Gettin' Down Home with the Neelys

Home , Aarti Party, Aarti Sequeira, Food Network Star Kids, Platinum Hit, RedTube, Sunny Anderson

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

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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]

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 successful 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 of authenticity that the Food Network brews is at once domestic and foreign, distant yet accessible. Such an ethos represents a literal and ﬁgurative example of what bell hooks terms “eating the other,” evidencing how “[w]ithin commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”11 Authenticity becomes more than a prere- quisite for non-Anglo Food Network stars; these racial, ethnic, and national “others” bolster the Network’s truth claims, as reality television.12 If the next Star has to, in the words of Bob Tuschman, General Manager and Senior Vice President of the Food Network, “command the imagination of a hundred million people,” then this edict demands playing to a certain racialized and gendered imaginary.13 Commercial television, as scholars like Herman Gray have well argued, is essential to the very construction of such a national imaginary.14 This national imaginary is both engendered and revealed by the performances of the Food Network as a multifaceted fantasy of national, racial, gender, and sexual authenticity vividly emblazoned in high deﬁnition. Humming steadily, if muted, in the quotidian programming of the Network, such a fantasy crescendos in the recent racial slur scandal of fallen Food Network star Paula Deen.15 Indeed, Deen’s drama makes a discussion of the complex socio-political networks of racial, sexual, and gendered desire that undergird the arena of “reality” cooking television all the more urgent. The Neelys, a Southern American black duo made up of husband and wife Pat and Gina Neely, adhere to the codes of the Food Network’s edict of authenticity, particularly for chefs of color. Their show, Down Home With the Neelys, illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in the ’

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 landscape of contemporary American cooking television. As the Food Network s only running couples program, their partnership provides a unique lens through which to examine televisual constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. This essay reads performances of race, gender, and sexuality in Down Home alongside the phenomenon of gastro- porn to illuminate the Neelys’ pornographic performances of black sexuality and redemp- tive spectacle of black love. Deconstructing the term gastro-porn (in its print, televisual, and cyber manifestations) and its imbrication with standard pornography, I argue that Down Home reﬂects a novel rendition of gastro-porn – one that speaks to the voyeuristic specta- cularized consumption of food as well as to racialized bodies, resounding the imagined obscenity of black hetero-hypersexuality itself. Down Home fetishistically caters to our desire to watch both a particular type of food preparation and a speciﬁc type of racial performance, both anchored in sexual fantasy. 326 A. Cruz

This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of racialized and gendered sexualities.16 More than just culinary instruction, I argue such television programs like Down Home with the Neelys reﬂect a polyvalent pedagogy, teaching one both how to cook and how to perform one’s membership in a particular racialized, gendered, and sexualized category of identity in contemporary American society. This paper begins with a discussion of the Food Network’s fantasy of authenticity to contextualize Down Home’s unique performance of racial sexual authenticity. Next, I explore the imbricated constructions of space, race, and gender in the Neelys’ home kitchen. Then, revisiting the phenomenon of gastro-porn, I read Down Home as offering a unique rendering of gastro-porn predicated on the esculent hypersexuality of blackness. Such libidinousness is however, as I argue, conﬂicted by the Neelys’ performance of a humanistic, though heteronormative, black familial love. Finally, I conclude by considering the self-consciousness of the Neelys’ performance, unveiling their own agency as a transgressive enactment of racialized sexuality.

Down home: space, race, and gender in the Neelys’ home kitchen While the Neelys aren’t technically Food Network “stars” they are luminary in their own culinary endeavors within and outside of the Network. Having learned the craft from his uncle Jim Neely, Patrick Neely has been in the BBQ business since 1988 when he opened up his first restaurant in Memphis, along with his three brothers: Gaelin, Mark, and Tony. In 1992, when the Neely brothers expanded, opening up another restaurant in East Memphis, Pat’s wife, Gina, joined them to assist the ever-growing demand for BBQ.17 In addition to owning two establishments in Memphis, the Neelys have expanded their command on Tennessean BBQ, opening up a third restaurant in Nashville in 2001, as well as venturing north of the Mason-Dixon Line. They recently opened Neely’s Barbeque Parlor, a restaurant in New York City. With this newly opened NYC eatery, Pat and Gina Neely promise “[to] bring authentic barbecue to New York City.”18 Despite a history of success in restaurant entrepreneurship, it is the television show, Down Home with the Neelys, which has made Gina and Patrick Neely cynosures on the Food Network and an American household name. The 2008 debut of Down Home marked the highest-rated series launch in the Food Network’s five-year history for weekend programming. The Neelys have become food-network celebrities, airing seven fi

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 times a week with an audience estimated to be ve million. Down Home remains one of the network’s highest-rated shows. Beyond the restaurant industry and television, Pat and Gina have expanded their brand with two cookbooks – a New York Times bestseller Down Home with the Neelys: A Southern Family Cookbook (2009) and The Neelys’ Cele- bration Cookbook: Down Home Meals for Every Occasion (2010) – as well as a line of food products recently endorsed by Kraft Food North America. As an African American couple, the Neelys have successfully navigated the world of food media, steered by the slogan down home. More than a catchphrase, down home is a moniker symbolizing the Neelys’ gendered, racialized, and sexualized authenticity as a Southern black American married couple. A powerful performative, down home signiﬁes a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and distinctly sexualized blackness. Encumbered by the demands of racial Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 327

authenticity, if all non-white chefs on the Network are required to turn up the heat on their authentic otherness and slather on a thick relish of exoticization, the Neelys are no excep- tion. Their unique zest is however, a familiar fiction of black authenticity that locates it roots in the performative tradition of a kind of blackface minstrelsy, the “still too present” highly ambivalent popular tradition Eric Lott unveils to be animated by both covetousness and repulsion, “the dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy.”19 Hence, newly trade- marked by the Food Network and represented by the marque of down home, the branded blackness that the Neelys exhibit is then nothing new. Such a branded blackness is a familiar fiction of an australly configured black authenticity – jocular, histrionic, and punctuated by comedic and sexual excess. Though it has resonance across the broader arena of black performance in popular culture, I devise the term branded blackness here to describe the complex networks of racial, sexual, and gendered desires that undergird the production of authenticity on reality cooking television, and the commodification of a particular stereo- typed vision of bona-fide blackness circumscribed by class, place, and sexuality.20 If, as E. Patrick Johnson reveals, “[a]uthenticity, then is yet another trope manipulated for cultural capital,” Down Home’s kind of branded blackness irradiates how the motif of black authenticity is simultaneously manipulated for economic capital.21 The veritable requisitions of such “racial counterfeit”–to produce a blackness all too often legible within the shadowy confines of a neo-minstrel archetype (a lucrative impera- tive black artists like Tyler Perry might well understand) becomes a foundational tenet of what Kobena Mercer dubs “black art and the burden of representation,” a phenomenon arising from the pressure of marginalized black artists to be representative of black art as a whole.22 While Mercer cogently argues the unfair, indeed oppressive, effects of this synecdochic dilemma to be a stifling of the possibilities of black art and its critical discourse, I would argue, as the Neelys illustrate, that authenticity is a central part of this onus of representation for black performers.23 That is, a critical part of “the impossible task of speaking as ‘representatives,’” is speaking in a language – oral and visual – that can be perceived as speaking at all.24 Down Home substantiates the Neelys’ rootstock in and allegiance to the good ol’ American South, a phantasmagorical mythologized locale where the Nation-sanctioned heterosexual couple reigns as the legible incarnation of and for black love and sexuality. A space within this space, the home in Down Home resonates the multivalent meaning of domesticity as signifying home and family life as well as Amer- ican Nation. In their preparation of hearty, traditional, but inventive Southern comfort food,

