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Gut cultures: fat matter(s) in genealogies of health, nation, and empire

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Gut cultures: fat matter(s) in genealogies of health, nation, and empire

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GUT CULTURES:
FAT MATTER(S) IN GENEALOGIES OF HEALTH, NATION, AND EMPIRE

by

Athia Nahar Choudhury

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

AUGUST 2022

Copyright 2022 Athia N. Choudhury

ii
Acknowledgements

This document is a reflection of many different versions of a life come together. The act of
writing this dissertation has been one of learning to hold the cacophonous contradictions
negotiated between my past and future selves (whom were not always helpful but still cute in her
relentless efforts), with old traumas and new ones, with rest and play, with much grief and even
more laughter. A lot of life happens between the space of a Ph.D. and I have been lucky to have
lived mine so well because of the big heartedness of my kin and co-conspirators. To thank them
is to shout out into a great big void, boldly and joyously, that my little slice of living in a world
so wide has been made more vibrant through our touching.

To my committee: I have been lucky to learn and grow alongside such brilliance and can only
hope to emulate the excellence and mentorship I’ve witnessed from you all firsthand.

Maca, I will always remember how during admit week, in a moment when I was overwhelmed
with the magnitude of the decision I just made, you approached me and said that you were happy
I decided to come to USC. That small gesture, the warmth of your presence, set me at ease. It
would be in your course the next year where I would learn to stand in my own light. Thank you
for making room at the table for me.

Kyla—you teach me to be brave and unapologetic, to know my worth and take up space without
shame or pretense. I am always in awe of not only the way you command a room with your sheer
brilliance and power, but how committed you are to kicking open doors for those coming in after
you. Our weird brains are kindred and how lucky am I, that I get to know and think with you.

Dorinne, I cannot thank you enough for all the ways you have stepped up for me over the years.
You continue to teach me lessons about the strength in vulnerability. The great care and
precision you’ve given to my work as a close reader has allowed me to become a sharper thinker.
Thank you for being my advocate.

Neetu—you are a dream. You have been my rock, my fiercest champion, my closest interlocutor
through all these years. You see the shape of this work for what it can be, even in its mess and
fractures. Your belief in me forced me to believe in myself—because obviously you’re always
right. Thank you for pushing me dive deeper, to get to the more interesting questions, to slow
down and keep doing the work.

I have had the immense privilege to learn from and work with the incredible faculty at USC,
including Nayan Shah, Kara Keeling, Jack Halberstam, Viet Nguyen, John Rowe, Sarah
Gualtieri, Lanita Jacobs, and Francille Wilson. I would have been utterly lost without the
guidance of ASE support staff, Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez. Thank you to
my undergraduate mentors, Shelley Park, Meredith Tweed, and Fayeza Hasanat for opening the
world of academia to me. You were right that this would not be an easy path but thank you for
guiding me through the ups and downs when I didn’t even have a sense for how little I knew. I
would also like to thank the University of Southern California and the Wallis Annenberg
Fellowship which allowed me to complete my research in a timely manner.

iii
I feel I was fated to meet my brilliant femme of color cohort who filled my days with so much
joy and beauty—Heidi Amin-Hong, Nicole Diop-Richards, and honorary member Cristina
Faiver-Serna. I could not have crafted such a dynamic project if not for the vibrant intellectual
community in ASE and at USC, particularly Emmet Harris-Dragger, Rebekah Garrison, Chris
Chien, Avvirin Gray, Viola Lasmana, Jenny Hoang, Angela Kim, Rocio Leon, Teraya
Peramehta, and Michelle Ruiz, Sanders Bernstein, Nicola Chávez, and Dillon Song.

To my big fat network of dear friends and colleagues of the Center for Fat Liberation and
Scholarship—I owe you a great deal of thanks for keeping me on my toes, gifting me your time,
and making the work seem possible. I would especially like to thank the late and beloved Cat
Pausè, who brought us all together. I have been lucky be in community with many incredible
scholars whom I met at various talks, presentations, and academic conferences over the years,
particularly the American Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, and
National Women’s Studies Association. I’m thankful to have cultivated friendships with, Aimee
Bahng, Rachel Lee, Leigh-Anna Hidalgo, Caleb Luna, Sonalee Rashatwar, Rachel Fox, Sami
Schalk, Chad Shomura, Marquisele Mercedes, among many others.

My close circle of friends, Nicole Diop-Richards, Sylvie Lydon, Heidi-Amin Hong, Sam
Ikehara, Huan He, Keva Bui, Kris, Avery Everhart, Matt, and Ly Nguyen—are all forces of pure
power, chaos, and unimaginable love. Who would I be if not for our k-town coffee shop dates
(featuring more gossip than writing), very off-key karaoke sessions, long and winding
conversations, hours of reading/writing/being with each other’s work, and the many tears and
many laughs in between? I am so proud of you all for the softness you bring to the world.

To my childhood friends who were my first teachers in how to be unapologetically bold and
joyous: much love to Pierce Dayuta and Alan Yepez for reminding me to be brave. Adriana
Nieves, my beautiful and brilliant friend, was my first ever writing partner and remains, to this
day, one of my fiercest interlocutors and closest readers, always reminding me about the power
of creating beautiful things.

My family is the center of it all—cultivating my strength, vision, and growth. My parents, Abdul
M. Choudhury and Aoythip Choudhury have always been in my corner, even when it wasn’t
easy for them. We have passed through physical and psychic distances to hold all the shapes of
ourselves, to learn how to come to one another as we are. Thank you for loving me and learning
to say it out loud. Thank you to my siblings Asima Choudhury, Vera Gadd, Attitarn Vihan, and
Bobby Choudhury for being simultaneously the best and the worst. I thank Asima for reminding
me to be silly, powerful, and grounding in me in what’s important. Vera was the first to think up
this wild dream of me being a professor, gifted in an inscription she wrote in a grammar book
many years ago, of all things, and has been in my corner from day one. My aunts and uncles,
especially Rungrawee and Vason Poontanglang, have been central fixtures throughout my life
and I am grateful for their great care. Thank you to Susan and Kyle Shirley for welcoming me
into their home and always believing in me. It’s been a joy to reconnect with my dear cousin,
Zirwat Chowdhury—thank you for nourishing me in all the ways. Penny: auntie loves you.

Russell, you are my favorite leap of faith; I would bet on us every time. Thank you for knowing
how to love me so well.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………...………………………………………………………ii
List of Figures……………………………………...………………………….……......…….…..iii
Abstract…………………………………………………………...…….……… ……….………..v
Preface: a life measured……………………………...…………………………………....…….viii

Introduction

Genealogies of Excess: Towards a Decolonial Body Politic………………..…………………….1

Chapter 1: Appetites of Capacity

Milky Appetites: On the Imperial Production of Fat-Free Futurity……………..…..…...45

Chapter 2: Metabolizing the Self

The Making of the American Calorie and Metabolic Personhood…………..…………..96

Chapter 3: Feeding Asians

Devouring the Inscrutable: Eating Asians on the Internet and the Politics of
Enfleshment……………………………………………………………………………135

Coda
Political Fitness and the Microbiopolitical……………………………………………..181

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………191

v
List of Figures

1.1 “MILKPARTY” still from YouTube
1.2 “A good Steer and a Runt” Mohler, John R. "Runts--and the Remedy" (1921): 225-240
2.1 “Composition of Food Materials” chart (Hunt and Atwater 1916) US Dept of
Agriculture/internet archive
2.2 Image from Hygeia magazine, 1936-06: Vol 12 Issue 6, Internet Archive
2.3 “Before and After Eleanor Roosevelt’s Redesign" White House Kitchen, The Library of
Congress.
3.1 Still from "Crazy Rich Asians" 32:05
3.2 “The Average Asian Aging Process https://imgur.com/gallery/OcRKK
3.3 "Cookie Portrait of Afong May" by Jasmine Cho for NPR

vi
Abstract
This dissertation argues that 20
th
century U.S. public health policies and transnational
cultural practices around fatness and fat consumption chart a transformation of colonial
sensibilities of race and gender into empirical data sets on health, eugenics, and evolutionary
potential. Turning to the obscured relationship between modern conceptions of health in the U.S.
and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures across Asia/n diaspora and North
America, this project reframes contemporary debates about gastrocolonialism that
overemphasize how the disruption of native foodways through U.S. foreign food aid produces fat
bodies and obesity comorbidities. Instead, Gut Cultures considers how health, as discourse and
ideological export, produces global consumers whose “choices” are racially coded as a means to
measure civility and the microbiopolitical capacities of self-governance as foundational to
competing and emergent nationalisms.
In analyzing diasporic literature, political protests, autoethnography, and visual and sonic
performances from cultural workers such as Vivek Shreya, Ocean Vuong, the Sad Asian Girls
Club, and Mukbang content creators (amongst others), supplemented with archival materials
from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration, and early 20
th
century
dietetics and home economics projects, Gut Cultures analyzes how representations of the gut and
eating come to delineate the boundaries of the human and the directions in which flesh spills
wayward. The chapters explore the military and weight-loss circuits of powdered/skim milk, the
American calorie and the productive power of metabolic personhood, and performances of
Asians eating on the internet.

vii
Transnational food scholars have studied the impact of American empire on global food
systems through the framework of neoliberalism while scholars of race and medicine have
charted how “medicalization” of the body is not a neutral category for indexing human
difference, but one fraught with complicated histories of race, empire, and subjugation.
However, there is little scholarship that examines the racial and gendered processes embedded
within epistemologies of health through the aesthetics of nutritional science. Working at this
nexus demonstrates slippages from the epidermal to the epidemiological, where previous means
of defining one’s place in society through colonial intimacies and stratifications—like plantation
hierarchies, Casta Systems, miscegenation laws— took on new sensory logics in a
decolonializing world. With the rise of the Third World nation state came a new optic and
rhetoric for denoting scales of racial difference as empirical data on health and fitness.
This dissertation brings the specificities of cross-hemispheric analysis to the fantasy of
health as an individual pursuit while marking the limits of neoliberalism as an analytic
framework for our contemporary epoch. Developing critical language at the intersection of
aesthetics, performance, and the material world allows us to confront the interlocking violences
of exclusion and punishment that make home on our bodies so that we might reach towards new
or forgotten sensations.

viii
Preface
a life measured

Between here and then

you convinced yourself that your desires
were bigger than a belly ought to be
that you had an obscene kind of hunger—
you could swallow a lesser man whole.

You started shrinking the lines on your palms
cutting down the loudness of your stare
you crunched the body little
only letting in half-breathes and small bites

you forgot the shape of (fullness)

the skin learns to take orders from a gesture,
the points on a wrinkled forehead,
a rogue laugh ricocheted between yellowed gap teeth
etch a bigger home on your back
coating the tenderness of your tips
raw, swelling, stung.

--

Hauntology of the Teaspoon
Kin pĕn h
̄ ịm? was a familiar refrain in our family home in the U.S. and the Bangkok of
my girlhood. It’s a colloquialism with two translations: “Do you know how to eat [this]?” and
“Have you eaten this before?” Aunties, street vendors, visiting overseas relatives often ask kin
pĕn h
̄ ịm while offering you something to eat, something they assume as unfamiliar to your
palette—a measure of your Thai-ness by the mouthful. Do you know how to eat? cuts to
something sharp; it associates the naming of the self via bodily functions with an ability to
recognize taste and texture alongside pleasure and digestion. What does your stomach know?
What can your gut handle? Have you been here before? When the question is followed by an

ix
affirmative answer, you are rewarded with a surprised sense of delight: aho kin kèng māk! (what
an excellent eater!).
I was always an excellent eater. When we would spend summers in the humid Thai
cityscape of my mom’s childhood, I’d walk to the morning markets with my grandparents to get
our breakfast of soy milk served in plastic baggies and ba tong go dipped in condensed milk.
When we were back home in the States, I would crawl up to the attic with my grandma—her
only private sanctuary in a house that was stuffed with three generations of kin. We’d sit cross-
legged in front of her gilded shrine as she cut up little pieces of durian candy or peeled the sticky
green pandan layers of khanom chan for me, either gossiping about the adult drama of the world
downstairs or sitting in silence until the incense burned down to ash.
The kitchen was the center of activity in our home, though no one used recipes. I rarely
saw the grown-ups in my life reach towards the measuring cups, teaspoons, and scales that
populate my own adult kitchen. Ours was a place for grandmas and uncles soaking glass noodles,
simmering red lentils, and deep-frying whole snapper in chili sauce through muscle-memory.
Stocks were made with veggie scraps you found lying about from someone else’s meal, you’d
pound spices and ginger and garlic in the khok until it looked right, and the curry and kaffir
leaves had sweated properly only when the whole first floor started coughing from the fumes.
When I watched my family cook in the busy kitchen, often scattered throughout the day as
different people worked odd hours, there was a rhythm to it. Everyone tasted, touched, and
improvised with what was in season or within reach. Cooking was a repetition where, with
enough practice, you could learn the weight of salt and turmeric by the tips of your fingers. Kin
pĕn h
̄ ịm, knowing how a thing tasted and felt extended to the ways of the kitchen. The silver-

x
plated teaspoons in our home were used exclusively for cough syrup and stirring in lumps of
white sugar into pots of chai.
--
In “On Old and New Identities,” Stuart Hall writes: “people like me who came to
England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically we have been here for
centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the
sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are
thousands of others beside me that are …the cup of tea itself.”
1
Writing on how the diasporic
subject is present in the West long before their bodies arrive through formal processes of
migration and what economists and scholars would come to name as globalization in the 20
th

century, Hall complicates the notion that Western culture developed in discrete, cohesive ways
separate from colonized bodies and colonial labor. Rather, the images he conjures are immediate
and intertwining, alluding to a feeling of heaviness and aching. The sugar sits at the bottom of
the cup; the sugar is heavier than the liquid; the sugar has failed to dissolve; the sugar is coated
and surrounded and yet still remains unchangeable. What does it feel like to crawl into the teeth
of Empire’s children, rotting them from within, when you didn’t ask to be here? What does it
feel like to make home when your body is the problem? Hall offers us a glimpse at what it means
to feel a history: as muddled, within, and living.
Intimate and entangled in the mouth and stomach, the materialist histories and affective
residues we can track through sugar, the plantation, and tea itself emphasizes the primacy of
embodiment and perception in our everyday archives—“what does anyone in the world know
about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea?”
2
—

