The Queer Food Politics of Farmers' Markets

• In Event: Precarity and Food Justice: Queering Agrarianism, Communal Kitchens, Farmers’ Markets, and Local Foods Movements

Abstract

The costs of American food production, including corporate agriculture, unethical and unsanitary livestock management, and wasteful aestheticism have prompted many to search for alternatives. For some, opportunities for rethinking individual and collective consumption practices are found at the local farmers' market. While these institutions offer resistance to capitalist food systems, they are also caught in neoliberal rhetorics of individuality that divide and prevent community and alliance building. Reviving earlier ecofeminist calls for feminist attention to environmental politics, I argue queering food politics offers resistance to precarity’s vulnerabilities and further enables the positives of precarity, such as affective resistance and coalition-building.

Presenter

• Katherine Schweighofer, Dickinson College