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 Memphis-style BBQ, and soul food, the Neelys demonstrate a kind of African American nationalistic pride. As evinced in the name, Down Home with the Neelys, the space of the home, in its multifaceted metaphoric carat, is not only essential to the television show itself, but also critical to the Neelys’ performance of an authentic domesticity, however contradictory. Public and private, intimate and exposed, actual working kitchen and television set, the Neelys’ de facto Memphis home kitchen, where the show is staged, brilliantly reﬂects the paradox of authenticity at work in Down Home. A meticulously constructed residen- tial mise-en scène functions to personify the home kitchen translating the Neelys’ branded blackness to the viewers. Despite having the look of an expensive professional kitchen, including top-of-the-line stainless-steel appliances, ceramic wall tiles, granite countertops, molded cabinetry, recessed lighting, and designer cookware, through décor 328 A. Cruz

and organization of space, the Neelys’ kitchen maintains an aura of approachability and personal quality: its down home character. Assorted accents and quotidian tchotchkes – rustic cookie jars and pig figurines from the couple’s swine collection – endeavor to mute the affluence of the space and assure viewers that, though the Neelys have flour- ished financially, they remain still down home.25 The camera’s shallow depth of field allows the viewers to be in close proximity to both the Neelys and their food, further for- tifying the feeling of intimacy and genuineness that the show engenders. All of these visual qualities create what André Bazin might call a “tendency toward the faithful rendering of reality.”26 It is essential that we, the audience, always feel welcomed in the Neelys’ kitchen. This reception is visually facilitated through a host of pre- and post-production effects – close camera angles, décor, warm, bright lighting and colors, as well as through joviality of the Neelys themselves. The carefully crafted home kitchen attempts to reflect the aura of warmth and intimacy that inspires the Neelys’ cuisine itself, as a type of Southern American comfort food. The name Down Home does more than sentimentally evoke the romanticized Amer- ican South. Down Home capitalizes on the nostalgia of and for the American home itself as the fictionalized foundation of the nuclear heterosexual American family, and the equally sentimentalized and symbolic practice of “home cooking.” Today’s home kitchen, as constructed by the Food Network, represents the memory of a family mealtime tradition now largely extinct – or perhaps never existent for many. Whether folklore or fact, the nostalgia for such ritual speaks to the symbolic bite of food through its production, consumption, and performance. Well evidenced by generations of situation comedy like Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, and Gimme A Break, American television has long privileged the domestic space of the nuclear family home in all of its racist and heterosexist splendor. Yet the kitchen, as a popular space of culinary pedagogy, did not become a locale important in its own right until the early 1960s with the first broadcasting of Julia Child’s The French Chef in 1963.27 The phenomenon of commodified home cooking, however, generated some time before. With the decline of actual home cooking in the 1920s due to the shifting of women’s labor outside the home, technological developments in food production and manufacturing (an increase in canned, frozen, and prepared meals), and urbanization, a restaurant industry “home-cooking campaign” opportunistically emerged.28 The waves of this home-cooking campaign are still visible on the Food Network, where

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 most chef hosts, male and female, cook on the stage of their own home kitchens. Most of these kitchens function as hybrid spaces, blurring the lines between professional and domestic. Like the home-cooking restaurants of the 1920s, these composite spaces – private home kitchen and public television set – function “as surrogate homes” to “restore to the middle class the old-fashioned domesticity that urbanization, modernization, and culinary standardization had stolen away.”29 Paradoxically, the Food Network is simultaneously invested in the restoration of an “old-fashioned domesticity” as well as a contemporary modernization via globalization and technologization. The term “home cooking” traditionally reﬂects a gendering of labor that reinforces the woman’s cementing in the home in a position of domestic servitude. “Home cooking” becomes the commodity of this ﬁxity, con- ventionally reaped by the patriarch and children of the household. Though the home kitchens of the Food Network are commanded by both female and male chefs, the construct itself Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 329

still maintains a fiercely heteronormative charge, reinforcing traditional roles of gendered labor. In the vista of contemporary American television, the Neelys’ home kitchen is unique in that it is a space inhabited by both female and male, where Gina and Pat labor together simultaneously. It is not that men are prohibited on the televisual stage of the home kitchen. On the contrary, well-known male cooking television-show host chefs like Jamie Oliver and Emeril Lagasse attest to the masculine occupation and command of the once uniquely fem- inized space of the domestic kitchen.30 Rather, it is that the man’s place in the co-ed home kitchen is unstable; typically his dominion becomes superseded by a feminine power.31 Despite Gina and Pat’s collaboration, the show clearly illustrates a more traditional gendering of food and the food-production process. The space of the Neelys’ home kitchen still functions to preserve the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity that contemporary American television enforces. Gina and Pat’s collaborative labor in Down Home’s home kitchen illustrates these gendered power dynamics. Notwithstanding his experience as a professional chef, Pat is often painted as a culinary dilettante, gleefully and obediently taking directives from his seemingly more experienced wife, Gina. His place in the space of the domestic home kitchen is coded by his masculinity, and vice versa.32 If jeopar- dized by his baking cookies and donning an apron, the sanctity of Pat’s heterosexual masculinity is preserved by the presence of the grill. Pat Neely is always solely in charge of cooking meats and “manning” the grill. In particular, when the camera follows Pat to his outdoor grill (lovingly referred to as his “outdoor sanctuary”), outside of the walls of the Neelys’ home itself, his masculine legibility becomes that much clearer. Pat’s al fresco BBQ mastery serves to restore the heterosexual masculinity shed through his labor inside the space of the home kitchen, alongside his wife. Already existing as a bastion of rugged American manhood, husbandry, and fatherhood in the romanticized middle-class suburban landscape and its imagination, both the grill and the meat cooked on it are defini- tively masculinized on the Food Network as further evidenced in shows like Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill.33 In American gastronomic consciousness, Down Home confirms the grill as the ultimate cooking tool of and for the heterosexual man. Hence what could be inter- preted as Pat Neely’s problematic femininity, not merely his mastery of the feminine domain of the kitchen but his happiness laboring in this very space, is remedied by his performance as grill “man.” Whatever transgressions of gender may be committed by Gina and Pat’s cooperative cooking in the kitchen are mediated by the grill’s function of demarcating

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 the roles of masculine and feminine via the spatial locales of inside and outside. As a woman and a man performing a woman and a man in the kitchen, Gina and Patrick Neely are relegated to a certain type of labor stratiﬁed by conventional constructions of gender. I have just discussed how the show both reiﬁes and challenges traditional gendered, middle-class conventions of domestic labor – i.e. the interior space of the home kitchen as belonging to or being occupied by the woman as well as the gendering of certain culinary tasks such as the “feminization” of baking and salad preparation versus the “masculiniza- tion” of meat and the grill. As black people in the kitchen, the Neelys enact yet another kind of labor cast by our nation’s history of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum black domestic servitude. As black entertainers replete with smiles and naughty humor, they “work,” not extramurally to the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy, to iterate 330 A. Cruz

another tenet of popular blackness itself as extravaganza, bringing beams and laughter to the viewing audience. Though they are among a sprinkling of black chefs and the first and only black couple on the Network, the Neelys are certainly not the first in this particular line of work.34 In television and film, black people, specifically black women, have a long history of occupy- ing the physical space of the kitchen primarily cast as domestics in white family households. But the kitchen has also been an important staging of the autonomous black television family. For Cliff and Claire Huxtable of The Cosby Show (1984–92), perhaps the most eminent contemporary black couple in the televisual archive, the kitchen was, as it is for the Neelys, a salient space of comic banter, intimate hetero-nuclear familial bonding, discipline, courtship, and of course victuals. With its island, French cast-iron cookware, Provencal table linens, brick fireplace, copper utensils, and electric juicer, the elegant eat-in Cosby kitchen, much like the rest of the set of their invented Brooklyn brown- stone also served as a marker of the family’s class status, exemplifying a vision, albeit very different than the Neelys’, of performative domestic blackness circumscribed by the commodification of a kind of upper-class black sensibility and celebration of the heteropatriar- chal nuclear black family.35 I am not attempting a comparative analysis of the complex dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality of each show here, nor am I trying to insist that the Neelys somehow represent a worse or more racist vision of black televisual representation.36 However, I am pointing out that, in their kitchen coupling, the Neelys build upon a televisual tradition of commodified black domesticization mediated by politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. More than the delectable dishes they produce on their show, the Neelys themselves are the comestible products of their own labor. In a dynamic play of commodity fetishism, their collaborative laboring in the commodification of race, gender, and sexuality is both revealed in and obscured by –“at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”–their performative production of material product: the food itself.37 The food and its surrounding performance becomes a vehicle of exchange for the construction of race, gender, and sexuality as commodity. It is these carefully constructed categories of identity, and this kind of labor (a toiling to uphold the myth of the obscenity of blackness) that I read as enactments of a particular type of gastro-porn in Down Home.38 In the following section I revisit the phenomenon of gastro-porn, interrogating its socio-cultural, historical, and technological entwinement with standard pornography, to foreground my reading of the Neelys’

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 dynamic performances of race, gender, and sexuality.