1
Hall, “Old and New,” 48.
2
Ibid, 49

xi
wherein subjectivity and the familiar terrains we perceive can limit or illuminate the stories that
not only sit parallel to each other but co-produce ideologies of the self and Other. Hall gestures
to the slipping, sliding loop from imbuing and imbibing through degrees of contact, from
Jamaican sugar plantations to the tea gardens of Sri Lanka and India, inviting critical
investigation into these nexuses.
Over the past few decades, Postcolonial Food Studies has taken up the sugar, the
plantation, and even the tea itself.
3
The field offers dynamic tools for thinking through the
history of food consumption, appetite-formation, and the (un)making of the self as a not-quite-
enclosed subject/object by studying mundane forms of imperial, racial, and state violence. Part of
its work, then, is to situate why we reach towards the foods we do and what cultural, political,
and historical influences come to inhabit our practices of eating. Postcolonial Food Studies
names the processes of colonial labor and extraction that commingle in the gut and take hold
through memory and story. However, I find myself wondering not about the sugar or the tea, but
about the teaspoon that perches in the periphery of Hall’s metaphor. As a household object that
maps colonial flows of power and the emergence of quotidian scientific discourse, the intimacies
of power, representation, and desire reveal themselves through the hauntology of the teaspoon.
Where could we end up if we sought to name the ways that the life of a gut is trained, hailed,
scaled, and counted?
Though versions of teaspoons have been crafted since antiquity—often gifted to babies as
symbols of status and portable wealth during the Roman empire—the first printed record of the
teaspoon as we recognize it today can be found in a 1686 issue of the London Gazette in a

3
For examples, see: Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar; Wazana-Tompkins, “Sweetness, Capacity,
and Energy,” 849-856; Minz, Sweetness and Power; Behal, Power Structure, Discipline, and Labour in
Assam Tea Plantations; Varma, Coolie Acts and the Acting Coolies; Karlsson, “The Imperial Weight of
Tea,” 105-114; Sharma, “‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labor, and the Assam Tea Industry,” 1287-1324.

xii
fugitive slave advertisement.
4
Nestled in the advertisement section in between a search for a lost
pocketbook and a string of pearls, the two-paragraph advert details a list of missing items: a set
of candlesticks and snuffers, three gilded teaspoons, and a 15-year-old enslaved boy. Though
fewer in number than the tens of thousands of U.S. fugitive slave ads from the 1800s that have
been widely documented and studied (as its own genre with specific aesthetic forms), British
slave ads tended to have the enslaved body recede into the background while offering a stronger
sense of detail to “lost” objects.
5
These lost and found advertisements offer a glimpse into public
life for the London elite, of the objects that cluster in the quotidian and reframes the familiar
interior of the English home as inextricably linked with slave plantations and commodity circuits
of the tea and sugar trade in the far off corners of the world. The “teaspoon” in the lost and found
ad then, marks a portable currency—in literal capital and affect, the commodity desires of
empire—as an object that promises relief and freedom to a body made in and through
objecthood, the stolen boy who steals the spoon. As the British amassed wealth through colonial
extraction, tea and sugar were made accessible in everyday households and the techniques and
etiquette for steeping, brewing, and drinking emerged to cohere an imperial identity and scales of
class stratification.
6
The simultaneity of the industrialization and codification of the apothecary
measurement of the teaspoon (as 5 drams) is reflected in standardization of a teaspoon that
accurately measures an expertise in flavor profile.

4
London Gazette, Advertisements, 1689, printed by Tho: Newcomb in Savoy.
5
This information on British Fugitive Slave advertisements came to light under the “Runaways” project
supported by the Leverhulme Trust, Schole of the Humanities, and College of Arts of the University of
Glasgow and can be found here: https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/. For more on the distinct genre of
American Fugitive Slave ads, see: Walser, Hannah. “Under Description: The Fugitive Slave
Advertisement as Genre.” American Literature 92, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 61–89.
6
Fromer, Julie E. “‘Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant’: Representations of English National Identity In
Victorian Histories of Tea,” Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 2 (2008): 531–47.

xiii
Across the Atlantic, earliest mentions of the teaspoon in the New York Times in the 1800s
were in relation to European interest stories: as in letters from abroad detailing quaint settings, in
scandalous court-cases about stolen goods, and most notably in articles about the emerging
metric system that promised to streamline industry and economy.
7
One news report about a
husband on trial for poisoning his wife included details from the medical examiner’s testimony
where he described the trace amounts of arsenic scooped out of the victim: a teaspoon of the
body’s viscera.
8
Another documented the conditions of a Southern prison during the Civil War
alongside prison rations.
9
In these later instances, the teaspoon did not function as an artifact of
colonial tea culture, but surfaced a medicinal and scientific signification of precise forms of
measurement. There is an assumption that readers were beginning to recognize what a teaspoon
looked like and that public media helped to cultivate an understanding of its scale as an applied
science.
By the late 1800s and early 1900s, the teaspoon would feature in household guides,
recipe books, dietetic writings, and child-rearing pamphlets where scales and measurements
became the cornerstone of the domestic science movement that sought to carve out white
women’s role in the making of American life during the age of scientification. The teaspoon had
all but shed its association with the racial politics of the plantation as it entered the U.S. context,
and it is within that tension and transformation— between imperial and scientific form—that this
project lingers. While much of the thinking around race, foodways, and colonialism is often
limited to examining how indigenous bodies and global foodways were transformed and made
sick, fat, and dysfunctional with the introduction of industrial, fatty, and processed foods, this

7
Felton, “Lectures: Proposed Extension of the Decimal System.” New York Times, Feb 1856.
8
“Trial of James Stephens for the Murder of his Wife by Poison.” New York Times, March 1859.
9
“Returned from the Southern Prisons.” New York Times, Oct 1864.

xiv
line of inquiry fails to connect to the primacy of healthism in the 20
th
century to discourses of
racialization, citizenship, and the human. My own body knows that one of the more insidious
culinary exports of U.S. eating culture is the diet-food industry and the logics of dieting as
wellness.
--
We would learn to measure in the spoonful in what I think of as the after-time, after the
family broke off from one house to several small apartments— after my grandma, the matriarch,
died in a car accident that would leave my mom mentally shattered and forever in chronic pain,
after the burden of my fat body became too much for my mother to handle alone. My parents
took me to a state-funded dietician for the first time; I was twelve and my body was not changing
in the right directions. My stubborn roundness and excellent eating had gone from a point of
pride to a cause for alarm.
Before meeting with the dietician, I was supposed to keep a logbook of all the things I ate
that week. I had never seen a diet worksheet before and tried to fill in the empty blocks with the
names of foods I knew how to spell in my crooked Thaiglish: Kị̀ s̄ atéa, K
̄ ĥāwh
̄ enīyw mam
̀ wng,
S
̄ ̄̂ mtả. The dietician—a clean-cut, thin, white woman with a pronounced clavicle and elegant
hands— read my diet log with such a look of bewilderment and unyielding concern. I could
sense how small my parents felt. What did she assume about the foods she could not name and
how eating these things made a dangerous home on my body?
I watched as she brought out measuring devices—plastic white nestling cups and
spoons—as she explained to me what a quarter cup of Special K looked like.
Most mornings, I just eat right out of the measuring cups.
2 teaspoons of low-fat peanut butter on whole wheat will keep you full until lunch.

xv
She then went through the foods I’d listed one by one, asking, what’s in that? while
peppering in thoughtful nods.
It’s best to stick to foods that you know what’s in them. You want to eat things with good
nutritional value that you can track and calculate for calories per serving.
The foodways of our home were soon transformed by the measurable. Ghee and butter
were replaced with margarine. Freshly boiled and strained soy milk was switched out for non-fat
dairy cartons. Clay pots of mishti doi were replaced with 100 calorie low-fat Yoplait. We read
every food label, shopped at the American groceries, and bought the expensive diet snacks that
never actually let you feel full. The nestled cups and measuring spoons became a fixture in our
kitchen; they hover in my home today. Kin pĕn h
̄ ịm? and kin kèng māk took on whole new
meanings, re-organizing a life of knowing how to eat to one of knowing how to eat well. What
does your stomach know? Where have you been?
The collection of gut cultural objects and flesh-writings I offer throughout this project—
as a promiscuous constellation of literary, philosophical, historical, and performance archives
that expound the pedagogical practices of the microbiopolitical—seek to traverse the disquiet
and mistranslations found in a life measured. What follows is an act of deep love for all the ways
I have held my body to account, as a problem, as a future tense in waiting, as an ancestor’s
daydream and a mother’s nightmare. The work is necessarily too big and too small all at once as
I am finding my side-ways through to remember the many feelings of fullness again.
--
touching gnawing boldness
crack the earth with your lips
to know the way she was (full) once too

the toughness
that pools

xvi
around wrists
will chip
with gentle work

you expand

become large and looming, an otherworldling
eight feet tall and just as cavernous
your reflection doesn’t fit in a mirror anymore;
you can only see yourself in wider things
the tides at swelling time
a pleasure-sigh

you come to us in dreams
how hard it is to look at you
they call you many porcelain names
an old story, a ferocious honesty
an ornament of lack
they haven’t witnessed the breadth of you unburied
when you no longer ask for simply enough.

Introduction
Genealogies of Excess: Towards a Decolonial Body Politics

This is the world in which I move uninvited, profane on a sacred land, neither me nor
mine, but me nonetheless. The story began long ago…it is old. Older than my body, my
mother’s, my grandmother’s. For years we have been passing it on, so that our daughters
and granddaughters may continue to pass it on. So that it may become larger than its
proper measure, always larger than its own in-significance.

Trinh Min-Ha, Woman, Native, Other

Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

Bah! You didn’t bring us spirit. We already knew of the existence of spirit. We always
act in accordance with spirit. What you brought us was the body.

Boesoou, in Maurice Leenhardt’s Do Kamo:
Person and Myth in the Melanesian

before we begin…
When did you first learn to be uneasy in your body? That you are, indeed, wrapped up in
flesh and culture—a kind of low-fi time machine which inhabits your senses, moves you from
time to place, from here to then? When did you learn to feel the limits of someone else’s appetite
on your skin? How did you learn all the ways that your body can be a problem? This dissertation
picks at the neurosis of wellness-making as nation-making, where the boundaries between body
sovereignty and liberal humanism remain unsettled despite their ever-persistent marks on eating
cultures and the technologies of the home and kitchen. This project is about the grammar of
racial-fat matters in the transnational imagination; it is about how bodily vernaculars curve
around each of us in the everyday. I gesture to you, reader, to evoke the work we must do

2
together to get free, to allow you to recognize how you are in this work with me as well.
--
Gut Cultures
Gut Cultures unearths a critical genealogy for the emergence of “health” as a vital
dimension to U.S. and Third World nation-building and emergent feelings of nationalism
beginning in the mid-20th century. This dissertation turns to the obscured relationship between
modern conceptions of health in the U.S. and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures
across Asia/n diaspora and North America. In it, I read a promiscuous constellation of literary,
philosophical, historical, and performance archives that center the microbiopolitical afterlives of
food and eating. Heather Paxson refers to “microbiopolitics” in her study of the raw milk and
cheese industry as the negotiations between farm workers, cheesemakers, food microbiologists,
safety regulators, retailers, and consumers working in multiple ways to reconcile the difference
between the Pasteurian (hygiene) and post-Pasteurian (probiotic) ideologies that have shaped
public and scientific feelings towards the morality and safety of consuming raw milk.
10
Thinking
alongside Paxson’s articulation of scales of work, ideology, and power through the microbiome,
my project turns to how food and eating cultures–through its various transnational forms–is an
intimacy scaled across multiple dimensions of body-workers, national projects, and scientific
labor(ers). Developing critical language at the intersections of aesthetics, performance, and the
material world, this dissertation confronts the interlocking violences of exclusion and
punishment that make home on our bodies so that we might reach towards new or forgotten
sensations. In the historical flashpoint that I traverse—from the military and weight-loss circuits

10
Paxson, Heather. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. California Studies in Food
and Culture, v. 41. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

3
of powdered/skim milk during World War II, to the mid-century home economics movement that
popularized vernacular use of the calorie, and the historic and contemporary images and
performances of eating and hunger in Asia/n diasporic culture works—fat matters surface as an
affect and logic for understanding how “health” materializes as a set of relations shaped by
colonialism, racialization, and gendering.
Transnational food scholars have studied the impact of American empire on global food
systems through such frameworks of neoliberalism and necolonialism,
11
while scholars of race
and medicine have charted how “medicalization” of the body is not a neutral category for
indexing human difference, but one fraught with complicated histories of race, empire, and
subjugation.
12
However, there is little scholarship that examines the racial and gendered
processes embedded within epistemologies of health through the aesthetics of nutritional science.
Working at this nexus demonstrates slippages from the epidermal to the epidemiological, where
previous means of defining one’s place in society through colonial intimacies and
stratifications—like plantation hierarchies, Casta Systems, miscegenation laws—took on new
sensory logics in a decolonializing world.
Where certain strains of posthumanist critique hypothesis a deracinated world via the rise

11
See: Avakian, Arlene Voski, and Barbara Haber, eds. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies:
Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005;
Mannur, Anita. “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora.” MELUS 32, no. 4 (2007):
11–31; Padoongpatt, Mark. Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America. American
Crossroads. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017); Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick
Errington. Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands, 2010; Ku, Robert Ji-Song, ed. Eating
Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
12
For a sampling of such works, see: Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco’s Chinatown. American Crossroads 7. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the
Philippines. (Duke University Press, 2006); Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
(New York; Chesham: New York University Press, 2010); Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public
Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. (University of California Press, 2019).

