while Sal inger docu ents workers and anagers participation in the

processes of production, their e periences are not an e plicit part of her theoreti cal fra ework. I agining the e perience of race, class, and gender as the tasting of

A N CULINAR M TAP R R RAC -CLASS-G N R STU I S 171

food de onstrates how i portant it is, and, in the vein of fe inist work over the last half-century, de ands that we ake an institutional place for e perience in our theories.

hat I believe the culinary analysis adds to the study of race, class, and gender is a guiding fra ework a way to investigate the social world that will open up our understandings of how, where, in what ways, and under what circu stances race, class, gender, and other dyna ics of oppression are related in any given product or process. This fra ework does not allow scholars to si ply e cavate de ographic infor ation about the people involved in a social activity, and speak convincingly about race, class, and gender in that activity. It de ands that scholars ground their work historically in the production of the dyna ics of oppression. It necessitates a focus on the local and institutional ways that people actually i race, class, and gender. It institutionali es a place for e perience in the analysis, and it re uires us to think about i plications. It is y hope that scholars will apply this etaphor to their e pirical work for a dual purpose: both to reveal aspects of their data that ay have otherwise gone hidden, and to provide further elaboration of the nuances

of this etaphor to help us characteri e and i agine and taste-the relationships a ong structures of oppression like race, class, and gender.

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