Gastro-porn revisited The phenomenon of gastro-porn is a lens through which the Neelys’ performances of gender, race, and sexuality become lucid. In addition to illustrating how contemporary television cooking shows, like Down Home, exhibit a complex conﬂation of pornography and food, gastro-porn speaks to the pornographic character of blackness itself that the Neelys enact. The term “gastro-porn” can be traced back to a 1977 book review written by Alex- ander Cockburn to describe the then burgeoning, now very familiar, trend in gastronomic representation: a genre of cookbooks displaying French-inspired recipes, largely impracti- cal for the average home chef, paired with brilliant color photographs of mouthwatering, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 331

gourmet dishes. Cookbooks, as Arjun Appadurai notes, “tell unusual cultural tales.”39 Not serendipitous to Cockburn’s coining of the term, the 1970s was a time when pornography infiltrated the American public. Gastro-porn’s genesis in the so-called golden age of pornography, roughly the decade of the 1970s, reflects pornography’s penetration of American recreational and domestic spaces in new ways. Beginning in the early 1970s, films like The Mitchell Brothers’ classic, Behind the Green Door (dir. The Mitchell Brothers, USA, 1972) and Deep Throat (dir. Gerard Damiano, USA, 1972), ushered hard-core moving image pornography to the “mainscreen,” bringing a pornographic aesthetic to mainstream American culture, and transforming not only pornography itself but the American public’s relationship with it.40 Emblematic of this era and pornography’s new image was a phenomenon called “porno chic,” a mainstream cultural appropriation of pornography, engendered by the film Deep Throat, the golden child of pornography’s golden age.41 We might understand gastro-porn as a visual and literary rendering of porno chic in the realm of the culinary arts. Coeval socio-phenomena, both gastro-porn and porno chic attest to pornography’s long-standing influence on American popular culture. Unfortu- nately, most of the literature on gastro-porn fails to comprehensively theorize the socio-cultural, political, and technological developments of pornography itself with the trend of gastro-porn (and its evolution from print, to television, to cyberspace) as coetaneous developments in mass American culture. More than illuminating common trends in each, such an analysis might help to dispel myths of pornography’s only recent infiltration of the mainstream pop-cultural imagination.42 Taking the cookbook French Cooking (1977) as quintessential of this new wave of gastro-porn, Cockburn limns both its “Rubenesque excesses”–brilliant close-up photographs of splendidly executed dishes created with exotic ingredients – and its chimerical act of transforming a food fantasy (one far out of reach of the quotidian, non-professional American chef) into a phantasmagorical yet palatable food reality.43 Such is the culinary mythology that Roland Barthes assays in his essay entitled “Ornamental Cookery” written five years prior. Focusing on the spectacle of food photography in Elle Magazine, Barthes describes the practice of ornamental cookery as one of “unbridled beautification.”44 According to Barthes, it is the “mythical econom[y]” that drives ornamental cooking, a paradoxical practice of representation that positions its “objects at once near and inaccessible.”45 Indeed, it is this same mythological economy that powers televisual constructions of race, gender, and sexuality particularly

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 in the performative domain of reality television, a space riddled with the ambivalent anti- monies of artiﬁce and reality that mark performance itself. Our need to “glaze surfaces, to round them off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icings, and jellies” represents an essential part of the visual mythology of food itself.46 For Barthes such “ornamental cookery” is part of the “societal tendency towards extreme realism” garnered via an artful artiﬁce.47 Yet unlike Cockburn, while he makes similar claims regarding the mythological spectacularization of food, Barthes does not explicitly mention pornography in his piece. Cockburn’s parallel of this new genre of food representation to sexual pornography is anchored in pedagogy. That is, both gastro-porn and conventional porn vividly instruct one in the production of “the ultimate, heavenly delights,” whether in the kitchen or bedroom.48 332 A. Cruz

But more than offering technique, gastro-porn and standard porn share, in Cockburn’s view, an interest in the impossible:

True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes. The gastro-pornhound can, in the Bocuse book for example, moisten his lips over a color plate of fresh water crayfish au gratin à la Fernand Point. True you cannot get fresh crayfish in the United States or indeed black truffles, three tablespoons of which, cut into julienne, are recommended by Bocuse. No matter. The delights offered in sexual pornography are equally unattainable.49

To the everyday neophyte, sexual porn and gastro-porn thus present an unfeasible professional technique, unobtainable ingredients, and an equally fantastic final product paradoxically evidenced in glossy, high-pigment images: a kind of culinary money shot. Anchored in the bedrock of voyeuristic fantasy, both standard porn and gastro-porn rely on a glorified, romanticized finished product to tempt the consumer with rapture and a duplicitously encouraging “sense of the unattainable.”50 We may understand this artifice of both pornographies as an essential element of the spectacle itself wherein, as Debord reminds us, “the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible.”51 Neo-colonialist, exoticist food pirate, renowned author, restaurateur, previous host of the Travel Channel’s Emmy award-winning cable television show, No Reservations, and current anchor of its CNN reincarnation, Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain confirms this sentiment. In a more recent article that re-introduced the term gastro-porn into the American popular lexicon, Bourdain makes the connection between gastro-porn (what the swashbuckler terms “food porn”) and sexual porn all the more explicit.52 According to Bourdain food porn is “the glorification of food as a substitute for sex.”53 Food porn thus becomes a fetish for sex itself. Modernizing the paradigm for the current decade, Bour- dain cites Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook (1999) as “the ultimate volume of chef porn.”54 The 336-page hardcover color cookbook boasts 200 color photographs by food photographer Deborah Jones. Exemplifying the implausible spirit of gastro-porn, the book features fanciful recipes with corresponding photographic visual evidence. For example, resembling miniature ice-cream sundae cones, “cornets,” tiny cones stuffed with salmon tartare, are enrobed in white napkins, placed in a special serving dish, and escorted to an elegantly set table by a faceless waiter similarly vested in equally crisp “ Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 whites. Throughout the book, photographs of beautifully executed recipes, such as Fricas- sée of Escargots”–round, succulent snails bathing in a pool of glassy sauce spiked with fine petals of vibrant, dewy green herbs – are juxtaposed with no less ravishing, but certainly more austere images of food its more “natural” state, as reflected by an image of afternoon shadows dancing atop a metal basket overflowing with a bounty of Vidalia onions. By describing food porn as “displays or descriptions of food – and its preparation – for an audience that has no intention of actually cooking or eating any of it,” Bourdain reinforces the issue of intentionality that Cockburn asserts. But, as The French Laundry Cookbook reveals, it may not be one’s “intention” that prevents one from attempting such recipes, but rather one’s ability and the tools at hand.55 Likewise, for Bourdain, pornography offers a similarly seductive yet equally irreproducible fantasy. He states: “Like the best Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 333

of pornography, the best of food porn depicts beautiful ‘objects’ arranged in ways one might never have previously considered; star chefs, like the porn stars before them, doing things on paper which few amateurs would ever try at home.”56 Accordingly, though we may desire and attempt to mimic the performances, both culinary and sexual, that we consume in print and on screen, according to Cockburn and Bourdain we have no intention of truly replicating such grand endeavors in the privacy of our own kitchens and bedrooms. Bourdain’s mention of star personage is critical. In his typical satiric expression, he dubs Food Network celebrity chef, Emeril Lagasse, “once the food world’s Ron Jeremy.”57 By comparing Lagasse to American porn legend Ron Jeremy, Bourdain evokes the quality of the celebrity that is so essential to not only pornography, but also contemporary food media, in particular Food Network shows like Down Home with the Neelys. As Yael Raviv declares, and as the Food Network evinces, food itself is a “star-making vehicle.”58 Con- temporary cooking shows illustrate that it is not so much what is being made, but rather who is making it and how. In “‘La Grand Bouffe’: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” Andrew Chan confirms the salience of the chef host figure to the pornographic performance of food television as well as to “the manufacture of emotions surrounding eating.”59 As shows like Star and Down Home reveal, the success and critical reception of such performance itself is as much due to person(s) as it is to product. Like standard porn, the definition of the term food porn proves obfuscatory and contentious, just as the parallels between them. Beyond this sense of glazed unattainability and the voyeuristic pleasure of watching despite an inability to replicate, the links between food porn and porn porn commonly rest upon the viscerality of both performances, the “safe” (virtual) consumption of both food and sex, the often fetishistic nature of this consumption, their designation as a “low” kind of popular culture (to label something pornographic is often to condemn it as an inferior form of mass culture), and of course, the rapture derived from both the acts of eating and sex. While the notable presence remains essential, the parallels between gastro-porn and porn porn have shifted and multiplied. Both gastro-porn and standard porn have similarly evolved with technology, first with cable television and subsequently via the Internet. Though food and television have maintained a marriage since the mid-twentieth century, cable television, specifically the Food Network, has launched gastro-porn to new heights, revolutionizing the spectacularization of food.60 In the early 1990s, cable television accelerated both the distribution of food porn and standard pornography. The union ’