4
of precision medicine,
13
Rachel Lee notes how the progressive speculation of a post-racial world
wrought on by the advances in scientific knowledges around the human genome and microbiome
are woefully askew. She writes:
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the bioscience’s repatterning of life at the
molecular level has raised the question of whether epidermal racial categories will
continue as operative terms in population management, as key channels of distributing
structural economic violence, and as salient boundaries in civil society. In the current
diagram of biopower, markers of difference tied to molecular information include
populations clustered around high cholesterol levels, mutations in BRCA 1 or CDH1
gene, positivity for HIV, and so forth. As hypothesized by Paul Gilroy, because there are
often not evident in surface phenotype, microscopic markers of difference present critical
race theorists with the possibility that the biosciences might afford positive avenues to
challenge racist epistemologies and the material legacies grown out of comparative
racialized anatomy.
14

Lee problematizes the claims that racial taxa by way of comparative anatomy will cease to exist
with the popularization and accessibility of scientific knowledge of microscopic difference
where group classifications rely on medical diagnosis and classification. She takes to task, for
example, Paul Gilroy’s argument that the old world classification system of “race” is weakened
by new technologies that can chart the vast scale of human difference, even across peoples
grouped within the same racial category. Gilroy offers an optimistic reading of epigenetic
intervention as having the potential to recognize the anachronistic conditions under which

13
Michelle N. Huang in “Racial Disintegration” uses the concept of deracination in precision medicine (a
medial model that customizes treatment based on environment, lifestyle, genetics, etc) to trace the ways
biomedical capital is invested into whiteness and Asianness (i.e. bodies capable of upward mobility and
individual health) while divesting from blackness (i.e. bodies rendered surplus). Through the language of
public health, optimization, and quality of life displaces the uneven life chances produced via
environmental racism and medical racism. For more on how Critical Race scholars have pushed back
against how posthumanist discourse disappears race and empire, see: Luciano, Dana, and Mel Y. Chen.
“Queer Inhumanisms.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 113–17;
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene
Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2014): 62–69; Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming
Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Sexual Cultures. (New York: New York University
Press, 2020); Koegler, Caroline. “Posthumanism and Colonial Discourse: Nineteenth Century Literature
and Twenty-First Century Critique.” Open Library of Humanities 6, no. 2 (December 10, 2020).
14
Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman
Ecologies. Sexual Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 52-54.

5
colonial racial taxonomies arrive and perhaps even pathways for other ways of being. Lee,
however, insists that the fantasy of advancement fails to reckon with how race, phenotype, and
the epidermal have their origins in the field of biological science. Rather, she argues, the
translation and transitional lexicons used to identify racialized differences on bodily surfaces
become re-routed in other ways.
The chapters I offer in this project grapple with those transitional and translational
lexicons of racial difference through how pastoral eugenics and euthenics are rebranded as health
and wellness in our contemporary epoch by (sometimes competing) constellations of state
officials and government agencies, public health and medical professionals, nutritional scientists
and home economists, and commodity goods and cultural performers. I build off Nikolas Rose’s
definition of “pastoral power” where he argues that the post-war period brought about a new set
of power relations for Western nations in regards to eugenics principles wherein biomedical
specialists acted as intermediaries for the affects and ethics of would-be parents through the
language of quality of life. He writes that “contemporary pastoral power is not organized or
administered by ‘the state’...It takes place in a plural and contested field traversed by the codes
pronounced by ethics committee and professional associations, by the empirical findings
generated by researchers, the attitudes and criteria used by employers and insurers, the tests
developed and promoted by psychologists and biotech companies, the advice offered by self-help
organizations, and even…. the critical perspectives contributed by religious organizations and
sociological critics.”
15
These emergent biopedagogical institutions did not rely on the sovereign
power of kings or the state alone, but traffic via the affects of the corporeal and somatic promise
of the healthy citizen-body, a body that was, in actuality, constantly in flux and negotiation.

15
Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 6 (December 1, 2001), 9.

6
Through the case studies I explore, Gut Cultures traces the development of nutritional science
and shifting sentiments to consuming fats and being fat that maps risk-coding as race-coding.
My research demonstrates that with the rise of the American global empire and the Third
World nation state came a new optic and rhetoric for denoting scales of racial difference as
empirical data on health and fitness. Following Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts, which maps
how British colonialism in South Asia reorganized the sensorium through a new poetics of food
and eating,
16
I think through the genre of gut-writings to investigate the myriad of how women
and minoritized subjects coalesce around the science of life in American empire—as objects of
study, collaborators, and dysfunctional figures. By examining literary, philosophical, scientific,
and performance archives of foodwaste/ways and eating, this dissertation surfaces a set of
somatic cultural codes, what I term “gut cultures”: a biopedagogical genre of food literacy and
self-making that marks “appetite” as an aesthetic and corporeal category of the human. Roy
considers how colonial politics operated through an “indisputably visceral tongue: its
experiments, engagements, and trauma were experienced in the mouth, belly, olfactory organs,
and nerve endings, so that the stomach served as a kind of somatic political unconscious in
which the phantasmagoria of colonialism came to be embodied.”
17
The visceral proximities and
approximations of colonial rule and its recursively recurring sentiments inspire how I think about
the gut as biological matter as well as a social and cultural space curated through appetites.
18
Furthermore, analyzing “gut cultures” demonstrates how health is not a neutral metric of

16
Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Next Wave. (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
17
Ibid, 7
18
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism. Next Wave : New Directions in Women’s Studies. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2015), Landecker, Hannah. “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New
Metabolism.” BioSocieties 6, no. 2 (June 2011): 167–94; Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political
Ecology of Things. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 39-51.

7
individual wellness, but is in fact an assemblage of intimacies that operate across multiple levels
of interpersonal, institutional, and political landscapes.
19
In analyzing the aesthetic life of
nutritional science to understand how food storying translates into visceral responses to fat
matters, gut-writings splice through how health is co-constituted alongside nation-making
projects and vice versa and how those sentiments re-configure across transnational borders. The
particular genre of food writings, hybrid memoirs, scientific articles written for lay audiences,
eating logs and videos, and diet manuals I engage throughout the project brings the aesthetics of
health to bear on the politics of the body.
Though the objects I traverse graze against many different articulations and genealogies
of fat, race, and debility in U.S. empire (with a particular indebtedness to Black Feminist theories
of enfleshment and the body), my central objects account for the unique ways in which Asiatic
flesh travels through its appetitive currents.
20
Transnational Feminist and Third World feminist
scholarship has offered frameworks for imagining different modes of bodily arrivals for
transnational, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan subjects and the many orientations to state,
consumer, and consumptive powers. For example, Inderpal Grewal’s quintessential text,
Transnational America demonstrates how information technology centers operate across
multiple centers–what she calls “connectivities'' in order to understand how the transnational,
postcolonial, and cosmopolitan subject each engages with an uneven distribution of privilege and
power as represented by both the geopolitical interests of the nation state and the individual

19
There is a rich and growing body of work that challenges the assumptions of “health” positivist
discourse; see Metzl, Jonathan, and Anna Rutherford Kirkland, eds. Against Health: How Health Became
the New Morality. Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century. (New York:
New York University Press, 2010).
20
I am especially indebted to the theorizing and writings of Audre Lorde and Hortense Spillers, amongst
others, as their work allowed me to press into the central questions of my own project.

8
biopolitical aspirations of the liberal human.
21
The subjectivities she describes toggle between
shifting territories, borders, and acculturation through the production and consumption of global
goods and services that live on in the way one curates and styles the body.
Fat Studies and Disability Studies, as critical disciplines, have grappled with how bodies
become de-naturalized through state and self-governance and are fields uniquely positioned to
interrogate how the body acts as archive and index for race and empire across disciplinary fields,
geopolitical locations, and political solidarities. However, as these nascent fields reckon with the
inherent whiteness and Westerness that permeates much of the scholarship in order to tell global
histories of the body, there is little to no engagement with Asiatic figures, histories, or
knowledges.
22
The recent scholarship on race and fatness, such as Sabrina String’s Fearing the
Black Body and D’shaun Harris’s Belly of the Beast, offer incredible and nuanced readings of the
intertwining forces of anti-blackness and fatphobia, but these analytics alone are not sufficient
enough to capture the dynamic meanings of fat matters across the Global South. Whatsmore,
even in articles, such as Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim’s “Integrating Race, Transforming
Disability Studies,” that are meant to expand and chart a geneology of disability theory through
Women of Color Feminisms, only engages with Black and Latinx feminist thought. I am left to
wonder: Where is the Asian body? What language do we have to talk about the Asian body?
What do we miss when we do not have a theory of Asiatic enfleshment?
My work turns to Asiatic figures and Asian American and diasporic theory and cultural
production not to simply map “correctives” to the current literature or offer a monolithic

21
Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Next Wave.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005),18-22.
22
It should be noted that in the field of Disability Studies engages in texts that figures “Asianess” such as
Eunjun Kim’s Curative Violence and Mel Chen’s Animacies, though it often feels like an afterthought of
a citation.

9
genealogy that can seamlessly stitch together the unified theory of fat and debility. Rather, I seek
to understand what about the Asian/American and Diasporic body and bodily experience is
untranslatable outside the field of Asian American studies and how we might respond to such a
wide gap in the literature. Grounding my work in Asian American/Diaspora allows me to move
horizontally across multiply layered temporalities and histories, to linger in the fissures of
possibilities, pause in the gaps, and grasp at the questions that might get us closer to finding the
body in Empire. For example, in my third chapter on “Devouring the Inscrutable,” I grapple with
Asian American Studies’ “anxiety [over] biologization,”
23
a fear of reinscribing white
supremacist racial science logics onto heterogeneous Asiatic populations in service of a cohesive
political idenity. Inscrutability, I argue, becomes the prevailing racial category for Asianess as
the body is de-emphasized for more abstract concepts of capital, labor, and objecthood. In
turning to historic and contemporary images of eating and body size in Asian/American and
diasporic cultural performances, the chapter grapples with the Asiatic figure as biological and
biopolitical matter. I look at how the figure of the “starving Asian” came to proliferate global
cultural imaginations and how Asian/American and diasporic relationships to food, eating, and
intimacy responds to this trauma and figure. The chapter demonstrates how the specificity of
Asian Americanist/diasporic biopolitical methodologies allows us to account for competing and
emergent national interests alongside military circuits of food and its influence on consumption
practices.
Furthermore, this dissertation centers on fat matters—being fat, consuming fat, becoming
fat—as a critical site for understanding racial formation and gender embodiment. We live in a
time of fat obsession and a simultaneous academic ambivalence towards Fat Studies. By

23
Lee, Exquisite Corpse, 8.

10
overlooking a more robust discussion of fat matters, cultural historians of food and militarism
and theorists of coloniality and gender miss critical tools for understanding how fat-regulation
slips into ideas of sex, capacity, ability, and sexuality for women and minoritized bodies as they
are misaligned with autonomy and self-hood. As Sondra Solovay and Ester Rothblum note in
their introduction to The Fat Studies Handbook, the fat body is discursively read as “bad” by
people across social, cultural, and political lines.
24
The precise tools scholars and activists have
developed to analyze biopower do not seem to apply where fat matters are concerned and,
instead, we see that the public willingly co-signs that some bodies should, can, and must be
policed for their own good. Focusing on fat matters that are often overdetermined and
understudied in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities opens up
new possibilities in the discussion of public health campaigns, internationalism, nation-making,
and race-making during this age of scientification. I will explore the language of risk-coding as
race-coding throughout this project via the framework of the obesity apparatus, what Nicole
Land defines as the settler social/bodily fantasy of health and fitness–and which operates as a
shadowy superstructure that lingers in our common sensing of race, gender, and the body.
25

As I will demonstrate in the next few sections of this introduction, discerning an archive
of fat matters beyond traditional studies of fat histories and obesogenic research (that are often
considered niche topics of interest) makes visible more bellied nodes and denser intersections for
the study of race-making in the 20
th
century, forms of which transform our thinking and expand
discourses on food deserts, gastrocolonialism, and starvation-figures outside of ableist, white

24
Rothblum, Esther D., and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 1.
25
Land, “Fat Knowledges and Matters of Fat: Towards Re-encountering Fat(s)” names the project of
hyper-surveillance, life/death management through state and medical industrial complex,
shaming/framing of at-risk obesity populations (particularly around the targeting of women and
communities of color) to serve the settler state as the “obesity apparatus.”

11
settler rhetoric. Gut Cultures challenges the prevailing logics of the flows of power from North-
South currents of extractivism and instead thinks about cross-hemispheric exchanges of ideas,
images, desires, and intimacies that make up the politics of health at the edges of nation-building
by way of pastoral eugenics.
Settling (Western) Fat
During a 2006 lecture at the University of South Carolina, then U.S. Surgeon General
Richard Carmona told his audience that “unless we do something about [obesity-fat], the
magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt,” that while the United
States grappled with the supposed global threat of terrorism, fat was, in fact, “the terror
within.”
26
Carmona’s remarks echo the earlier sentiments of Secretary of Health and Human
Services, Tommy G. Thompson who said only months after September 11 that it was a “patriotic
gesture” for Americans to lose weight.
27
Carmona would go on to a paint a picture of fat
terror and a failing U.S. state incapable of protecting American lives at home and abroad,
securing both America’s continued role as global leaders, asking:
Where will our soldiers and sailors and airmen come from? Where will our policemen
and firemen come from if the youngsters of today are on a trajectory that says they will
be obese, laden with cardiovascular disease, increased cancers, and a host of other disease
when they reach adulthood?
28

His questions invoke soldiers and policemen, sailors and firemen as a melding between
militarism, public service, and a future nation incapacitated by its own failing bodies.

