Gettin' Down Home with the Neelys

This article was downloaded by: [67.6.132.41] On: 13 December 2014, At: 11:00 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20 Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender, race, and sexuality Ariane Cruza a Department Of Women's Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Published online: 03 Dec 2013. To cite this article: Ariane Cruz (2013) Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender, race, and sexuality, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 23:3, 323-349, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2013.853916 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2013.853916 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2013 Vol. 23, No. 3, 323–349, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2013.853916 Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender, race, and sexuality Ariane Cruz* Department Of Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness. Keywords: black sexuality; gastro-porn; food television; pornography; internet pornography; food porn; reality television; the Food Network; The Neelys; Down Home With The Neelys; cooking television; black authenticity; racial authenticity; single ladies; home kitchen Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. – Guy Debord *Email: [email protected] © 2013 Women & Performance Project Inc. 324 A. Cruz A veritable star is crafted: the Food Network’s fantasy of authenticity It is summer again, a season not traditionally renowned for stellar but subpar television: a time of re-runs, experimental sitcoms, and reality-television marathons. Amongst this ban- ality viewers like myself, food-television enthusiasts, may eagerly look forward to the next new season of the Food Network’s hit show, the Food Network Star.1 Week by week, 15 finalists, chefs of diverse backgrounds and differing pedigree, compete to win the acclaimed title of the next Food Network Star, and gain her/his own television show on the lucrative cable-television network. Week by week, through a host of diverse and rigorous challenges, one contestant is eliminated until the last chef standing is declared the next Star. Yet the challenge is not completely dependent upon culinary prowess. The Star must possess, in addition to culinary knowledge and skill (whether self-taught or professional), pedagogic ability, and a “star” quality – what the Network describes as “personality that pops.”2 Indeed, Food Network Star reveals the role of invention underlying the ideology of stardom itself, and how such ideology “serve[s] to disguise the fact that [stars] are just as much produced images, constructed personalities, as ‘characters’ are.”3 While the Network is frank about some of its requirements for stardom, implicit but no less transpar- ent are its qualifications for non-Western chefs, particularly chefs of color. Hence, what is not listed in the casting call, but what functions as a critical star quality for such chefs is a certain construct of reality – a white hegemonic fantasy of authenticity anchored in gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual exoticism. The pantheon of identities – cooking-show hosts, celebrity chefs, stars, and aspiring stars – represented on the Food Network personifies this fantasy. In recent of episode of Star (season seven), the judges consistently validate Susie Jimenez, a Mexican American female chef, when she creates “Mexican” foods and roman- tically accentuates her Mexican family heritage.4 On her “playful” show, Aarti Party, season-six Food Network Star, Indian-born Aarti Sequeira, “invites viewers to join her for a playful Aarti Party, where she shares easy and delicious ways to enhance American favorites with simple but unique Indian influences.”5 Incorporating “unexpected flavors” (read Indian ingredients) Aarti reinvents “American classics” with dishes like a red curry macaroni and cheese, a “BLC” (bacon, lettuce, and cucumber sandwich with a cumin mint mayonnaise), and “pizza” made with naan, mango chutney, and paneer cheese. Through its deliberately constructed racial others, the Food Network offers a not necessarily homogenized, but harmonious view of American nationhood in which outside exotic Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 flavors, ingredients, and bodies playfully meld to inspire yet uphold the sanctity of some kind of American classical tradition, analogously fabricated. Other women of ethnic heritage are similarly positioned in the Network’s televisual imagination. Italian-born celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis, host and author of Everyday Italian, melds fresh, healthful, approachable Italian ingredients into the American home kitchen.6 Born in San Diego and formally trained in classical French pastry in Paris, Chicana chef Marcela Valladolid remains inspired by her childhood memories “growing up around expert and traditional cooks in Tijuana,” to make “real” Mexican food on her show, Mexican Made Easy.7 On her series Cooking for Real, black American chef Sunny Anderson “offers real food for real life,” putting her own “spin” on American comfort food.8 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 325 It is not just the female chefs who seem obliged by the constraints of the Food Net- work’s carefully constructed fantasy of ethnic, national, and racial authenticity. Similarly, non-Anglo male Food Network personalities and cuisiniers like Aarón Sánchez, a success- ful restaurateur acclaimed for his contemporary Latin cuisine, ventures “back to his roots to cook the Mexican food of his childhood with a fresh interpretation.”9 Trinidad-born Roger Mooking’s show, Everyday Exotic, on the Food Network’s sister cable network, the Cooking Channel, encapsulates the very neo-Colonial, ethnographic, exoticizing spirit of the Network family. The show displays a uniquely constructed palatable difference and imagined otherness simultaneously heightened and mitigated by its approachability to the equally mythologized everyday “American” consumer.10 Despite specializing in the “exotic,” these star chefs are more like the cook next door, but thanks to the wonder of television, inside our own homes. As such, the fantasy

Load more