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 of pornography and cable television further fueled pornography s interior place within American homes and hotel rooms nationwide, shifting the space of consumption of porn and ﬁxing a space for it within the American economy of popular visual media, entertainment, and communications. Like video that preceded it, cable offered a quality of discretion and selection to pornography consumers that increased the potential market for hardcore pornography especially.61 In 1995, for example, Americans spent more than US$150 million dollars on pornographic movies through the cable option pay-per-view.62 By 1997, approximately 67% of Americans were cable subscribers, and “adult” material on cable constituted roughly US$100 million in revenues.63 If the televisual phenomenon of gastro-porn may be elucidated by looking toward pornography’s relationship with cable TV, contemporary cyber gastro-porn is illuminated by coeval trends in Internet pornography, speciﬁcally the development of interactive, 334 A. Cruz

user-driven digital media. Internet porn has absolutely exploded since its genesis in the early 1990s in the primitive form of Usenet chat rooms where visitors could swap graphic scanned images, post messages, and engage in erotic chat under dirty cyber pseu- donyms. Now highly sophisticated and “one of the largest industries of the digital era,” pornography generates an estimated US$2.84 billion in the US and US$4.9 billion worldwide.64 Pornography maintains itself as a foundational part of the World Wide Web: sex is the most frequently searched-for topic on the Internet and half of the money spent on the Internet is linked to sexual activity.65 Cyber pornography has revealed “the economic potential of the Internet,” serving as a model for cyber advertising, electronic commerce, and the digitization of data.66 More recently, the incredibly popular pornography tube sites, free pornographic video-sharing websites, have revolutionized Internet porn.67 One of the important things these user-generated sites have done is mark a shift from professional toward amateur that is a critical transformation in authorial power. Cyber pornography reconfigures the relationship between pornography performer, producer, consumer, and distributor, ultimately allowing for higher audience involvement and interaction. Pornography websites, both user-generated and professional, have been fueled by Do it Yourself (DIY) technologies like handheld digital video, editing software, file-sharing, hosting services, webcasting, and webcams, enabling the average person to become, if not a porn star perhaps a pornographer. In turn, we are witnessing another democratization of pornography, as the barriers for entry into pornographic transaction have been significantly lowered.68 Similarly, as it has transformed standard porn, the Internet has transfigured gastro-porn. Indeed, in its cyber manifestation, food porn mimics standard porn even more. The Food Network’s thriving website, foodnetwork.com, a user-friendly, interactive site featuring recipe and video archives from different Food Network chefs, an online store, program updates, and more, illustrates a contemporary rendering of gastro-porn.69 Recipe reviews testify to the website’s popularity and the interactivity and accessibility of current cyber incarnations of gastro-porn. Visitors can review recipes, rate them (from one to five stars), and provide commentary to either warn a fellow food network.com denizen that the radicchio in the Neelys’ recipe for Buttermilk Slaw (three stars, three reviews) is “far too bitter and overwhelmed the dish,” while The Neely’s Chicken and Dum- plings (five stars, 66 reviews) are “the best chicken and dumplings ever!”70 Such reviews evidence that, unlike with much of the gastro-porn of the 1970s, the contemporary gastro-

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 porn audience is attempting, with more or less success, to replicate what we see. Indeed, the interface of foodnetwork.com reads much like many pornography tube websites, such as www.redtube.com, wherein hardcore, amateur, and professional porn videos are similarly rated from one to ﬁve stars. Through its multiple technological reincarnations – from the printed page, to the satellite waves, to the computer screen – gastro-porn may now share even more similarities with standard pornography, becoming more accessible and user- friendly, while transforming the relationship between consumer, distributor, and producer. In addition to foodnetwork.com, websites like foodporn.com and foodporn.net, as well as smartphone apps and food-porn blogs testify to gastro-porn’s perforation of new media, our continued desire to gaze at food, and the porn-esque democratization of gastro-porn facilitated by new media.71 Wildly popular photo-sharing apps like Instagram function as dynamic social hubs of digital gastro-porn exchange. Personal websites and countless Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 335

blogs also document the individual practice of gastro-porn: its production, display, and consumption. On a blog post entitled “What is Food Porn?” Erin McDonnell, known as The Skinny Gourmet, “deconstruct[s] the idea of food porn,” discussing and illustrating with corresponding photographs how the “pornographic aesthetic” is achieved through a multi- tude of elements like sexually suggestive foods (the often phallic, vulvar, or sexually “suggestive subject”), presentation of the food, use of exotic food elements, and fetishization.72 In light of the fact that most of the previous publications about gastro-porn have been authored by men, The Skinny Gourmet’s blog suggests that new media may shift more than the venue for gastro-porn, but also the gender demographics for its production and commentary. Such websites boast captivating close-up photographs of highly sensualized dishes – a plate of labially folded dumplings faintly shimmering in a butyraceous sauce, or a creamy white ovular scoop of frozen custard vitriﬁed by the garnet coulis of red rasp- berry – what Roland Barthes would certainly call the “glaze” or the “smooth coating” so fundamental to the mythology of ornamental cookery. Though Down Home features similarly tantalizing images of food, there is another type of critical pornographic production at work within the show – that of the pornography of black sexuality.

Gettin’ down in the kitchen: sexuality and the Neelys’ conﬂicted black love In an essay written about black male visual artist Romare Bearden (1911–88), art historian Judith Wilson argues that Bearden’s incorporation of pornography into his work becomes a tool to extricate “the contested site” of the black body, particularly in regard to its long- defamed sexuality.73 Through “getting low, culling images from pornography,” Wilson contends that Bearden co-opts “pornographic strategies,” such as his employment of “the voyeuristic gaze,”“representation of prostitution,” and lastly, “domestication of the nude.”74 Using two familiar terms within black vernacular expression: “getting down” (a term that signiﬁes both cultural hierarchies and sexual activity), and “getting over” (a term that denotes an unorthodox victory, typically “illfully” gained at another’s expense), Wilson herself “gets down” in her own writing to describe Bearden’s work.75 Incorporating the supposed low-standard tropes of pornography, oft deemed a trashy facet of popular vernacular culture, into works of “high” art, Bearden challenges the binary of high/low and the cultural hierarchy itself. Cloaked and cached, pornography in effect, snuck into galleries and museums on the vehicles of Bearden’s canvases allowing

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 for a veiled yet brazen expression of black sexuality. It was, as Wilson argues, through his appropriation of pornography, and by “dealing with black sexuality in an unusually explicit manner – [that] Romare Bearden managed to transcend the widespread stigmatization of black sexuality.”76 I would like to argue that the Neelys similarly get down to get over, workin’ the stereotypes of a highly sexualized and proletariat-imagined blackness in their act of self-commodification. Aiming low on the cultural ladder, the “down” in Down Home alludes to not just the austral food that the Neelys specialize in, but the voyeuristic fantasy of culinary slumming that many viewers may enjoy via their consumption of a Food Network-branded authentic black American southern rural family cuisine topped with a dollop of branded blackness. Indeed, given the affluence of foodnetwork.com’s US audience, this concept of culinary slumming may not be too far afield.77 Down Home illuminates Pierre Bourdieu’s economy of cultural goods by reversing its hierarchical logic of 336 A. Cruz