26
“Obesity Called ‘the terror within: Surgeon General Says the Crisis can Dwarf 9/11,’” Associated Press,
March 1, 2006. https://www.deseret.com/2006/3/2/19941085/obesity-called-the-terror-within
27
Charlotte Biltekoff in “The Terror Within” does a deeper dive into the rhetorical function of the “war
on terror” as an ongoing cultural construction that helped to secure and legitimize the “war on obesity,”
where the war on obesity borrows language, images, and military aesthetics to ground the American
public imagination in a sense of urgency and alarm.
28
“Obesity Called ‘the terror within: Surgeon General Says the Crisis can Dwarf 9/11,’” Associated
Press, March 1, 2006. https://www.deseret.com/2006/3/2/19941085/obesity-called-the-terror-within

12
Underpinning the anxiety of Americans growing too fat is a fear of who must come in to replace
the nation’s vital work. The terror is not merely about a potentially immobilized service force,
but also about the boundaries of citizenship and belonging that would become blurred with
America’s inability to produce its own fighting and carceral figures. Carmona conjoins the fear
of the ethnic Other (the terrorists outside, the migrants who would come to replace American
labor) and the fear of the fat-self in a seamless transition between racial and bodily affects,
between global securitization and governmentality.
Years later, First Lady Michelle Obama would both compliment and complicate these
racial logics around fat, terror, and the fear of the black/brown body by dedicating her time in the
White House campaigning to end childhood obesity within a generation for low-income,
communities of color. The terrorized and terrorist bodies would collapse into more discrete
categories throughout the Obama-era, where the First Lady shifts blame for the existence of fat
children from industrial foods and unethical labor conditions to primarily the fault of negligent
parenting. The shifting politics of the “post-racial” neoliberal state sought to disappear the racial
and class implications in food supply while simultaneously attempting to tackle childhood
obesity as a bad faith cultural problem of choice and re-education.
At a press conferences for one of her Let’s Move events, Obama approached the dangers
of childhood obesity from the standpoint of national security, positing, “Military leaders tell us
that when more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of
their weight, childhood obesity isn’t just a public health threat, it’s not just an economic threat,
it’s a national security threat as well.”
29
Child, nation, and future constellate a mapping of the

29
Allen, “First Lady Has Warning on Obesity.” Politico, December 13, 2010.
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/12/first-lady-has-new-warning-on-obesity-046303

13
modern national body that follows the trajectory of hetero-temporality, what queer theorist Jack
Halberstam names as the normative flow of time and capital with reproduction and inheritance.
30

While U.S. state officials have been fixated on obesity-fat since the 1970’s political
landscape saw a sharp pivot from eradicating childhood hunger to stopping childhood obesity,
31

studies have shown the growing prevalence of eating disorders across racial and class lines,
32

particularly through the emergence of a condition called Orthorexia Nervosa: an obsessive
fixation on eating clean, healthy, and pure foods. Though not officially recognized by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM), many mental health experts
continue to develop treatment plans for patients managing orthorexia. Nancy Koven and
Alexander Arby describe those afflicted with orthorexia as

30
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Sexual
Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
31
The 1950’s Food for Peace Act and the 1970’s senate committee hearing on nutrition would exemplify
the alignments of these contradicting forces. Both initiatives were spear-headed by Senator George
McGoven who oversaw the most comprehensive food aid and nutritional programming on the federal
level of that era. While the 1950’s initiative allowed for the dumping of excess U.S. agro-goods into the
Global South, the 1970’s senate hearing on nutrition sought to end child hunger in the U.S.—both
initiatives maintained that full bellies would stop the spread of communism at home and abroad. The
senate committee hearing on nutrition would eventually produce some of our most iconic images for food
literacy purposes–the food guide pyramid– in an attempt to simplify and standardize American diets. It
must be noted, however, that the senate hearing quickly transformed its initiatives around ending child
poverty and hunger to combating childhood obesity once communities of color began advocating for food
access, fair and free housing, healthcare, etc during the Culture Wars (federal and state priorities would
shift within a 3-year period). For example, while Black Panther Party chapters across the U.S. were
feeding hungry children in their neighborhoods through their free breakfast programs, the U.S.
government would begin its decades-long initiative to end childhood obesity with the introduction of
public health and welfare programs that intensified the hyper surveillance of poor black and brown
communities under the guise of education and policing poor dietary habits. For more on this, see Potorti,
Mary. “Feeding Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food.” Radical Teacher 98
(February 27, 2014): 43–51.
32
See: Ries, “Teens Visiting ER for Eating Disorders Double During Pandemic.” Healthline, March 7,
2022. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/number-teen-girls-in-the-er-for-eating-disorders-doubled-
in-pandemic; Katella, “Eating Disorders on the Rise During Pandemic Year.” Yale Medicine, June 15,
2021. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/eating-disorders-pandemic; Meraji, “When it Comes to Race,
Eating Disorders Don’t Discriminate.” NPR, March 2, 2019.https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2019/03/03/699410379/when-it-comes-to-race-eating-disorders-dont-discriminate; “Eating
Disorders Among Minorities.” Toledo Center for Eating Disorders. https://toledocenter.com/eating-
disorders/eating-disorders-among-minorities/

14
…individuals with an obsession for proper nutrition who pursue this obsession through a
restrictive diet, a focus on food preparation, and ritualized patterns of eating. Orthorexic
individuals are typically concerned by the quality, as opposed to the quantity, of food in
one’s diet, spending considerable time scrutinizing the source (eg, whether vegetables
have been exposed to pesticides; whether dairy products came from hormone-
supplemented cows), processing (eg, whether nutritional content was lost during cooking;
whether micro-nutrients, artificial flavoring, or preservatives were added), and packaging
(eg, whether food may contain plastic-derived carcinogenic compounds; whether labels
provide enough information to judge the quality of specific ingredients) of foods that are
then sold in the marketplace.
33

Though there is overlap between orthorexia and the more familiar anorexia nervosa and bulimia,
orthorexia’s fixation on food quality as a “combination of nutritional value as well as perceived
purity” is central to a desire to “maximize one’s own physical health and well-being.”
34
In other
words, orthorexics believe that eating only pure foods can prevent one from becoming a sick, fat,
or dying body.
The fear of aging, fattening, and dying is all too common even for those without eating
disorders or patterns of disordered eating. However, the fact that orthorexia is not officially seen
as a medical condition and that it parodies the language of optimization and clean eating make it
difficult to separate a neurotic self-care from the socially acceptable health food movements such
as techno-fitness, fitspo influencers, and anti-diet dieticians. Orthorexia signals a desire to know
the scientific, quantifiable, and material conditions in which a food item has been grown and
harvested and how it will interact with the body on the cellular level—a food literacy that has
gone too far. I do not state the growing prevalence of orthorexia to make value judgements on
forms of pathologized eating (i.e. whether orthorexia should be added to the DSM or not), or
even to lay claims to how orthorexic logics could represent the free-falling symptoms of late-
stage capitalist anxieties over consumer choice, ethical consumption, and a lack of trust with

33
Koven, Nancy S, and Alexandra W Abry. “The Clinical Basis of Orthorexia Nervosa: Emerging
Perspectives.” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 11 (February 18, 2015), 386.
34
Ibid, 386.

15
corporate agri-businesses. Rather, I am interested in reckoning with when the body becomes a
problem. In the first example of the terror of fat American children who will, supposedly, be
responsible for ending U.S. militarism, the body is a problem because it can be seen and coded as
such. Or, in the example of cases of anorexia and bulimia, the body becomes a problem when it
is too thin, skeletal, and ailing. Orthorexia is not a new phenomenon–first observed and coined as
a term in 1977, scholars and practitioners argue that its omission from the DSM is about a “lack
of research” on the topic.
35
This indicates a failure to recognize the problem of fixating on
healthy eating as we are surrounded by a pro-diet culture, a failure that arises because orthorexia
does not typically show up on the body in either drastic weight loss or gain and disrupts people’s
lives in other, less easily visible ways (like in organ failure, attention deficit, etc).
I situate the central questions of this dissertation alongside these rhetorical junctures
between contemporary public health and national security (the terror outside and the terror
within) and alongside the underbelly of healthism culture to rethink the question of surface
matters, or rather, when bodily surface matter. Gut cultures, as an analytic, parses through, on the
one hand, the somatic responses to a want—drooling, hunger pangs, secretions of ghrelin and
leptin in the digestive tract—and, on the other hand, a set of power relations that underlie
craving, longing, yearning for not only food itself, but the promises those foodstuffs hold. Who
do we become by virtue of the objects we reach towards, the objects we consume, the objects
that consume us? How do we come to recognize the boundaries of the human through the
boundaries of the body?
These questions about surface, body, and aesthetics are slippery under Western

35
That orthorexia has not been added to the DSM because of a “lack of research” within almost two
decades since Bratman and Knight coined the term in 1977, signals a failure to identify the problem with
these eating practices in the first place.

16
conditions of liberal humanism and Modernity that function through the pressure points in
demarcations between rationality/emotion, desire/duty, civilized/unruly as an obscured yet
ubiquitous colonial fantasy. While Terry Eagleman wrote that aesthetics is “born as a discourse
of the body…it is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell–the
whole corporeal sensorium,”
36
in reference to the 18th century German philosopher Alexander
Baumgarten’s “dense, swarming territory” that pushed against cartesian philosophies of his time,
Susan Buck-Morss’ compelling and important article on “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics” argues
that Modernity, itself, shifted an understanding of aesthetics to outside of the body–into
something disembodied, such as the visual representation of a work of art. In expanding on this
archive of continental theorists, Buck-Morss posits that aesthetics becomes a project of
desensorialization and desensitization because of Modernity.
37

Modernity can signify a historical periodization or social experience—in either
articulations, it is premised on a notion of time and history. In Edmund Husserl’s concept of
Modernity as a time consciousness, which expresses a particular relationship to time where the
sense of “being modern” is predicated on a concept of the “now” as breaking free from the bonds
of tradition and premodern belief systems.
38
However, just as it refers to a certain consciousness
of time, a sense of “newness” about the present, Modernity embodies also a system of
knowledge about the world. To be modern implies a manner of apprehending the world in ways
that its present possibilities and element of change are seized upon toward fuller development. It

36
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, UK ; (Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell,
1990), 13.
37
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.”
October 62 (1992): 3-41.
38
Husserl, Edmund, Martin Heidegger, James S Churchill, and Calvin O Schrag. The Phenomenology of
Internal Time-Consciousness, 2019.

17
is in this way that the classical tradition of philosophical Enlightenment—from Locke, Kant,
Hegel, to Marx, to name only a few—understood modern man not only as an individual in and of
the present, but, more importantly, as an enlightened individual whose powers of reason confer
upon him the moral duty to make use of all his rational abilities toward self-betterment and the
improvement of society as a whole. Briefly put, Modernity refers to a historical consciousness
that directs itself toward the realization of universal reason and progress.
39

In thinking about that individual with the powers of reason conferred upon him and the
realization of universal reason, Emmanuel Kant describes the transcendental subject as one who
can command, comprehend, and compartmentalize the body at odds with feeling and sensation.
In Critique of Judgment, writing about the dis-equilibrium of vital forces eschewed by those who
succumb to body-pleasure and sensation, he chastises the “Oriental voluptuaries” who are
overcome when “they have their bodies thoroughly kneaded, as it were, and have all their
muscles and joints gently squeezed and bent.”
40
The naming of the “Oriental voluptuary” as a
category of person othered by their inability to command excessive appetites for feelings and
sensation conjures the kinds of boundaries between body, touch, being, and the somatic that,

39
The poststructuralist literary turn — canonized around such scholars as Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, and
Deleuze— problematized trenchant ideas of Modernity, Enlightenment and subjectivity by arguing that
the concept of “self” as an affixed and coherent being was a fiction weaved through “discourse.”
Foucault, in particular, traces how power/knowledge production has shifted from the dominion of
sovereign-law to operate as an omnipresent, multifaceted force that moves from all directions—which
itself is unstable and has multiple scales of density. He argues that power is not exterior to
knowledge/economic/sexual processes, but are the “immediate effect of the divisions, inequalities, and
disequilibriums” that occur in different types of relationships (History of Sexuality, 94). For Foucault,
there is no binary to power (i.e., no opposition between ruler/ruled), power relations are both intentional
and nonsubjective, and resistance is “never a position of exteriority to power relations” (ibid 95). We can
read this as a closed system where there is only subjugation and subjectification, but Foucault turns our
looking towards forced intimacies. He argues that resistance is mobile and transitory (like power), has
heterogenous points of departure, and produces its own cleavages in society that shift, fracture, and
regroup unities and social formation.
40
Kant, Immanuel, and Werner S. Pluhar. Critique of Judgment. (Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Pub. Co,
1987), 274.

18
itself, surfaces an aesthetics divorced from the 18th century discourses on sensibility. Scholars
such as Michelle Henning have written extensively about Kant’s use of the aesthetic as a mode to
distinguish the feminine/effeminate from the world of reason and masculinity. She writes:
When Kant wrote about ‘aesthetics’ he distanced himself from the eighteenth-century
cult of sensibility. This, for Kant, is associated with femininity and effeminacy. Indeed,
Goethe praised Kant for having ‘brought us all back from the effeminacy in which we
were wallowing’ (quoted in Buck-Morss, 1992: 10). Masculinity, then, becomes
associated with being sense-dead and self-contained while an openness and
responsiveness to sensation is associated with femininity and lack of control. Femininity
also had historical associations with fluidity—the female body ‘spills over’ while the
(idealized) male body has defined boundaries.
41

While Postcolonial theory, Feminist theory, Asian American and Diaspora Studies, and
Disability Studies have all dealt with the historical associations of fluidity and the trouble of
undefined borders of the body–through ideas of hybridity, heterogeneity, and the “leaky body” to
name a few theoretical turns that problematize gendered and colonial binaries–these analyses
often focus on the discursive or representational. The discursive and representational, though
important sites of meaning and self-making are limited by the language of authenticity that leads
to “good” versus “bad” representation debates that miss the point in how the discursive becomes
hailed and used within a settler capitalist society.
Neetu Khanna, instead, turns to the visceral to consider the “embodied interface” as a site
that “confounds distinctions between thought and feeling, habits of the mind and habituated
reflexes of the body, the ideological and the intuitive, the involuntary and the desired” when
thinking of revolutionary figures and emotions in India’s anti-colonial writers.
42
She posits that it
is this embodied interface of the visceral that poses challenges for decolonial theory as much of
the work has “largely focused on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence”

41
Henning, Michelle. “‘Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric)’: On Gender and Sensation in Modernity.” In
Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression, 26.
42
Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 2.

