power imbalances

Sally Rooney on her writing:

In a 2017 interview in The Irish Times, Rooney describes wanting to use her fiction to think about “questions that I feel we haven’t necessarily got the theory to deal with yet,” such as the limitations of feminism when addressing power imbalances in our personal lives. Her novels suggest that she is thinking broadly about the disjuncture between our politics and our daily experiences. Understanding the inequity of our “precise historical moment,” much like understanding the causes of our pain, is not the same as knowing how to stop it. Indeed, it can make our experience even more distressingly acute.

via LARB

*

The politics of Foodieism:

The basic principle of the food industry is the exchange of cash for edible objects, so its social architecture has been built by the people who have traditionally been the wealthiest. If cooking is a working class profession, dining is the province of the bourgeoisie and fine dining, where cooking as an art reaches its pinnacle, is the dominion of the rich.

When you take into account the way the fine dining industry overlaps with home cooking and food media, the overall effect is of a culture that skews male, white, and wealthy.

The writer and artist Sukjong Hong…sees foodie-ism as “a form of conspicuous consumption that disguises itself as cultural acumen.” When food is separated out from its practical function and cultural context and turned into a media property, foodie-ism is often “orientalist and neocolonial in its language of ‘discovery,’” Hong said, particularly in its “valuing of authenticity around foods that are not from the dominant culture.”

via New Republic

*

 

Comments are closed.