Queering as Process

Abstract

This article is a composite narrative case study exploring my experience of facilitating workshops around food and eating with participants who have a conflicted relationship with food or are confused by nutrition messages. Many of the workshops have been with queer, especially trans and gender-expansive, participants. I use a Freirean, interactive, story-based teaching style that I call ‘kitchen table pedagogy’.   An aim is to investigate any role that thinking beyond the binary - or queering as process - may have in helping us relate to food and our bodies in new ways that are more conducive to personal flourishing as entangled with collective liberation and hence climate justice. I illustrate how a liberatory pedagogy and queer praxis address the root of oppression by considering the provocation “How does public health nutrition perpetuate a racist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchal world view as normal, desirable, inevitable and how can queer(ing) food narratives interrupt this drive and replace it with something liberatory and life-affirming?”