19
and turns to the logics of emotions that catalyze and frame the (post)colonial human.
43
In other
words, to move through and beyond the limits of representation and engage with aesthetics as a
discourse born of the body, we might turn to the visceral as it “traffics between the materiality
and metaphor of bodily life.” For Khanna, thinking with the visceral, “requires that our theories
of consciousness and liberation contend with the involuntary and automated reflexes of the
body—realms that are largely relegated to the instinctual or innate; seen as biologically
programmed and therefore outside the reach of cultural critique.”
44
It is within this tension
between the somatic and appetitive, the rehearsed and spontaneous, that gut cultures, as an
analytic, interrogates the multiple renderings of fat matters.
This project engages with the emotive alongside the phenomenological, as twinned
forces. Sara Ahmed’s work on bodies, orientations, and race in Queer Phenomenology builds an
argument of the spatiality of sexuality and race by first offering the body as perspective where,
“the body provides us with a perspective: the body is “here” as a point from which we begin, and
from which the world unfolds, as being both more and less over there.”
45
Ahmed thinks of the
geographies of the body not only as a second skin wherein you have your physical skin and the
skin of the social (constructed through the social and economic). She argues that there is also
another layer where the body is a spatial object that frames the social terrain. Orientation
becomes both a temporal and spatial configuration where the familiarity and feeling of settling
into space orders our worldings. As we think through settling and unsettling as
phenomenological processes—how we come to inhabit spaces and how spaces come to inhabit
us—it is critical to think through the materiality of settling. Settling is fraught with imperial

43
Ibid, 2.
44
Ibid, 4.
45
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), 8.

20
straightening devices overlaying the conditions of modernity and coloniality, the same
straightening devices that make race and sex legible as discrete properties.
Settling the fat/fattening body appears to us in a different, albeit more explicit way when
thinking of the settler colonial relationship between land, health, and mouth as drawing a tight
line between technologies of life management and American nativism. In this constellation,
white bourgeoise subjecthood becomes legible via an attachment to native lands by consuming
local organic foods, artisanal rather than industrial products, and farm-to-table haute cuisine—
giving us a different prism through which to view orthorexic behaviors as a desire to belong,
attach, and develop different land-mouth-labor relations. Settling the fat/fattening body, at the
same time, appears in movements that call to decolonize foodways and center a return to
indigenous land and eating practices to redress how bodies become bastardized and abused
through colonial extraction and imperial rule. Unpacking the promises and pitfalls of a
postcolonial critique in the genre of work under the umbrella of gastrocolonialism offers
important insights into how ableism and fatphobia continue to remain unexamined in anti-racist,
anti-capitalist politics and relegated to peripheral interests.
Chamorro poet and theorist Craig Santos Perez has defined gastrocolonialism as: “the
study of how foreign foods invade and colonize native stomachs.”
46
He describes the processes
of gastrocolonialism in the Pacific as a multifaceted project which involved seizure of native
lands for the creation of military bases, plantations, and hotels. Gastrocolonialism involves the
control of native fisheries and creating capitalist wage economies and exporting monocultural
crops to colonized lands and “force feeding natives unhealthy, albeit convenient, imported

46
Perez, “Uncle Spam Wants You,” Kenyan Review, April 26, 2013.
https://kenyonreview.org/2013/04/uncle-spam-wants-you/

21
foodstuffs.”
47
Not only did this change native relationships to land cultivation and eating, but to
movement and exercise as well, where “it [gastro colonialism] also separated us from traditional
and functional exercise routines (hunting, planting, harvesting, fishing, etc). Nowadays, we leave
the gym all sweaty and tired yet we have no food to show for it.”
48
I use Perez’s expansive
understanding of gastrocolonialism to identify trends and threads in the rich research that
interrogates imperial foodways through a myriad of entry points with a range of disciplinary
methods: from sociological research that seeks to understand the impact of processed foods and
food deserts on poor communities of color to historical research that traces the patterns,
appetites, and creation of consumer bases for U.S. agricultural waste-as-food aid.
49
While I
believe these projects to be critical and necessary for community well-being, the majority of
these works either implicitly or explicitly regard fatness as consequential and undeniably a
problem caused by colonization. Framing fat as colonial loss and trauma necessarily implies that
there is a “natural” native body, and that said body is inherently fit, healthy, and abled.
That the “natural” native body is presumed healthy, in and of itself, upholds capitalist
frameworks of relationality wherein fat, disabled, and ill pre-colonial bodies and relationalities
are unthinkable. The fixation on a precolonial food loss–a look back at a future that was never
there or not available for those of us who make lives in the present– re-enforces fatness as a sight
of absolute abjection and disability as a modern phenomenon. As Kyla Wazana-Tompkins warns

47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
49
For examples, see Fresno-Calleja, Paloma. “Fighting Gastrocolonialism in Indigenous Pacific Writing.”
Interventions (London, England) 19, no. 7 (2017): 1041–55; Chao, Sophie. “Gastrocolonialism: The
Intersections of Race, Food, and Development in West Papua.” The International Journal of Human
Rights 26, no. 5 (May 28, 2022): 811–32; Hillyer, Garrett. “Case: Food in Sāmoa,” Food Studies: Matter,
Meaning, Movement, 2022. Myriam Durocher also pushes against the collapsing of imperial food ways
with the production of unhealthy bodies in her piece “‘Healthy’ for Whom? ‘Healthy’ Food’s
Effectivities, Avocados, and the Production of Differentiated Bodies.” BioSocieties, 2022, 1-21.

22
about the rise of interest in native foods and the social capital accrued by white bourgeois
consumers of said pre-colonial foodways: “perhaps we should not give in so easily…to the
adoption or valorization of ‘primitive’ foodways, without thinking through the colonial, even
imperialist, pathways on which such commodity romances are and have been traced.”
50
Through
a similar line of thinking, native food melancholia masks the structural and systemic ways in
which thinness becomes a moral imperative of the white colonial subject—a project which
codifies racial capitalism’s aesthetics into a modern vernacular, allowing fatphobia to go
internalized, undetected, and institutionalized. This dissertation argues for a sustained analysis
that links these contemporary phenomena within a much older historical context and wider
transnational circuit through transnational eating cultures of the 20
th
and 21
st
century.
This project pushes against two primary phenomena that encrust fat to a niche field of
study most often concerned with white women’s bodies and experiences: the temporalizing and
localization of fat as a modern problem of the West; and the epistemological consolidation of
fatness as pathology and disease wrought on through colonization and industrial Western
foodways by postcolonial critics of gastrocolonialism. The first seeks to uncover how and why
fat matters (being fat, becoming fat, consuming fat) has been rendered as a modern problem
despite the fact that fatness itself is not a new phenomenon. The second offers a more expansive
vision for decolonial body politics that push against existing frameworks of capitalist and settler
wellness projects. Tracking the public debates about eating and wellness, fats and digestion,
euthenics and eugenics as they appear in a range of texts and forums from newspapers to
scientific journals and works of fiction and experimental memoir alongside my own stories of

50
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. (New York: New
York University Press, 2012), 186.

23
inhabiting the world as a fat, femme, Asian diasporic body, thickens my approach for studying
the permutations of governmentality and racial formation within a transnational context.
Coloniality ideologically limits the scope and scale of bodily possibilities while framing
normative bodies within very narrow perimeters of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and thin
functionality. The decolonial body politics I offer engages with the bifurcation of labor and
biology in processes of globalization. In Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
Anibal Quijano begins with a provocation that challenges the presumed incongruity between
globalization and imperialism by stating that: “Globalization of the world is, in the first place,
the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as
a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power.”
51
The emergence of America created the
conditions for a new historical world that organized, for the first time, around two principles of
consolidating labor practices and instituting racial taxonomies. He argues that all forms of labor,
production and exploitation were organized under “the axis of capital and the world market”
52
—
meaning, a capitalist economy and world system came into place; and biology and culture (now
known as race and ethnicity) were codified into racial categories through European medical
science, marriage laws, property rights, and other colonial ways of ordering social relations.
Through this dual process of modernization and colonization, racial hierarchies and
taxonomies were solidified at sites of embodied difference. This linking demonstrates how
relations of power and domination were naturalized through discourse. Following Quijano, I
reckon with how health and style, then, operates across many intimacies of new nations and
nationalisms. According to its most basic definition, health is a noun which names a person’s

51
Quijano, Aníbal. “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–
3 (March 2007), 214.
52
Ibid. 216

24
conditional state—either one free or inhibited by illness or injury. This dissertation engages
health as a verb, as a multifaceted conditioning of and for the fattening body with symbolic
meaning as it moves across social space and time.
A Note on Decolonial Body Politics, or, Stiffening as Method
What does the decolonial mean in this dissertation written by a fat South/Southeast Asian
diasporic body primarily educated and securely housed within the U.S.? Why is decoloniality, as
a radical framework invested in land repatriation, indigenous sovereignty, demilitarization, and
environmental justice necessary for reckoning with flows of power and capital in relation to body
size, ability, and debility? While calls to “decolonize” body politics have gained traction in
cultural spaces dedicated most explicitly to beauty—especially through online activist spaces and
social media influencer culture—decolonizing fat (or, decolonizing body-love) often comes to
stand in for undoing euro-centric beauty standards.
53
As feminist scholars have argued, the
realm of beauty and the politics of desirability not only offer soul-body-healing projects, but
have the potential to examine and dismantle the structures of internalized colonial body
traumas.
54
As much as I am indebted to this necessary and important work, popular discourses on

53
Online discourse and fat activist spaces demarcate the difference between the “body-positivity”
movement that has capitalized on fat liberationist language, aesthetics, and politics for profit at the
expense of larger fat bodies, fat BIPOC and queer fats versus historically grounded, queer of color
centered fat liberationist politics. As I explicitly route my work through the lens of fat liberation, I’m
speaking specifically here about the conflation of body-love-via-capital and the shrine of self-
help/wellness marketing campaigns that litter media spaces.
54
Many of these works take up the idea of radical self-love/self-care as presented by Audre Lorde where
she writes in her cancer journals: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that
is an act of political warfare” (A Burst of Light, 131). For Lorde, caring for her ill, fat, black woman,
caring for that body–that is despised and discarded by the medical industrial complex–is a direct form of
resistance. The refusal to let die, and the turn to softness, compassion, and love marks an important
moment of radical self-care praxis. Scholars have turned this analysis to how beauty, ornamentation, and
performance are also acts of political warfare in the same vein. See: White, Michele. “Beauty as an ‘Act
of Political Warfare’: Feminist Makeup Tutorials and Masquerades on YouTube.” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 46, no. 1/2 (2018): 139–56; Barlow, Jameta N. “WhenIFellInLoveWithMyself: Disrupting the
Gaze and Loving Our Black Womanist Self as an Act of Political Warfare.” Meridians (Middletown,

25
feminist theories of embodiment often overemphasize the importance of representation as a
pathway to healing and dismantling internalized white supremacy by privileging access to
neoliberal consumer culture as a sign of body liberation.
The decolonial body politics I sketch out here begins with the body as a vehicle for
registering the aftermath of (colonial) encounter and the sticky impressions left behind, carried
over, which become sediment as everyday thought. Impressions—marks produced by pressure—
weigh psycho-affectively and materially on the body as and in formation, to be made bare
through moments of bodily tension and resonance. The anecdotes, stories, literary and
philosophical gut-writings I engage throughout attend to moments of fat bodily stiffening, an
anxious pause, a widening gap, that oscillates between an anticipatory reaction to mechanisms of
punitive discipline and breaking oneself open as vulnerable to those technologies of control. I
engage in autoethnography throughout, partly, as a response to a long tradition of women of
color feminist theorizing that recognizes the value of our lived experiences as both intellectually
rigorous and urgent. Secondly, my own stiffening–pauses, oscillations–as a fat Asian femme,
measures the anticipatory pause before I break open an invisible seal that calls attention to my
body and subsequently all the bodies in the room that drastically shapes and informs the kinds of
conversations we can have. In other words, this dissertation advances a reading and literary
practice that is deeply embodied, offering ways in which to recognize how the body’s responses
and misfires to cultural codes, cues, and performances tap into a sensory logic.
It is in moments of tension and tensing, of contact between flesh and episteme, touch and
ontology, that the fat body of color grazes uncomfortably against what Frantz Fanon calls a
colonial vocabulary, and it is here that I trace a genealogy of excess. In Wretched of the Earth,

Conn.) 15, no. 1 (2016): 205–17; Hernandez, Jillian. Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black
and Latina Embodiment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

26
Fanon writes about the native’s encounters with European values (the zoological, colonial
vocabulary that marks the native as beastly, savage, less than) as producing a kind of bodily
stiffening or muscular lockjaw.
55
As he grounds the phenomenology of encounter within his own
Black, Colonized, Martinique flesh, he details a bodily and visceral reaction that demonstrates
the distance between what he feels and knows about himself versus what he is told about his
body and appetites. Writing about that moment priori in Black Skin White Mask, Neetu Khanna
considers the belated and the explosive operate through temporality, where “Fanon not only
writes the colonized black subject into narratives of history but also illuminates the structures
and contradictions of a colonial modernity—not as abstract narrative conceptions, but as visceral
repositories of lived history.”
56
Time and feeling, Khanna offers, map the affective energies of
decolonization. Building off of this work, I consider moments of fat bodily stiffening as breaking
open the seal around a colonial vocabulary of fleshy propriety—oscillating between what we feel
and know about ourselves versus what we are told about our bodies. How we break open and
offer up parts of ourselves is indicative of the distance we must travel to decolonize Fat Studies
and fatten decolonial theory.
Stiffening, as method, is a tender look at the bodies—waiting— strung taut through fat
origin stories and fleshy myths and asks us to interrogate “clichéd and shorthand forms in some
everyday habits of thought”
57
that sediment fat and race over time. The following sections
interrogate the shorthand histories of fat and race that press into our skin—the stories we
intuitively share, inherit, and perpetuate.

55
Fanon, Frantz, and Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon; Translated from the
French by Richard Philcox ; Introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. (New York: Grove
Press, 2004), 43.
56
Khanna, Visceral Logics of Decolonization, 132.
57
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Reissue. Princeton Studies in Culture, Power, History. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4.

27
De-Mythologizing Fat
Fat Studies has asked crucial questions about embodiment, governance, medicalization,
gender, and sexuality.
58
Through a myriad of approaches to the cultural study of fat, scholars
have examined the force of fatness in Western societies to organize and rearrange intimate
domains of life and zones of contact both mediated and unmediated by the state and
globalization.
59
In this section, I examine a recurring shorthand in our everyday thought: the
evolutionary trajectory of fat—or, in other words, the story of how fatness was once a desirable
corporeal form (a sign of good health, access to food/wealth, and strong reproductive capacities)
and has now shifted into a symbol for excess, poor choices, lack of self-governance, and
moral/health decay.
When deployed by cultural critiques, this shorthand for our shifting orientations towards
fat is meant to demonstrate its malleability and social constructiveness. Feminist theorists and
cultural critiques often deploy such logics in order to complicate the morality of thinness and call
for an end to fat-based discriminatory practices. I consider this motif an evolutionary trajectory,
however, because of how this very same narrative is utilized by social scientists to map the
social, political, and material terrain in which fat bodies are no longer needed in our modern

58
See: Harjunen, Hannele. Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body. Routledge Research in Gender
and Society. London New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2020; LeBesco, Kathleen.
“Neoliberalism, Public Health, and the Moral Perils of Fatness.” Critical Public Health 21, no. 2 (June
2011): 153–64; Mollow, Anna. “Disability Studies Gets Fat.” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 199–216;
Murray, Samantha. “Pathologizing ‘Fatness’: Medical Authority and Popular Culture.” Sociology of Sport
Journal 25, no. 1 (March 2008): 7–21; Usiekniewicz, Marta. “Dangerous bodies: Blackness, fatness, and
the masculinity dividend.” Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 2016, 11: 19-45.
59
See: Boero, Natalie. Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American “Obesity Epidemic.”
New Brunswick, New Jeresy: Rutgers University Press, 2013; Cooper, Charlotte. “Fat Studies: Mapping
the Field: Fat Studies.” Sociology Compass 4, no. 12 (December 2010): 1020–34; Farrell, Amy Erdman.
Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011;
Greenhalgh, Susan. “Weighty Subjects: The Biopolitics of the U.S. War on Fat.” American Ethnologist
39, no. 3 (2012): 471–87; Murray Samantha. “Marked as ‘Pathological’: ‘Fat’ Bodies as Virtual
Confessors.” In Biopolitics and the “Obesity Epidemic.” Routledge, 2008), 86-98.