high/low via the audience’s vicarious appropriation of not a kind of cultural nobility, but rather a type of quotidian conventionality: downhomeness.78 The taste for down home represents a particular experience of culture, an ethos of authenticity circumscribed by class, race, place, and time. Down Home serves the concocted relic of black southern American mores as cultural fodder for our national imaginary. But more than referencing this uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated performative of blackness, I suggest that the “down” in Down Home signiﬁes the overt licentiousness practiced by Gina and Pat. As I argue in this section, like Bearden, the Neelys’ explicit eroticism performed in Down Home becomes more than a labor of black hypersexuality or libidinality; it is a critical, if conﬂicted, de-stigmatization of black sexuality via its expression of black humanity and devotion. That is, despite their enacted lasciviousness, Gina and Pat Neely perform a kind of respectability via their presence as husband and wife. Capitalizing on the presumed hypersexuality of blackness as well as the Food Network and its audience’s penchant for cultural authenticity, the Neelys consciously perform a distinct down home blackness that is marked by racial and sexual excess. Down Home is a racial, sexual burlesque that dramatizes the prurience of blackness while exaggerating its rustic quintessence. Already employing pornographic stratagems like the voyeuristic gaze and the eroticization of food exhibited in many cooking shows on the Food Network, Down Home gets down even lower via the sexually charged interaction between real-life couple, Gina and Pat. Hence, Down Home reveals not your proto- typical gastro-porn, but the pornography of race itself: the obscenity of blackness. Inundated with sexual innuendoes, coquetry, and ribald sexual references thinly veiled in food metaphors, the cultural script of down home blackness that the Neelys recite is a litany of licentiousness. Pat devilishly uttering, “I like to squeeze that lemon,” while demonstrating his masculine brawn by squeezing a lemon press with one hand (something Gina is seemingly unable to do), smiling and staring suggestively at Gina, serves as one example here. Beyond constant references to the juiciness of fruits, vegetables, and meats, it is the oft-uttered brown-sugar innuendo that in addition to signaling the sexual charge between Gina and Pat, speaks to the sexualization of race on the show. Constantly introduced by Pat as “Gina’s favorite sugar,” brown sugar symbolizes the eroticization of blackness that is the show’s foundation. Pat and Gina articulate their pet names for one another – daddy, baby, mama – in an equally wanton tone. The Neelys’ carnality is physical as well as verbal. Eye contact, furtive glances, close positioning, body contact, and kisses “

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 heighten the pornographic capital of the show. Gina, who is described as as spicy as the hot sauce they were shaking all over those ribs,” shares that Pat forgets the camera is rolling and she must continually remind him, “[t]his is a family show hon!’”79 Nonetheless, Pat’s lewd remarks flow freely while Gina’s “spicy” character is accentuated with her equally flirta- tious remarks. In a section entitled, “The Reunion: Pat and Gina’s Sizzlin’ Love,” in their first cookbook, Down Home With the Neelys: A Southern Family Cookbook (2009), Pat reaffirms both his libidinal nature and the conflation of food and sex that Down Home exhibits, writing: “There are two things in Memphis that take time (and patience!): making love and making barbecue. I’ve discovered that both are worth the wait.”80 Indeed, this section at the beginning of the book affirms the centrality of the Gina and Pat romance to the construction of the Down Home culinary narrative itself. As illustrated in both the Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 337

book and the show, food becomes not just a fetish for sex; in the good ol’ rubric of a down home customary heterosexist logic, food functions as precisely the vehicle through which a “good” woman secures and keeps her “good” man. Gina confirms this reasoning in another section of the book titled, “Three Ways to Skin a Cat,” in which she shares precious advice passed down from her Nana: “‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat … You gotta hit a man three ways to get to him.’ The three ways are the head, the stomach, and the lower part (you know what I’m talking bout!).”81 This type of sexualized vernacular evidenced in print throughout the book is that which the Neelys recite on their television show of the same name. In Down Home the commonplace gastro-porn of culinary television – close-up shots of dazzling dishes and an eroticized spectacularization of the process of food production – is augmented by the Neelys’ concupiscent interaction, as wife and husband. Here gastro-porn refers to the voyeuristic, sexualized spectacle of the food as well as to the carnality of the bodies preparing the food. As the only host couple on the Food Network, and one of the few black shows, the Neelys perform the purported libidinality of black heterosexuality. However, despite their pornographic qualities the Neelys execute a unique televisual performance of black love. Particularly in the realm of reality television eclipsed by shows including The Real Housewives of Atlanta (Bravo), Basketball Wives, Single Ladies, Love and Hip Hop (all VH1), where romantic conflict reigns and drama is the cur- rency between black women and black men, the Neelys’ representation of what might be traditionally considered a healthy, strong partnership is notable.82 While still reinforcing the heteronormative mandate of mainstream television’s representation of black romance, Gina and Pat Neely, an exemplar of happiness, stability, cooperation, and communication, contest predominate images of broken black love. In particular, Down Home contests dominant images of black women in reality television as not only luckless in love, but un-lovable in their belligerence.83 In a televisual realm of representation wherein the supposed “nature” of black womanhood is constructed as physically and verbally combative, Down Home may present a refreshingly humanistic figure in Gina Neely. In this vein, Pat Neely’s consistent utterances professing his love, admiration, and desire for his wife Gina reveal not the pornographic obscenity of black (hetero)sexuality, but rather validate the humanity of black womanhood and signal the constitution of a kind of enduring black love. His continual accolades of her culinary skill serve as an unusual affirmation of black female expertise. Down Home defies the pathologized yet highly celebrated “single lady” televisual construc-

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 tion of black womanhood. As Beyoncé intones, “all the single ladies” are a hot phenomenon in American popular culture. Both the titles of Beyoncé’s quadruple-platinum hit song (2008) and a recent television sitcom on VH1 demonstrate the popularity of the single-lady trope in pop culture. BET consummates the newest televisual capitalization on our fascination with unwed black women with its recently premiered series, Being Mary Jane. Beyond the media, black women’s singledom – speciﬁcally the low marriage rates of black women who tend to be ﬁnancially successful and highly educated – has received recent attention in aca- demia.84 A study on the longitudinal trends in marriage among highly educated black women by the Yale Center for Research on Inequalities and The Life Course shows that black women born after 1950 are twice as likely as white women to be unmarried by age 45 and twice as likely to be divorced, separated, or widowed.85 Although the 338 A. Cruz

study and its circumferential dialogue are grounded in a heterosexist logic that disavows same-sex marriage and black women’s choice to abstain from marriage, both illuminate the portrayal of black women’s relationships. Such data suggests, as co-author of the study Hannah Brueckner states: “In the past four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family.”86 Though these studies point to black women’s prior- itizing of self – educational development and standards of living – other sources postulate that black women are to blame for their single status. Televisual recitals of single black womanhood in reality TV in particular confirm the complicity of black women in their own loneliness, denouncing them as inapt, idealistic, and simply impossible partners. Paving this path of black women’s liability, books like Eric Culpeper’s The Black Girl Curse (2009), Jimi Izrael’s The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Men (2009), and Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment (2009) suggest black women are on a vain quest for a mythical black man, and need to effectively lower their utopian standards to secure a “good” (good enough) brother.87 Such rhetoric refreshes prevailing oppressive images of black women as accountable for the failure of the heterosexual black family unit, cemented into our national consciousness in March 1965 with the publication of Patrick Moynihan’s contentious report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. As such it is perpetuated that the “tangle of pathology” that black women ceaselessly find ourselves ensnared within is one of our own making.88 In this vein, Gina Neely herself becomes an if not radical, then certainly rein- vigorating, characterization of black heterosexual womanhood – amiable, happy, pro- ductive, and partnered. Such integrity of character is, of course, complicated by her salacious behaviors. Indeed, the ambivalence of Gina’s representation mirrors that of the Neelys’ similarly irresolute performance of race, gender, and sexuality. Concurrently, notwithstanding their pornographic performance of blackness, the Neelys demonstrate a unique air of respectability, albeit problematic, anchored in their relationship as husband and wife. The performance of black sexuality that Down Home with the Neelys instantiates reflects a profound tension between blackness that is at once essential and performed, lascivious yet reputable.

