Adams, Carol

Ainley, Rosa

Allison, Dorothy

Antje Lindenmeyer

Bartkowski, Frances

Bynum, Caroline Walker

Carlston, Erin

Chernin, Kim

Chinosole

Delphy, Christine

Dowler, Elizabeth

Fiddes, Nick

Grass, Gunter

Hallett, Nicky

Healey, Emma

Hinds, Hilary

hooks, bell

Hughes, M.

Lindenmeyer, Antje

Livia, Anna

Lorde, Audre

Lupton, Deborah

McPhee, John

Money, John

Probyn, Elspeth

Rossetti, Christina

Smith, Ali

Visser, Margaret

Willetts, Anna

Winterson, Jeanette

Zimmerman, Bonnie

English

Food and its emotional and political significance pervades autobiographical writing by lesbians. This article traces the connections between food, sexuality and identity through four exemplary texts - Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Audre Lorde's Zami, Dorothy Allison's 'A Lesbian Appetite' and Anna Livia's 'Tongues or Fingers' - where food is crucial in both defining and contesting lesbian identity, sexuality and community. Food memories and histories are portrayed as constitutive of the self, reaching back to childhood and images of 'home'. On the other hand, they are also related to the social context of class inequalities and gendered hierarchies. Within these autobiographical narratives, food both constitutes and expresses a sense of self, playing a crucial part in the construction of the writers' complex, multi-layered narratives of identity

Lindenmeyer, A.

University of Birmingham Research Portal

'Lesbian appetites':Food, sexuality and community in feminist autobiography

Crossref

‘Lesbian Appetites’: Food, Sexuality and Community in                 Feminist Autobiography

Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository

[1994]) Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,

5 This blurring of boundaries has been disturbing even to lesbian feminists: Anna Livia

6 For US-American readers, ‘granola’ is still redolent of the Puritanism of the Kellogg brothers. The maverick sexologist John Money

7 Probyn refers here to bell hooks chapter ‘Eating the Other’ in black looks

8 According to Christina Jarvis

A Lesbian Appetite. In: Trash: Stories and Poems,

accessed on 16

also my article (2001) on autobiographies by three daughters of immigrants, which briefly outlines the relationship between Caribbean/African ancestry and lesbian identity in Audre Lorde’s use of fruit imagery.

Audre Lorde and Matrilineal

Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities,

Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies,

Feasts, Fasts, Famine: Food for Thought,

Feminist Utopias,

Fingers or Tongues. In:

Food and Culture: A Reader,

Food and Poverty: Insights from the ‘North’. Development Policy Review 21: 5-6, 531-736 Fiddes,

Food, the Body and the Self, London: Sage

Fruits of the Soil: Botanical Metaphors in Caribbean Literature.

Holy Fast and Holy Feast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,

Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/Biography

Lesbian Sex Wars,

Much Depends On Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Culture and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal,

My Cypriot Cookbook: Re-imagining My Ethnicity.

Orangen, ‘Unnatural Passions’ und das Autobiographische in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In: Grewe-Volpp,

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach. In: Munt, S. (Ed.) New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf hooks, b.

recalls that when the television drama based on Oranges was first screened, one tabloid journalist fantasised about a version with a cast of Page Three models where ‘melons are not the only fruit’ (166).

Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature,

The Consuming Fruit: Oranges, Demons and Daughters.

The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegetarian Theory,

The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women’s Cookbooks.

World Literature Written in

Zami and the Politics of Plural Identity.

'Lesbian appetites' : food, sexuality and community in feminist autobiography

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/251/2/WRAP_Lindenmeyer_food_article_revised_version.pdf

'Lesbian appetites' : food, sexuality and community in feminist autobiography

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University of Birmingham Research Portal

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University of Birmingham Research Portal

Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository

Crossref