28
society and should therefore be eradicated. I interrogate the logic of this shorthand not as a
means of disproving fatness’ malleability or social construction, but instead to ask: how is this
evolutionary timeline enmeshed in racial taxonomies and capitalist time? What does it tell us of
the story of perversity/inclusion, white colonial health aesthetics, and systems of governance?
Fat history, whiteness, and the modern savage
A dominant Western history of fatness often begins with the figure of the portly
European settler who sought factory work in industrialized cities, signaling to the American
public a crisis of class and migrant contagion.
60
Fat Studies historians detail the malleability of
fatness from desirable to derisive by tracking the historical influx of new settlers which caused
the American public to fixate on food, appetite, and stature/body size at the height of hygiene
reform. Such a fixation ideologically consolidated an ethno-national identity that could still fit
within the cultural vernacular of the savage versus the civilized—a vocabulary inherited through
colonial
61
and American Nativist ideologies.
62
As the category of whiteness became bound and
unbound through class lines, the cult of slenderness emerged as a fleshy marker of bodily
propriety. For example, Peter Stearns traces American diets and eating cultures in the nineteenth
to twentieth centuries, following the winding history of a fear of fat grounded in class discourses
where early Americans transposed French and British sensibilities around slenderness as a form

60
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993; Schwartz, Hillel. Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat.
New York: Free Press, 1986.
61
I name this as colonial because as Rebecca Earle notes in Body of the Conquistador, Spaniards in the
Americas fixated on diet and food as a means by which early settlers maintained racial and class
difference in contact zones where flesh and fluid were in constant interchange and flux, dissolving the
boundaries between self and other.
62
Colman J Barry. “Some Roots of American Nativism.” The Catholic Historical Review 44, no. 2 (1958):
137–46.

29
of class distinction from the new flood of hefty working-class settlers.
63
The story that is told,
then, foregrounds and yet disappears race and landedness from fat history, a slight of hand
necessitated by the ongoing process of consolidating the boundaries of whiteness in the U.S.
However, this is also a moment of productive tension that can help us read, horizontally, the
intimacies between fat, racialism, and capital.
Cedric Robinson’s theorizing on racial capitalism allows us to sit within this tension.
Robinson defines racial capitalism as a system of dispossession, primitive accumulation, and the
manufacturing of uneven life chances that sutures around racialism/racialization to produce the
conditions of capitalism and economies of attraction.
64
He argues that racial taxonomies have
always been foundational to capitalist origins and pushes back against Marxist frameworks that
mark capitalism as a distinct break from European feudalism. Such a break from the social and
economic world order would suggest that capitalism was “racial” only insofar as the ruling class
needed to separate laborers to discourage uprisings or provide justification for slavery and
dispossession. Rather, Robinson argues that capitalism is not a breaking point, but an extension
of a Western ontoepistemology of differentiation, or, racialism embedded in the common-
sensing, economy, and political fashioning of everyday life. Part of the fabric of early European
society was the process of marking the racial other within Europe, where the first proletariats
were already racial subjects and victims of captivity, criminalization, dispossession, and death. A
Cultural Studies reading of fat and class must therefore attend to racial formation as the bedrock
of body-hierarchies.

63
Stearns, Peter N. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. With a new preface. New York
London: New York University Press, 2002.
64
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, N.C:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

30
Where fat historical materialists and cultural studies projects interrogate fat through a
locus of annunciation within Western genealogies of white desirability, sexual desire, and
performing proper gender/citizenship roles as a more recent phenomenon of the nineteenth and
twentieth century, I turn to the site of racialized fat to consider how the perimeters of who is
considered human have always included questions of body size, appetites, and excess. Fat,
Desire, and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination traces the colonial anxiety felt by British and
French imperialist in the 18
th
century over indigenous fattening practices, documenting them as
body disorders and marking the difference between civilized (and therefore populations who
could regulate and manage themselves) versus savage behavior.
65
Forth notes how much of this
colonial anxiety around body size predicated on how women’s bodies and sexualities were a
speculative terrain read through fat, diet-regulation, economy, and reproductive viability. I
gesture to these works to excavate how coloniality ideologically limits the scope and scale of
bodily possibility while framing health within very narrow perimeters of whiteness, able-
bodiedness, and thin functionality. By orienting ourselves in partial histories and incomplete
archives, Fat Studies scholars can ask different kinds of questions about the specters that haunt
our modern medical system, carceral state, ecologies, and public spaces and architecture.
--
While Fat Studies cultural critiques might neglect to tell a thicker story of race and fat
outside of the West and whiteness, obesogenic research has taken to undertheorizing and over-
representing the vulnerabilities of women, children, and communities of color as highly
susceptible to “obesity-fat.” Public health crisis, medicalization, and environmental catastrophe
narratives become saturated with overlapping fat-racial-contamination. Obesogenic researchers

65
Forth, Christopher E. “Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination.” History Workshop Journal
73, no. 1 (April 1, 2012): 211–39.

31
speculate risk, harm, and economy through gene-alogies of becoming fat (and subsequently
losing-fat) to consider the forces both inside and outside of the body that produce fleshy
responses to food, environment, and economy. I contend that this literature often results in risk-
coding as race-coding—where fat embodiment comes to symbolize symptoms of minoritized and
marginalized social conditions produced by industrial harm, an account that often relies on old
colonial, classist, and white supremacist tropes of the savage brown other.
Discursive feminist critiques of fat/ness and the body attempt to situate the shifting
meanings of fat across whiteness, womanhood, the civilized and (un)governable body through
Euro-American Enlightenment and beyond. Obesogenic research, on the other hand, has been
more interested in determining the environmental factors that produce at-risk populations
susceptible to the “obesity epidemic” or advocating for a study of fat outside of its social
symbolism. Obesogenic projects offer what they assume is a corrective to what Megan Warin
notes as an over-investment in representations of fat life.
66
Warin contends that the “celebrations
of ‘fat flesh’ do not engage with material or biological bodies, but squarely sit within a social
constructivist frame…[as they present] important debates about identity, not about the
materiality of flesh.”
67
Warin is speaking to how Fat Feminist theory and activism has been
scaffold around and against the “globesity crisis” and is, therefore, weary of how biology, human
nature, and nutritional science has been leveraged as disciplinary mechanism from inclusion into
full citizenship, human rights, and dignity.
Scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Rebecca Yoshizawa, and Elspeth Probyn, Samantha
Murray, Edward Norman and Fiona Moola, have all argued that the discursive turn in feminist

66
Warin, Megan. “Material Feminism, Obesity Science and the Limits of Discursive Critique.” Body &
Society 21, no. 4 (December 2015): 48–76.
67
Ibid 48.

32
theories of the body make it difficult to engage with biological matter and the very real negative
consequences of capitalism run amok on public health, while highlighting how a refusal to look
at the facts of “obesity-fat” reproduce Cartesian logics as well as theories on the body that are
overly invested in recuperating and re-centering the human.
68
Oftentimes employing an
ecological Marxist analysis of over-industrial foodways, an alienation of labor to land to mouth,
and modern populations’ shift to sedentary lifestyles as the (chrono)logical trajectory of the
obesity epidemic, much of the work centers around framing target populations as vulnerable to
state and corporate violence, particularly amongst poor, working class women and children (of
color). However, in doing so, these feminist scholars recast race, gender, and fatness through
ideas of risk-coding—what Anna Ward describes as a process by which “subjects are fixed in a
setting, installed in a field that nurtures a particular appetitive response, a response that produces
not just fat, but also a particular racialized and classed embodiment of fat.”
69
As Ward suggests,
risk-coding and race-coding are conflated within obesogenic research, often deployed by white
feminists advocating for particular forms of environmental and health conservation and redress
that results in the hyper-surveillance of communities of color through state nutritional and health
programs.
Obesogenic researchers argue that a focus on representations of fat life and liberation
politics deflects from the very real harm done onto vulnerable populations by multinational

68
Though I agree that Fat Studies has certain limitations in theorizing alongside the human, I route my
critiques through Sylvia Wynter (2001) and Denise Da Silva’s (2007) work on race, science, and
embodiment in order to think through an urgency in decolonizing conceptualizations of health and
fatness. That discussion remains outside the scope of this chapter, but also complicates how the Feminist
Science Studies scholars I have listed above have taken up the question of fatness, materiality, and
humanness.
69
Ward, Anna E. “Fat Bodies/Thin Critique: Animating and Absorbing Fat Embodiments.” S&F Online.
Accessed June 1, 2022. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/fat-bodiesthin-
critique-animating-and-absorbing-fat-embodiments/.

33
agribusinesses and other forms of environmental degradation, noting that the fat body represents
the scale of environmental collapse— the yellow canary in the poisoned mines.
70
Such claims
only serve to justify further punitive measures for fat people, whether manifested in psycho-
affective or material consequences. Ultimately, as Ward and Anna Kirkland argue, obesogenic
studies fail to recognize the inherently classist (white supremacist) logics that are invisible to
many of these researchers, as the fat-poor-body is perceived as more susceptible to its
environments than the elite bodies who manage to stay thin and healthy despite environmental
conditions. Though many of these feminist scholars claim to be sympathetic to, aware of, and
even in agreement with Fat Studies critiques of the stigmatized fat body, the work often reflects
an inability to grapple with the murkiness of fat as both material stuff and symbolic order due to
an uncritical optimistic investment in health.
Where scholars of foodscapes and food deserts utilize a neoliberal framework of global
capitalism to analyze why at-risk populations are more susceptible to food-related chronic illness
(obesity always listed amongst them), the reigning logic says that issues of obesity and illness are
created by lack of access, fast food franchising, and lack of nutritional education. Though there is
an extreme urgency for food justice and sovereignty movements which challenge state-corporate
interests and environmental degradation of our water and foodways, I must call for a closer
examination of the rhetoric around obesity-fat as it targets at-risk populations, a strategy that

70
Despite the move to depoliticize fat and to materialize fat outside of cultural critique, the fat body
remains an ideological and representational force that furthers public policy recommendations around
agriculture, city ordinances around fast food and soda, child services, welfare and healthcare, and
environmental policies—many of which are central points of focus for obesogenic research. For further
discussion on how fat and environmental apocalypse are collapsed categories, see: Constance Russell and
Keri Semenko. “We Take ‘Cow’ as a Compliment: Fattening Humane, Environmental, and Social Justice
Education.” Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.) 467 (2016): 211–20; White, Francis Ray. “Fat, Queer, Dead:
‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive.” Somatechnics 2, no. 1 (March 2012): 1–17; White, Francis Ray. “‘We’re
Kind of Devolving’: Visual Tropes of Evolution in Obesity Discourse.” Critical Public Health 23, no. 3
(September 2013): 320–30.

34
often serves to deepen divides between the Global North/South and further stigmatize fat
racialized bodies. What does it mean, then, to be an at-risk body working towards shrinking
yourself? Where Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois have asked what it feels like to be a problem—of
being black in a world built on anti-blackness—or what does it feel like to live with the double-
consciousness of a colonial subject that must move through colonial spaces, I turn these
questions to racialized fat. How does it feel to be a bodily problem and product of modernity as
fat bodies of color move through a world that has already marked them for dead? How does it
feel to know that a world free of white settler colonialism is a world free from you and the
problems of your body?
The Colonial Body Problem
Thus far, I have characterized the literature on fatness and obesity-fat as it has been
conceived by Western (white) scholars, public health professionals, and activists. And yet, when
I find myself in anti-colonial, anti-capitalism spaces with predominantly people of color, the
same shorthands about fatness are exchanged and one thing becomes utterly clear: bodies like
mine are not supposed to exist in a world where we are free from white supremacy, capitalism,
and (neo)colonialism.
71
Bodies like mine exist because colonization has broken me/us. Take for
example an excerpt from Perez’s piece on Spam:
For decades the Pacific has been a fatty food dump for the first world. The fats of Empire
are in our stomachs, suffocating our organs ...
My stomach is a colonial subject of the United States of SPAMerica. My Pacific body is
an American SPAM dump. Indigestion is not an event; it is a structure

71
It should be of some note that in all my years in academia, I have rarely found myself in a space--if it
was not explicitly organized for fat folks–that included even one other fat scholar/person. I am typically
the only person of my size in any given seminar, talk or event, panel, or networking setting. I have
encountered even fewer fat people of color and or queer fat folks in “elite” academia. How is it possible
that there are no other fat people in these institutional spaces that I move through (given the data we have
on U.S. population weight trends and the actual number of fat people who orbit my every day–in personal
and public space) if not for structural and systemic issues that make our existence in academia untenable?

35
The play on indigestion being a structure and not an event echoes Patrick Wolfe’s brilliant
article on settler colonial regimes where he argues that settler colonialism destroys to replace,
wherein about the fundamental regimes of settler colonialism as a logic of eliminating the native
about the native.
72
For Perez’s stomach to be a colonial subject of the “United States of
SPAMerica,” for the Pacific to act as a “fatty food dump,” and for his Pacific body the grounds
of these irrevocable changes, gesture a loss of indigeneity and native cosmology. The fixation on
a precolonial food loss presents a melancholic attachment to the disappearance of native
foodways, worlds, and potentials. At the same time, the manifestation of that loss is rendered
through the fat colonial subject whose suffocating organs represent the visceral and visual cost of
empire on the gut.
The drama and visual/visceral force of naming fat-as-problem has an affective and
aesthetic currency to it—one that attracts and acts as a call to order for unruly bodies. Just as
modernity is not the exclusive property of the colonizer/Europe, neither is the call for self-
governance, surveillance, and healthfulness. The visual/visceral purchase of fat-free future-hood
holds a promise of prosperity, normalcy, and dignity for many suffering from the indigestion of
Empire. But what of those of us who are left behind as sites of ruination? The flattening of the
gut as a site of colonial domination alone and an attachment to precolonial food melancholia
deeply misunderstands how gut microbes’ function—in multiplicity, adaptation, and
contingency. This project takes up the matter of fat, of excess, of the unruliness that escapes
knowability (but not desire) and the many collisions—of flesh, ecology, and episteme— which
create the pressure points of our bodily surfaces.

72
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research
8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409.