Saucing it up: Alabama white BBQ Sauce, an uncanny digestivo Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 In one of their many Down Home video clips available to watch on foodnetwork.com, the Neelys share their recipe for “Grilled Chicken with Alabama White BBQ Sauce.”89 The three-minute, 30-second clip doesn’t so much as elucidate their unique rendering of gastro-porn as unveil what I read as a kind of transgressive agency expressed in the Neelys’ down home performance of hyperracialized and hypersexualized blackness. In the video, Gina, wide-eyed and dubious, alternatively glances at Pat and the bowl of white barbeque sauce, emphatically questioning its color (“white?!”). In his most exagger- ated southern colloquial diction Pat replies, “Yeah it’s white and it’s a gonna be right!” Among many ingredients, the recipe calls for mayonnaise. Pat excitedly informs the viewers: “I’m a gonna use a cup a mayonnaise!” Gina ﬂeeringly queries, “I’m a gonna use?” Her question functions not so much as an expression of wonder over the rara Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 339

avis of white BBQ sauce made with mayonnaise as it does a critical interrogation of his hyperbole. Though humorous, this catechetical exchange between Pat and Gina is an insightful reflection of the racialized codes that script the show. Gina’s mimicry is a reiter- ation that ruptures the performative power of such speech and gestures to the Neelys’ blackness as production. Spotlighted by Gina, Pat’s deeply embellished stereotypical blackness is simultaneously reprimanded and rewarded. Brought into relief, his language is tagged as not just inappropriate, but also ironically inauthentic. Despite the curtain pulling on this “linguistic ventriloquism,” within the neo-minstrel mise-en-scène of Down Home, such speech remains comic fodder for the viewing audience.90 Pat’s sardo- nic acknowledgement of the rightness of whiteness functions as a nod to the white supremacist ideology feeding the continued pathologization of blackness that he and Gina exploit in Down Home. Cloaked in satire and their usual comedic mantles, they mock their own performances of an authentic down home blackness – at once farcical, invete- rate, pornographic, and vernacular – for the Food Network and its print, television, and Internet audiences. Illuminating how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television, this essay has argued that Down Home with the Neelys depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. (Re)producing a certain brand of black heterosexuality via gendered enactments of domesticity and space, Down Home offers an ambivalent critique of televisual reflections of black love and labor. As I have argued, the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of down home, and exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. Beyond culinary demonstration, food television reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as critical lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. Down Home with the Neelys elucidates the ways that race continues to be rendered in audio-visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness. From the printed page to the television screen, and then to the computer screen, the Neelys’ down home brand, a fugue of authentic blackness – obscene, excessive, and self-lampooning – is metaphrastic. Yet here in this lesson on Alabama white barbeque sauce, in an act of symbolic redress, whiteness is mocked and exoticized in the Neelys’ home kitchen. While white barbeque sauce is a rarity in the Neelys’ kitchen, sauce itself ’

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 is not. The Neelys reputation for loving sauce is evident throughout their show as well as in their cookbook, which informs readers, “at the Neelys’, mealtime is family time, and that means no stinting of ‘the sauce.’ Indeed, that’s one of the Neely family secrets: the liberal application of BBQ sauce to almost anything – spaghetti, nachos, salad, you name it.”91 If not a family secret then the Neelys’ slathering of “sauce” is certainly a secret to their success. Symbolizing their staging of a hyperracialized and hypersexualized blackness, sauce functions as not only a signature of their cuisine but also a fundamental component of their performance. Perhaps the secret to the Neelys’ sauce is in its harmonious blend of complex, opposing ﬂavor notes – a kind of umami concocted from the insipid left- overs of a hackneyed blackness brightened by the piquancy of a fresh spectacle of black love. 340 A. Cruz

Notes on contributor Ariane Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her teaching at Penn State includes classes on feminist visual culture, racialized sexuality, and representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Her research interests include black female sexuality, black visuality, and pornography. She is currently working on a manuscript exploring black women, BDSM, and pornography. Her recent publications appear in Camera Obscura, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press at CUNY), and Hypatia, and are forthcoming in Feminist Studies.

Notes 1. The Food Network Star, one of the network’s highest-rated shows, melds the Network’s interest in personality-driven culinary shows, celebrity-chef instruction, and reality television, specifically entertainment-based competitions. In addition to their cable television channel, the Food Network maintains a website, www.foodnetwork.com, offering recipes, chefs’ profiles, videos of shows, a store selling Food Network products ranging from chefs’ personal lines of cutlery, to cookware and food products, a blog, a print magazine, and more recently a video game. The Food Network sponsors and hosts food and wine festivals around the nation. Also under the Food Network media-conglomerate family umbrella are the cable channels: HGTV, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel, and the websites food.com, food2.com. Founded in 1993, the Network was launched nationally in 1993, then internationally in 2009. Food Network cable TV is distributed to 100 million US households. Food Network.com averages more than 9.9 million web users monthly. Food Network Magazine delivers a circula- tion of 1.25 million. For more see http://www.foodnetwork.com. 2. Season-eight Food Network Star casting call lists three elements: “Cooking know-how (you can be self-taught or professionally trained or somewhere in between, but you should know your way around the kitchen),”“Personality that pops (let yourself shine and tell us who you really are. Don’t be shy. We are all about personality, so show us yours!),” and “Teaching skills (you bring the world of food and cooking to life in your very own passionate and unique way).” For more see http://my.foodnetwork.com/food-network-star-casting-call/editupload.esi. 3. Dyer (2008, 20). Unlike the divination of the first Hollywood stars, who were represented as ideals, modern-day stars like those being created by the Food Network are marked by their quotidian typicality and relatable nature. For more on the social phenomenon of stardom and the invention of the star see Dyer (1986). 4. Jimenez’s casting video wonderfully illustrates the Food Network’s investment in her reflection of a kind of cultural and national authenticity as well as her molding as the “ideal” immigrant (hard working, untiring, resourceful, and grateful) success story, despite being American born. ’ Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 To watch Jimenez s casting video in its entirety see http://www.foodnetwork.com/susie- jimenez-food-network-star/video/index.html. 5. For more information, see Sequeira’s personal Food Network website at http://www. foodnetwork.com/aarti-party/index.html. 6. De Laurentiis (2005). In addition to the title of her cookbook, Everyday Italian is also the name of one of De Laurentiis’ Food Network television shows. 7. Marcela Valladolid’s foodnetwork.com bio is available at http://www.foodnetwork.com/ marcela-valladolid/bio/index.html. 8. Sunny Anderson’s foodnetwork.com bio may be referenced at http://www.foodnetwork.com/ sunny-anderson/bio/index.html. 9. Aarón Sánchez’s foodnetwork.com bio is available at http://www.foodnetwork.com/aaron- sanchez/bio/index.html. 10. While Roger Mooking prepares exotic cuisine in his own home kitchen, white male food television personalities discover such cuisine around the world. Two shows on the Travel Channel, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 341

for example, represent this neo-colonialist, ethnographic adventurist enterprise to its fullest: Anthony’s No Reservations and Andrew Zimmerman’s Bizarre Foods. Sharing a deep penchant for the exotic, both men, in their mission to bring the global local, recite the familiar civilizing narrative of colonial Western Empire. In No Reservations, chef and best-selling author Bourdain “encounters the weird, wild and downright outrageous personalities and places that help define the international cultural landscape.” For more about the show visit http://www.travelchannel. com/TV_Shows/Anthony_Bourdain/About_The_Show.InBizarre Foods chef and writer Zim- merman “gives us a taste of the world’s different cultures by serving up what the locals eat. Viewers this season get an even greater treat as Andrew experiences unusual food practices even he never knew existed.” For more about Bizarre Foods visit http://www.travelchannel. com/TV_Shows/Bizarre_Foods/About_The_Show. 11. hooks (1992, 21). bell hooks has long revealed the “desire for the Other” and the consumption of racial difference to be a commodity fetishism of mainstream, “white supremacist capitalist patriarch[al]” culture; see hooks (1992, 22). The Food Network programming exemplifies how “[w]hen race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power- over in intimate relations with the Other;” see hooks (1992, 23). 12. Seemingly this stick-to-your-roots Food Network philosophy of cooking only applies to non- Western chefs, and in particular chefs of color. White male food-television personalities like Anthony Bourdain and Bobby Flay are allowed to go ethnic, experimenting with regional cui- sines outside of their comfort zones, and exploring and exploiting the culinary landscapes of other cultures. For more about authenticity and reality television see Rose and Wood (2005). 13. Tuschman makes this statement on episode seven of the Food Network Star. The episode can be watched online at http://www.foodnetwork.com/food-network-fns7-2011-video-gallery/videos/ index.html?channel=52461. Tuschman presides over programming, production, and development aspects for the network. For more on Tuschman see http://www.foodnetwork.com/ shows/bob-tuschman-senior-vice-president-programming-and-production/index.html. 14. See Gray (2005), Torres (1998), and Lipsitz (1986). 15. Deen was recently fired from the Food Network and dropped from numerous sponsors for using the N-word. She is also involved in a civil-discrimination suit with a former employee at one of Deen’s restaurants who alleges racist behavior. 16. Here I consider the dualistic substance of domesticity as referring to both the home and Nation, as well as the metonymy between the two. À la Food Network imagination, the American home, symbolized by the American home kitchen, functions as a mythologized multicultural utopia where exotic flavors palatably meld with American classics. Such harmony reflects outside the boundaries of the home to narrate not merely an immigrant success story, but a national triumph of efficacious cultural integration. 17. See http://www.ginaandpat.com/about.html. The Neelys were already a successful restaurateur family before Gina Neely came on board to assist with recipe development, catering, and cus-