36
Moving towards a decolonial body politics requires us to interrogate how obesogenic
research—that can find itself in progressive, radical, and anti-capitalist movements and
ideologies—actually recast old prejudices of racial contamination into more palatable discourses
through health and wellness.
73
We must consider how these discourses are weaponized against
black, Indigenous, and communities of color as people advocate for better living/work
conditions, anti-capitalist organizing, sovereignty and self-governance, and structural
representation that can unwittingly paint said communities as incompetent and complicit in their
own self-destruction.
Lessons from a Fat Asian Femme
When I first moved to Los Angeles for graduate school, my mom visited with me for a
few weeks and we would ride the buses and trains across the city for hours. It gave her a sense of
ease to practice the routes I would take. It helped her imagine my life here—a life that was full
and productive and easy, the kind of life she always dreamt of for her children.
It’s one of those days of mapping the city and we get lost in transit when this old uncle
from New Delhi helps us make the right bus transfer. He escorts us to the metro and chats about
his life. He asks my mom if she’s Thai. I can tell from the roundness of your face. Your daughter
looks like us, though. He’s a retired mechanical engineer and academic. He loves Thai food and
traveling and has four kids, all grown now. He asks me what I’m doing in L.A. I tell him I’m
starting a Ph.D. program and this look of deep worry breaks his smile in half.
You need to listen to me. I’m not saying this to be hurtful, but if you want get successful
in academia, you have to lose the weight. Otherwise, you will die there. These people are

73
In a similar vein, Lucas Crawford’s Slender Trouble: From Berlant’s Cruel Figuring of Figure to
Sedgwick’s Fat Presence offers a strong analysis of how even queer theory overdetermines the stagnation
and dead-ends of fatness. Crawford, Lucas. “Slender Trouble.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 23, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 447–72.

37
very intellectual but will not forgive you for this. Lose the weight; you are young. You
will go nowhere, trust me. Do something good for your life. Bas.
Bas—that’s it. He ends a conversation people start all the time and I wonder how I can untangle
his tenderness from his harm. We get off at our stop and my mom cries in the Rose Garden when
she thinks I’m not looking. Later that night, she reaches for my hand. Begs me to make my life
easier. The room is dark and she doesn’t see the hard lines in my face when I say okay.
--
I have my first day of classes and feel so incredibly out of my element. I’m meeting my
mom at the Hollywood/Western metro station so we can grab dinner together. I’m waiting for an
elevator when I feel a pair of hands cup my ass cheeks. I turn around to the smug face of a man
who looks like he’s done me some huge favor by deigning to touch me. I start cursing him out
and chasing after him through the station. My mom hears my screaming from the other end of
the tunnel and blocks his exit, and without knowing what happened, sees my distress and begins
beating him with her bag full of oranges she bought from a street vender.
Both of us are red-faced and speechless.
--
Later, we’re at the Thai market and wandering about in separate sections. A middle-aged
man with a heavy French accent keeps trying to make conversation with me, following me
around, trying to grab my hand.
“Khuṇ S
̄ wy–so pretty.”

“Are you Thai?”

“I like Thai girls and fat girls too.”

38
My mom rounds the corner and he neither has the decency nor sense of self-preservation
to leave.
“Your daughter is beautiful.”

She doesn’t miss a beat, leveling her fiercest stare: get away from us now.
--
I worry about leaving you.
It’s the night before she heads back to Orlando and we’re laying in the dark on the heap of
blankets my landlord left for us in the apartment because I haven’t gotten a mattress yet. She’s
been helping me settle into this new city but I can’t help but to feel like my L.A. life can’t start
until she’s safely tucked back into her world thousands of miles away.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, mom! You and Dad crossed an ocean and you were much
younger than me.

There’s a silence that stretches out and I almost think she’s fallen asleep before she says,
in a voice softer than I’m ever used to:
I don’t like the way people treat you here. The way they touch you here.
--
Moving through the world as an Asian diasporic fat femme, I am acutely aware of how
body-size, ability, and perceived dis-ability aggregate conceptions of race, nation, gender, and
sexuality not adequately reflected or explored in critical race, postcolonial, and transnational
feminist discourses. I share the experiences above to illuminate the tension in being both
fetishized/reviled, desired/discarded, that it is my racialized fat that elicits these sentiments of
hypersextualization and the fantasy that my body is meant for public consumption. Furthermore,
not only is my Asian diasporic fat femme body the site of unwanted touch, but also unwanted
speculation of my labor and capacity. The story of the New Delhi uncle teases at the ways fat–on

39
Asian flesh– can agitate the body’s relationship to the model minority figure–a subject position, I
would argue, that also requires a devotion to thinness and ableism for economic and social
advancement. As James Kyung-Jin Lee asserts, “It is the model minority that insists that Asian
America’s children enjoy the bodies that make their upward mobility not only possible but
necessary in an economic system built on ableism and health as its paragon.”
74
As Pedagogies of
Woundedness asks us to consider how, despite Asian American Studies’ aversion to the biology
of the body, Asian racialization and the schematics of model minority is a entangled in a highly
curated body, this project connects Asian Diasporic medical humanities, Fat, and Disability
Studies to develop a decolonial body politic that confronts the colonial and racial legacies of
health and wellness cultures which continue to structure the quotidian practices of body
surveillance, calorie tracking, and eating and feeding pedagogies. I do not lament the loss of
model minority status, but rather, think of how discourses of Asian American/diasporic
racialization fail to grapple with how such a status is a bodily subjectivity.
Transnational feminisms, Third World feminisms, and women of color feminisms are not
interchangeable within this dissertation, though I acknowledge how these bodies of work are
interconnected as I borrow and build from all three feminist histories. I turn to Third World
Feminist commitments to opposing military-politico-economic currents of power and Western
cultural domination as opposed to the overarching “neoliberal global capitalism” framework of
much of the Transnational feminist frameworks. While Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan
offered Scattered Hegemony as an incredible articulation of transitional feminism based on
praxis and not identity to consider how globalization is gendered and racialized across
deterritorialized centers of power and capital, Third World feminist scholarship reminds us about

74
Lee, James Kyung-Jin. Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model
Minority. Dis/Color. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022), 10.

40
the interconnected processes of nation-building. For example, in Geraldine Heng’s piece on the
function of women’s body within/against emergent nation-states, she argues that women’s sense
of belonging and rights have:(1) developed alongside postcolonial/anticolonial movements that
ultimately were invested in the creation of new nation-states, (2) grew in opposition to ultra
conservative religious government entities, (3) came to stand in for competing modernities—
were the clashing values of the west and fledgling nation compete across women’s bodies.
75
In
such a configuration, women’s rights movements perform the affective/temporal labor of
liberatory populist feelings that benefit emerging nations. Through women’s movements,
struggling nations demonstrate a fracture from the past/barbarism and complicates the fledgling
nation to a fractured sense of modernity. The nation is severed into two affective registers —
functioning vis-a-vi the logics of modernity, where: modernity is the necessary part of
technological and economic advancement; modernity contaminates the nation state. This later
affective register is complicated by how the nation itself is a modern invention that must
continuously renew itself through colonial sovereignty politics.

This project grapples with how women’s bodies and femmeness operate as currency for
the benevolent national imaginary while being complicit to/explicit in marketing women’s
bodies to global appetites. Though the roots of femme arrive from 1950’s lesbian bar culture as a
way to distinguish lesbians with feminine characteristics from their butch counterparts (and has
seen many uses and complex permutations since then), femme has expanded in its colloquial and
theoretical use to name queer, non-binary, gender-non-conforming, trans, and othered bodies
who practice femme/feminine aesthetics and politics deviant from white supremacist,
cishetereopatriarchial capitalist ideas of the feminine. My use of femme throughout is influenced

75
Heng, Geraldine. A Great Way to Fly: Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World
Feminism, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge, 1997), 31

41
by and invested in black feminist, women of color, and Third World feminist critiques about
universal womanhood as an exclusionary category that cannot account for difference or multiple
orientations to modernity. By deploying a politics of refusal towards the terms of universal
womanhood, I engage femme as analytic for how colonized and racialized subjectivities have not
only been barred from the category of the human, but how the human as a cohesive subject
hinges on epistemic violence, displacement, and exploitation of precisely those same bodies.
76
Femme, then, is an impossible ontology for an impossible body as the body of that human is
fraught with histories of racial exclusion, genocide, and conquest that must disappear or remain
discarded under contemporary regimes of transnational and state violence. It is with this
particular attention to the symbolic and enfleshed meanings of women’s body and femmehood
that Gut Cultures examines the many ways in which women and femmes collaborate with and
against the nation.
Chapter Breakdown
In chapter one, “Milky Appetites: On the Imperial Production of Fat-Free Futurity,” I
analyze how the messy tracts of powdered/skimmed milk map how colonialism and race are
transformed in the 20
th
century through metrics of public health and how the boundaries of
gender are negotiated through national appetites. Through my case studies–ranging from
nationalist protests that utilize milk imagery, to milk vignettes in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Vivek Shreya’s She of the Mountain, to pastoral eugenics literacy
campaigns such as the Bovine Trials and WIC ordinances– I demonstrate how fat-free milk maps
the viscerality of whiteness (and its concomitant racial and class markers) through the digestive
tract in terms of the optics of who can consume it, the infrastructure of its industries, regimes of

76
Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the Human, After
Man, its Overrepresentation--an Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-333.

42
subjugation, and the genre of its appetites. Turning to dairying uncovers the affective and
structural forces that naturalize white colonial and settler publics through ideas of nature,
technology, and public good which simultaneously work to contain racial-bodily-excess through
consumption. This chapter considers the joint vectors and contradicting meanings of
powdered/skim milk as it enters transnational foodways and American homes. While the allure
of American powdered/skim milk in the global south comes from a desire to get big and strong,
skim is marketed as a miracle weight-loss elixir for women and an obesity-stabilizer for poor
populations managed by the state. Powdered/skim acts as a material agent of empire that binds—
through touch and tongue— the body to race, gender, health, and the nation. In asking how skim
milk—originally a dairy waste discharge—became naturalized as a healthy and desirable global
food for specialty diets in at-risk populations, I examine the story of imperial food production as
a messy alimentary affair.
Chapter two, “The Making of The American Calorie and Metabolic Personhood,” traces a
cultural history of the racial life of the American calorie. The calorie is ubiquitous—its numeric
simplicity as a unit of energy output acts as a measurement of biological matter through
biopolitical mattering, where the calorie unit itself fades into impressions of things left over:
aesthetics, hygienic form, personal health and responsibility. The calorie is everywhere, and its
supposed neutrality informs personal choices, nutritional guidelines, supplementary food
programs, military rations, and foreign aid packages—all of which demarcate to us what the
citizen-body needs and looks like. In reading twentieth century food literacy as an aesthetic,
materialist, and phenomenological index of race science, this chapter argues that the vitalism of
the euthenics movement sutures personhood to metabolics, were science and metaphor co-
produce their own entanglements. The making of the American calorie embodied a racial and

43
labor logic that branded much of US domestic and foreign policy and the current neocolonial
food matrix as both an extension and distinct project from European colonial taxonomy, central
to which was the image of the new American woman. The ontology of the calorie has been
rehearsed in the private spaces of the home and kitchen that transformed into laboratories of life-
management systems—more formally known as home economics programs—spearheaded by
white women of America, practiced in academia and public schools, in advertisement and public
agencies, and circulated from port to port in the guise of food literacy and anti-hunger campaigns
that welcomed US military satellite colonies and repurposed agricultural waste. In looking at the
literature of nutritional guides from prominent domestic scientists, we can trace how a new
language of vitality begins to take shape in the home to describe the contours of the new
American woman and the nation she keeps.
Chapter three, “Devouring the Inscrutable: Eating Asians on the Internet” juxtaposes and
contextualizes the recent phenomenon of Asian “eating” content (such as popular Mukbang
videos and daily eating vlogs) alongside Asia’s image of being the “principal famine area of the
world.”
77
This chapter asks: why is Asiatic flesh untranslatable? How did the Asian femme
become an ornament? What are ways we can actually talk about the Asian body through the
visceral? I contextualize the sensory ecologies of eating Asians on the internet within a history of
food and militarism, famine and occupation, medicalization and colonialism–reading a wide
range of contemporary performance archives of Asians performing eating against the mid-
century famine and rhetoric policies of the U.S. Who eats and who watches? What happens
between the looking and the eating? My analysis demonstrates how the act of eating (and the

77
Scrimchaw, The Phenomenon of Famine, 3.

44
kind of body doing the eating) tells a congealing story of race, gender, thinness, and nation that
pushes and pulls in popular imaginations of Asian flesh.
In the tradition of a Woman of color Feminism that calls for an unwillingness to seek
easy resolutions—refusing the production of knowledge that demands positivist answers—this
project, instead, sits in the muck of tension/tensing. This chapter reckons with a deep fracture in
the world as our fat, brown, femme bodies experience it versus the world as it has been
historicized and contextualized through a colonial vocabulary. This fracture is the distance
between what we inherit and learn about our bodies through our great-grandmother’s traumas
and the indexing of risk/race-coding as a new racial formation in the 21
st
century. Practicing
decolonial body politics means wanting more than anyone is willing to give you, being stuck
between worlds that can’t contain all of you and moving about those spaces without asking
permission or forgiveness. It is a patchwork of incomplete archives, cross-disciplinary
methodologies, and partial histories that are felt onto our bodies and into our spaces. It is
uncovering a look at and after ourselves despite all the ways scholars, doctors, and kin have
already defined us. This genealogy of excess that I am piecing together is part of the healing
work we do for ourselves and each other—even when we aren’t ready, even when the citation
trail runs wild.

45
Chapter 1
Milky Appetites: On the Imperial Production of Fat-Free Futurity

A casual look at the races of people seems to show that those using much milk are the
strongest physically and mentally, and the most enduring of the peoples of the world. Of
all races, the Aryans seem to have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest
users of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high
development of this division of human beings.

-Ulysses Hedricks, A History of Agriculture
in the State of New York

The double function of the mouth—both in processing food into digestible matter and in
producing sense—sutures that space to the domestic and civic production of language, to
storytelling.