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 tomer relations that brought their business to “a new level.” See Neely (2009, 12). 18. http://neelysbbqparlor.com/our-story/. 19. Lott (1993, 18, 35). As Eric Lott argues, the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, the most popular form of antebellum entertainment, was actuated by both “love and theft.” 20. Branded blackness illuminates the ways in which race is inhabited as a branded space. My thinking here is informed by Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2012) exciting recent work on brand culture, which helps us to understand the cultural and economic signiﬁcance of brands to how we envision, inhabit, and practice authenticity. 21. Johnson (2003). 22. Lott (1993, 37); see also Mercer (1994). Such a burden W.E.B. Dubois (1926) identiﬁed decades earlier. 23. Mercer (1994, 248) propounds, “[i]n my view, the main problem with the ‘social responsibility of the artist’ paradigm is that it both depends on the notion of the artist as racially 342 A. Cruz

‘representative,’ in the sense of speaking on behalf of a supposedly homogenous and monolithic community; and that the prescriptive demands by which black critics have sought to set out such rights and duties that make up the responsibilities of the black artist have had the effect of binding him or her ever more closely to the burden of being ‘representative.’” 24. Mercer (1994, 235). The age-old question of “who speaks for ‘the race,’ and on what authority?” as Dwight A. McBride (1998, 364, 377) and others have long revealed, is one whose answer summons not just race, but sexuality, gender, and class, signaling how “race is, indeed, a fiction, an allegory, if you will, with an elaborate linguistic court.” As the Neelys demonstrate, central to the domain of such a tribunal is both language and visuality: authenticity becomes a performative prescription of black audio-visibility. Illuminating how we, specifically black intellectuals, participate in the discursive practice of racial essentialism that constructs, indeed legitimates, certain voices and bodies as authentic voices of and in the community, McBride illuminates the heteronormative politics of inclusion and exclusion determining such a body, and ultimately the failure of anti-racist discourse to critically intervene (in) black homophobia. For more on the vexed question of blackness and authenticity in the realm of culture, see Johnson (2003), Favor (1999), Japtok and Jerry (2011), Neal (2013), Riggs (1995), Walcott (1997), Hall (1998), and Lubiano (1991, 1997). 25. The couple’s pig collection is another element that adds to the personal, individualized feel of the Neelys’ home kitchen. Porcine objects – pot holders, cookie jars, saltcellars, and ornaments – decorate the space. 26. Bazin (1973, 85). 27. Ray (2007, 50). The marriage of food and television began well before the 1960s. Child was not the first to pioneer cooking shows in the United States; in 1946, James Beard launched his own cooking show on television. With the aid of television, both Child and Beard brought French cooking into the domestic American home kitchen. 28. Barbas (2002, 43). 29. Ibid. 30. Sexual orientation needs to be considered as a key element of masculine belonging in the domestic kitchen. For example, Julier and Lindenfeld (2005, 2) argue that that male presence in the kitchen doesn’t necessarily “subvert deep cultural understandings of the gendered order,” but that “[t]he message is: Unless they’re chefs, straight guys, especially single straight guys, can’t cook.” 31. Pat’s would-be transgression of American manhood may also be mediated by his identity as a professional chef and successful restaurateur. As Joanne Hollows (2003) argues in her explora- tion of British food media giant, Jamie Oliver, the televisual construction of the male domestic cook is often predicated on the disavowal of his cooking as a type of domestic labor via the reinforcement of his status as a professional chef. 32. For more on the construction of gender in television cooking shows and within the “foodie” culture as well as the broader politics of gender and food see Baumann, Cairns, and Johnston (2010), Inness (2001), and Swenson (2009). For more about food, food performance, and fem-

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 ininity—“the culinary feminine”—see Lawson (2011), and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1999). For more about food television and the politics of representation see Ketchum (2005). 33. In American gastronomic consciousness, meat is an essential component of the symbolic diet of an imagined heteronormative masculinity. One’s taste for meat often translates into a signiﬁer of innate masculinity and one’s ability to cook it as marker of manly prowess. Men’s recipes in American cookbooks dating back to the 1920s illustrate this essentialist masculine rhetoric of the backyard barbeque as a decidedly masculine instrument and meat as a deﬁnitively manly food; see Neuhaus (2003). For more on the relationship between masculinity and food, particularly meat, see Sobal (2005). See also Julier and Lindenfeld (2005) and Adams (2004 and 1990). 34. Besides the Neelys, the only other black chef currently playing on the network is Sunny Ander- son. Past black chefs include Aaron McCargo, Jr., winner of season four of Food Network Star (2008) and host of the now defunct show Big Daddy’s House, which only ran to six episodes beginning in 2008. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 343

35. Still, I wonder, is there something about the space of the kitchen, as primary setting and its legacy of antebellum and post-bellum black domestic servitude, that might encourage this type of neo-minstrel black performance? 36. Scholars like Sut Jhally (1992) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1989) have long argued that the upper-middle-class status of the Huxtable family does not neutralize the systematic racism oper- ating on and off screen for black Americans. 37. Here I am drawing on Marx’s (1906) theory of commodity fetishism. 38. Theorizing “blackness-in/as-abjection,” Darieck Scott (2010,7–8) for example, has compel- lingly argued that “the history that produces blackness is a sexual history,” unveiling the “twin- ning of blackness and the sexual – the relentless, repetitive, sexualization of black bodies, the blackening of sexualized bodies.” The scholarly body of work documenting the social construction of blackness as libidinal, what Fanon might call a “fact of blackness,” is large and interdis- ciplinary, though black feminist scholarship in particular has long examined the complex entanglement between race, sexuality, gender, and power, contesting not only myth of black (female) hypersexuality, but also a kind of purported black female inhumanity. Some examples include: Carby (1987), Collins (1990, 2004), Davis (2002), Hammonds, (1994, 1997), hooks (1992), Harris-Perry (2011), and Spillers (1997). 39. Appadurai (1988, 3). 40. I employ the term “mainscreen” to communicate moving-image pornography’s transformation during the golden age from the margins to the main screen – a move from clandestinely screened stag films in private homes and fraternal organizations to large screens in public adult theaters nationwide. 41. In a 1973 New York Times article of the same name, writer Ralph Blumenthal attributes the birth of the pornochic trend to the crossover hit feature-length porn film Deep Throat which had become, “a premier topic of cocktail party and dinner table conversation in Manhattan drawing rooms, Long Island beach cottages, and ski country A-frames.” Though Blumenthal (1973)recognizes that “sexploitation gone beserk,” was, as a promenade down Manhattan’s 42nd Street would reveal, pre-Deep Throat, he rightly accredits the film with bringing a kind of new and improved pornography to mainstream audiences. Indeed, with its developed characters, humor, linear narrative plot, original musical score, and even special effects, it sold a different and artsier version of sex than 42nd Street, one that broader audiences could more safely consume. 42. For examples, see Dines (2010) and Paul (2005). 43. Bocuse (1977). 44. Barthes (1972, 78). 45. Ibid., 79. 46. Ibid., 78. 47. Ibid. 48. Cockburn (1977). 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid.

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 51. Debord (1995, 26). 52. For the remainder of this article, I use the terms food porn and gastro-porn interchangeably. 53. Bourdain (2001). 54. Keller (1999). 55. Multiple recipes in The French Laundry Cookbook require professional culinary tools and equipment that the average home cook does not own. For example, a recipe for “White Truffle-Infused Custards with Black Truffle Ragout” calls for an “egg cutter” to neatly sever the tops off the eggshells in preparation to fill with custard; see Keller (1999, 16). 56. Bourdain (2001). 57. In addition to being a “celebrity” chef and a James Beard Award Winner, Emeril John Lagasse (previous host of Emeril Live and Essence of Emeril), is an author, television food personality, and restaurateur. Notorious for his large penis, highly acclaimed, experienced, and renowned pornographic actor Ron Jeremy maintains a distinct mainstream cultural popularity as a kind 344 A. Cruz

of pornographic icon. Jeremy has starred in over 1700 pornographic films as well as appeared in 60 mainstream films. AVN Magazine ranks Jeremy on their “100 Top Porn Stars of All Time” list. For more see Jeremy’s personal website at http://www.ronjeremy.com and Jeremy (2007). 58. Raviv (2011, 292). 59. See Chan (2003, 48). More than two decades prior, Cockburn preempted this phenomenon with his mention of the “merging of person and product;” see Cockburn (1977). For lively discussion of the term food porn featuring some of eminent folks in food media and its study see McBride (2010). 60. In an article entitled “Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography,” Frederick Kaufman (2005) argues that the Food Network is a pioneer in televisual food porn. 61. The advent of cable television was somewhat belated in comparison to home video. In the late 1980s an estimated 60% of Americans owned VCRs while roughly 20% subscribed to cable television; see Lane III (2000). 62. Pay per view was an especially profitable realm of video pornography for cable retailers who were able to keep approximately 70% of the revenue generated from sales; see Schlosser (1997). 63. See Winton (1998). Besides greatly increasing the number of Americans consuming pornographic images inside their homes and hotel rooms across America, the technology of cable fueled the industry of pornography and reveals pornography’s salient place in the national economy. Profits from pornography are a major source of revenue for major cable companies like Time Warner, Cablevision Systems Corp, Continental Cablevision, and TeleCommunica- tions, Inc. Some of the main channels that offered pornography through cable in the video age were Playboy, Spice, Adam & Eve, Hot, and Adult Vision (Playboy’s pay-per-view service). A particularly large market in the mid to late 1990s (that continues to thrive today), was the hotel industry, which offers pornography videos to its guests through their television screens in the privacy of their own hotel rooms. Pornography becomes perhaps more acceptable in the confines of a hotel room, in which an individual or couple may be outside of her/his own realm, norms, and restraints, etc. In 1995 alone, Eric Schlosser (1997) notes that hotel guests nationwide spent over US$175 million on porn at large, at upscale hotel chains like Hilton, Hyatt, Holiday Inn and Sheraton. 64. Nayar (2010, 128). 65. See Freeman-Longo and Blanchard (1998). A 2005 report found that the majority of (the top six out the top 10) search terms on popular search engines were pornographic; see Nayar (2010, 128); see also Coopersmith (2006). There were approximately 68 million (25% of the total search-engine requests) pornographic search-engine requests per day in 2006. See “2006 and 2005 Pornography United States Industry Revenue Statistics,” http://internet-filter-review. toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html#anchor4 [Accessed 1 July 2008]. 66. Lane III (2000, 70). The adult-entertainment industry has consistently pushed the technology of the Internet, demanding state-of-the-art websites with high performance features and functions like faster, clearer, video, live video conferencing, crisper audio, and improved e-commerce (such as designing and perfecting some of the first password-protected private websites).

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 67. Internet pornography can be roughly separated into two categories: professional and user generated (tube), though this line is increasingly blurring. Professional websites exhibit material chosen, produced, and edited by professionals in the adult-entertainment industry, while user- generated websites traditionally feature content – entire videos, video clips, still photographs, and textual material – uploaded by public users, usually (but not exclusively) amateur. Unlike professional websites, which charge monthly membership fees, user-generated websites acquire revenue solely from advertising, offering products, and passing trafﬁc to other websites for a fee. User-generated tube sites (for example, redube.com, xtube.com, youporn.com, pornhub.com, for example) are immensely popular; Forbes magazine recently ranked youporn.com and pornhub.com among the top 100 websites in the world; see Chiang (2009). 68. In the 1980s, the silver age of pornography, video enabled a democratization of pornography decreasing production and distribution costs. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 345

69. Distributed to more than 96 million US households and averaging more than 7 million web site users monthly, Food Network maintains headquarters in New York City and offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Knoxville. Food Network can be seen internationally in Canada, Australia, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Monaco, Andorra, Africa, France, and the French-speaking territories in the Caribbean and Polynesia. For more visit www.foodnetwork.com. 70. Visit http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/patrick-and-gina-neely/buttermilk-slaw-recipe/ index.html to access the Neely’s Buttermilk Slaw recipe and reviews. For Neely’s Chicken and Dumplings recipe and reviews visit http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/patrick-and- gina-neely/neelys-chicken-and-dumplings-recipe/index.html 71. See http://www.foodporn.com, http://www.foodporn.net/ and http://skinnygourmet.blogspot. com/2008/02/what-is-food-porn.html, Monday, 18 February 2008 [Accessed 19 July 2011]. 72. According to the Skinny Gourmet, the “pornographic aesthetic” is achieved through compo- sitional devices like framing, orientation, object choice, and “short depth of field and artful light;” for more see Ibid. 73. Wilson (1998, 113). 74. Ibid., 113, 116, 118. 75. “Get Down Tonight” a Billboard Hot 100 song released in 1975 by KC and the Sunshine Band, launched the phrase “get down,” as moniker for sexual intercourse, into the mainstream popular lexicon. In the chorus, the band sings “do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.” 76. Wilson (1998, 113). 77. The foodnetwork.com audience’s median household income is US$72,705. Distributed to over 9 million households in the United States and averaging more than 7 million website users monthly, Foodnetwork.com boasts an affluent, educated, tech savvy (access to internet and ownership of a personal computer), and increasingly younger US audience. For more see foodnetwork.com. 78. Identifying taste as a critical cultural capital reflective of one’s social positioning, Bourdieu (1984) explores the linkages between food and class. He reveals how our taste for particular foods may have less to do with gustation and flavor, and more to do with the economy of cultural goods and the function of taste as an indicator of class status. Taste is thus a kind of instrument of power. Long before Bourdieu, the classed origin of taste was by demonstrated by Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser (1951). Raymond Williams (1980, 46) identifies taste to be “the earliest stage of consumption theory.” 79. In her foreword to the book Food Network celebrity chef and host, Paula Deen, describes Pat as “the kind of guy they’d want to hang out and have a few beers with” and Gina as “no shrinking violet and as spicy as the hot sauce they were shaking all over those ribs;” see Neely (2009, viii). 80. Neely (2009, 15). 81. Ibid., 113. Such rhetoric of sexual seduction through food is corroborated with recipes like “Get Yo’ Man Chicken” about which Gina warns potential chefs that its scent is so intoxicating that: “The minute your man walks in the house and gets a whiff, well, it’s game over (you may not

Downloaded by [67.6.132.41] at 11:00 13 December 2014 even make it to the dinner table hon!);” ibid., 158. 82. In addition to the Neelys’ display of a holistic black love and moored family, they also work to correct televisually perpetrated mythology of black people as indolent with demonstration of a hard “work ethic.” Pat and Gina Neely write about their shared “work ethic” in their ﬁrst book, see Neely (2009, 13). 83. Reality shows like Basketball Wives and The Real Housewives of Atlanta illustrate the combative, verbal, and physical “nature” of black womanhood. 84. See Alexander (2009). See also Jones (2006) and Johnson (2010). The successful heterosexual black women’s single status was the topic of an ABC News Television Nightline “Face-Off” on 21 April 2010. On the show, Sherri Shepherd, co-host of ABC’s The View, and Jacque Reid, star of VH1’s Let’s Talk About Pep, debate CSI star Hill Harper, and Jimi Izrael, author of The Denzel Principle. For more visit http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/nightline-black- women-single-marriage/story?id=10424979. 346 A. Cruz

85. Brueckner and Nitsche (2009). For more on the low marriage and high divorce rates of black people in the United States due to black women’s social advancement, see Banks (2011). 86. See “Marriage, Family on the Decline for Highly Educated black Women,” Yale Ofﬁce of Public Affairs & Communication, 8 Aug. 2009 http://opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6815 [Accessed 10 October 2010]. 87. See Izrael (2010). 88. Chapter IV of The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (also known as the Moynihan Report) entitled “The Tangle of Pathology” analyzes black matriarchy, “the reversed roles of husband and wife,” as the root cause of the failure of the black family, including high rates of poverty, delinquency, crime, and educational deﬁciency of black youth; see Moynihan (1965). 89. To watch the video clip, visit http://www.foodnetwork.com/grilled-chicken-with-alabama- white-bbq-sauce/video/index.html. 90. Hall (1981, 233). 91. Neely (2009, front cover).

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