-Kyla Wazana-Tompkins, Racial Indigestion

This chapter lingers in the odors of 1920’s U.S. dairy creameries—in the stench after fat.
Curdles of putrid waste from the creaming process for butter and cheese seeped across ditches,
streams, and soiled patches of the American Pastoral.
78
Oozing, rotting, retching, by the 1940’s
the environmental damage and sensory sore from discharging waste into local waterways was so
severe that the dairy industry was forced to find a solution in the form of powdered milk.
79
Skim
milk’s earlier entry into the market in the 1900s was met with wholesale rejection by the average
American palette and used most often in livestock feed and military rations. Five decades later,
powdered/skim milk would weave its way into the fabric of American life and transnational

78
Michels, Hoards Dairyman, “Wisconsin Buttermaker’s Meeting,” 36; M. Mortensen and J.B.
Davidson, Agricultural Experiment State Bulletin, “Creamery Organization and Construction,” 139;
Carmichael, “Forty Years of Water Pollution Control in Wisconsin,” 418-419.
79
Velten, Hannah. Milk a Global History. Edible. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

46
bellies: as wellness foodstuffs, foreign aid, and filler in industrial processed foods.
Powdered/Skim is everywhere—from the expected places like baked goods, milk teas,
nutritional supplements, and Nutella to the unexpected such as salad dressings, canned soups,
and processed meats. With marketing sleight of hand, the once reviled skim milk has been
domesticated as a health food to strengthen the weak and help the weight-conscious shed their fat
since the mid-20
th
century.
What intimacies of empire might we find by following the shifting sentiments around
skimmed milk? This chapter analyzes how the messy tracts of powdered/skim milk across
borders and bellies is a telling map for how race and gender were re-negotiated in the 20
th

century as metrics of public health and national appetites. An appetite for skim milk congealed
across food literacy and foreign aid campaigns that relied on a cohesive image of the national-
body and proper citizen-subject scaffolded through ideals of whiteness, able-bodiedness,
thinness, and sovereignty. While there has been a wide range of work in milk studies that links
dairy economies and lactose cultures to racialization, my focus on powdered/skim attends to
imprints of American empire where dairy cultures act as a material agent of war and imperial
expansion.
In asking how skim milk—originally a dairy waste discharge—became naturalized as a
healthy and desirable global food for specialty diets in at-risk populations, I examine the story of
imperial food production as a messy alimentary affair that attempts (and often fails) to regulate
gut-cultures and economies of flesh. I use the term gut-cultures to denote how the gut acts as
biological matter as well as a social and cultural space curated through what is inside/outside of
the body-in-motion, the body-as-becoming.
80
Tracing the productive force of powdered/skim

80
See: Wilson, Gut Feminism, Landecker, “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New
Metabolism,”167–94, Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 39-51.

47
also delineates and makes visible the enclosed relationship between militarism and
humanitarianism, a closed-loop where benevolence bleeds into occupation.
This chapter critically approaches the benign concepts of health and wellness through a
postcolonial feminist disability framework by situating the Enlightenment logics of the human
and its permutations through technologies of management in the post-enlightenment era. By
thinking through the affects and aesthetics of nutritional sciences—how skim transformed into a
healthy and desirable global food and the fantasy of a body transformed by its consumption into
a normative subject—I consider the terms in which the democratic subject of rights is crafted and
negotiated. Centrally, this chapter asks: what is the affective and aesthetic relationship between
science and imperialism and how do these joint projects come to bear on conditions of disablism
and ableism? The case for powdered/skim milk locates the modes in which colonial empire white
settler relationships to land through processes of ecological extraction and universalizing the
concept of “health” through militarism, food literacy, and population management. The section
on the growing dairy industry in Asia at first aided by U.S. militarism and food aid and now a
site of fearing the unquenchable thirst of the ethnic other, for example, thinks through the
relationship between landedness, racialization, and the production of the optimized citizen-body.
As scholars and activists of the modern/colonial food systems note, offloading food
waste onto poor and brown populations under the guise of imperial benevolence is precisely the
function of industrial and processed foods.
81
Postcolonial Food Studies has given us dynamic
tools for thinking through the history of food consumption, appetite-formation, and the
(un)making of the self as a not-quite-enclosed subject/object by studying the mundane forms of

81
See: Garzo Montalvo, M. F.; Zandi, H. The modern/colonial food system in a paradigm of war.
Planting Justice, 2011; Janer, Zilkia. “(IN)EDIBLE NATURE: New World Food and Coloniality.”
Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March 2007): 385–405.

48
imperial and state violence.
82
The intersection of food studies and disability often center
questions of access and intimacies, thinking through how proximities to caretaking of the land
and body can reorient capitalist modes of production. My turn to the minor, to a hyper-study of
milky artifacts, is meant to account for how coloniality disrupts and reorganizes world systems,
reverberates, sinks to the stomach, mingles, re-forms, and ultimately, I look to make sense of
bodies under conditions of discipline and surveillance in the everyday.
83

Rosemarie Garland-Tompson’s quintessential feminist disability studies text
Extraordinary Bodies imagines the disabled body beyond objects of pity and study within
medical discourse and, instead, interrogates the productive potential of disability “in the realm of
political minorities,”
84
where “meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies resides not in inherent
physical flaws, but in social relationships.”
85
This relational model of embodied experience—
grounded through proximity and intimacy— has been a useful analytic for thinking of
infrastructure and access as a design of personhood and belonging. At the same time, as Anna
Mollow argues, neglecting health and medical discourses forecloses the important contributions
that fat activists, liberationists and scholars have done around the production of “healthism.”
86
I
am not interested in recuperating health and wellness as moral or empirical evidence of a life
well-lived. Rather, this chapter turns to the cultural politics of food and eating in the wellness

82
For examples of methods of postcolonial food studies, see: Roy, Alimentary Tracts, Wazana-
Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, Kim, “The Postcolonial Politics of Food.”
83
For more on coloniality/modernity see: Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs; Gómez-Barris, The
Extractive Zone; Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization; Silva, Denise Ferreira Da. Toward a
Global Idea of Race. U of Minnesota Press; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of
Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
84
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American
Culture and Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6.
85
Ibid. 7
86
Mollow, “Disability Gets Fat,” 206-207

49
industry to think capaciously about the mundane act of eating and the benign concept of
wellness, interrogating the historical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of health.
Fatness and disability, as minoritizing identity markers, are often collapsed under the
same categorization of discrimination in mainstream body politics despite the tenuous
relationship between the two fields. This chasm grew from the question of whether fatness can or
should be classified as a disability, with debates ranging from critiques on the limits of rights-
based discourse to the outright ableist “good fattie” narratives that seek to distance the fat body
from assumptions of being disabled and the question of whether fatness is produced through
individual choice as opposed to a representation of bodily difference/diversity.
87
Disability is
imagined through a sympathetic gaze: it’s no one’s fault (unless we turn to the disabling forces
of colonial extractivism),
88
while fat is seen as something that could disappear with simply
enough regulation. My study of fat matters through a decolonial disability framework allows a
critical look into the contradicting mechanisms of power that constitute health and how such
renderings are embedded in governance and securitization.
When we do not apply the critical and precise tools scholars and activists have developed
to chart biopower and its many iterations, and merely see fat/ness as bad, we fail to engage the
nuances of ideologies of sex, capacity, ability, nationhood, and sexuality. Failure to interrogate
this uncritical sentiments about fat terror allows the public to co-sign that some bodies should,

87
See: Jones, Lauren E. “Framing of Fat: Narratives of Health and Disability in Fat Discrimination
Litigation.” New York University Law Review (1950) 87, no. 6 (2012): 1996–2039; Meleo-Erwin, Zoë.
“Disrupting Normal: Toward the ‘Ordinary and Familiar’ in Fat Politics.” Feminism & Psychology 22,
no. 3 (2012): 388–402; Brown, Heather, and April M. Herndon. “No Bad Fatties Allowed?: Negotiating
the Meaning and Power of the Mutable Body.” In Thickening Fat. Routledge, 2019.
88
Emerging scholarship of disablism and the Global South by scholars such as Jasbir Puar (The Right to
Maim), Thomas Dirth and Glenn Adams (“Decolonial Theory and Disability Studies”), Amy Reed-
Sandoval and Roberto Sirvent (“Disability and the Decolonial Turn”) and Adria Imada (“A Decolonial
Disability Studies?”) trouble the sympathetic gaze of the disabled body when turned to sites of black and
brown death at the hands of the settler state.

50
can, and must be policed for their own and public good. Fat historians and scholars have studied
the illicit repulsion we are trained to experience from seeing fatness. This chapter splices through
the objects that constellate such programming, pulling apart insidious habits of thought and
visceral feelings. Following fat matters allow me to meditate on race-and-fat collisions through
formations of new nationalisms and competing economic world systems as moments that expand
how communities of color are policed and disciplined through nutritional programs that
inevitably intensified their containment via the project of body-making and obesity
biopedagogies.
89

In the first section, I think alongside the growing body of material history and
philosophical literature that engages the social history of dairying with colonial and racial
ontologies. Reading the counter-protests by white supremacists to the He Will Not Divide Us art
installation in the Museum of Moving Images, I argue that whole milk—as an anchoring object
of affect—maps the viscerality of whiteness (and its concomitant racial and class markers)
through the digestive tract in terms of the optics of who can consume it, the infrastructure of its
industries, regimes of subjugation, and the genre of its appetites. The second section considers
the joint vectors and contradicting meanings of powdered/skim milk as it enters transnational
foodways and American homes. While the allure of American powdered/skim in the Global
South comes from cultivating precise knowledges about hygiene and sanitation as well as a
desire to get big and strong, skim is marketed as a miracle weight-loss elixir for women and an
obesity-stabilizer for poor populations managed by the state. Powder/skim acts as a material
agent of empire that binds—through touch and tongue— the body to race, gender, and the nation.

89
Wright, Jan, and Valerie Harwood. Biopolitics and the “Obesity Epidemic”: Governing Bodies. Vol. 3.
Routledge Studies in Health and Social Welfare. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009.

51
Finally, the third section turns to the bodies that do not fit and the flesh we must manage
at the altar of nation in service of health. Exploring the rhetoric around motherhood and feeding,
specifically in child welfare programs, alongside queer South/Southeast Asian writers Ocean
Vuong’s milk vignette in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Vivek Shreya’s She of
the Mountains, this section interrogates how bodies of color and diasporic figures uncomfortably
graze against codes of whiteness, citizenship, and thinness that seek to manage intimacies and
desire through appetite. “Milky Appetites” considers the obvious and the minor of milk and
dairying—from the process of repurposing industrial waste as food in foreign and domestic aid
packages to skim’s marketing as a miracle elixir for dieting middle class bodies. By reading food
waste/ways, militarism, and gendered (colonial) violence through a decolonial and critical fat
studies lens, we can better sense the function and form of racial capitalism’s aesthetics in the 21
st

century.
Milky Myths and White Matters
In 2016, the anti-Trump protest installment He Will Not Divide Us—a live-feed set to
stream outside of the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, NY which invited participants to
say the phrase for the duration of Trump’s presidency— was hijacked by a group of white
supremacists.
90
Incited by 4chan users to provoke the left and internet-illiterate media outlets by
turning every day, mundane objects into white supremacist symbols (a strategy meant to
discredit and delegitimize anti-fascist and anti-white supremacist organizing through obfuscating
quotidian violence via hyperbole, exaggeration, and sarcasm), the men took over the livestream.
There they stood: bearded, shirtless in the cold, flexing, gathered in a frenzied, messy theater as

90
The installation was created by Luke Turner, Nastja Rönko, and Shia Lebeouff. It’s important to note
that 4chan users were especially interested in targeting this particular protest installation due to
Lebeouff’s erratic and controversial public persona, and 4chan users dedicated many months to stalking,
provoking, and ridiculing him for sport.

52
they cheered and chugged gallons of whole milk in front of the camera, surrounded by a circle of
onlookers and semi-participants. Mockingly, they are seen taking turns addressing the lens, close
up, growling, laughing, kissing their biceps, lifting one another up in arms, and saying such
things as: “hey non-whites, I can do this and you can’t,” “you may not like it but this is the face
of white nationalism,” and “Ah, an ice-cold glass of pure racism.”
91

The five players at the center and the smirking crowd surrounding them share a
recognition for the absurdity of this performance through laughter, belly slapping, and
nonsensical chants. There is a sharpness to the way these men name themselves as white
nationalists and milk boys, a transparency meant to act as opacity, where the joke appears only
when others name their behavior as racist and patriarchal. The tongue-and-cheek milk-chugging
is meant to feel disorienting; it is experienced as non-sequitur incongruence for those not in the
know on the origins of the joke and the online discursive vernacular. The joke is in your inability
to accept a joke.

91
Tekajin, “MILKPARTY,” Youtube, 9:43, Feb 5, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
OsvFOXWqRg
Figure 1.1 Still from “MILKPARTY.” Youtube Video

53
Whole milk quickly circulated as an alt-right meme—similar to the likes of Pepe the Frog
and the ‘okay’ emoji
92
— through the typical online channels of 4chan, reddit, and twitter. The
counter-protest at the Museum of Moving Images was embroiled in long-standing discourse
where internet-white supremacists armed themselves with race-science readings of scientific
journals around lactose intolerance and the bodies genetically capable of digesting it. In these
forums, making much ado about whole milk meant designating skim and soy as racialized,
gendered, and sexualized markers of weaker bodies. Skim, often associated with weight-loss, is
read as effeminate—meant for those who must shrink to fit into cultural aesthetic norms,
something antithetical to an expansively encroaching white heterosexual masculinity.
Soy consumption, on the other hand, conjures the Asian body coded as weak—unable to
“bench press 360” as one of the milk boys growls into the camera as he grabs hold of his own
biceps. The white supremacist discourse on whole milk cite decontextualized studies about
phytoestrogens found in soy assumed to cause a lower sperm count. Entering “the Milk Zone”
93

became an ethno-spatial mapping for a narrative of anglo-diets in contradistinction to Asian-diets
heavy in soy consumption, thereby consolidating a fantasy of white male virility and supremacy
in the face of increasing race anxieties over global capital.
This tension between the joke and the real present a vexed target of criticism, that at once
demonstrates the limits of representation and the need to develop critical reading practices for the
politics of aesthetics. The meme of whole milk emojis and the theatrical performances of the alt-
right seem like an aberration, a random sequence of events that is a reaction to public art and

92
“OK hand sign added to list of hate Symbols” BBC News, Sept 27, 2019,
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49837898?piano-modal; “When the O.K. Sign is No Longer O.K.,”
New York Times, Dec 15, 2019,https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.html;
“How Pepe the Frog went from harmless to hate symbol,” LA Times, Oct 11, 2016,
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pepe-the-frog-hate-symbol-20161011-snap-htmlstory.html
93
Archive of 4chan thread “Entering the Milk Zone” https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/111581590/

54
discourse of the time, meant to sit as ahistorical in the bowels of the internet. Yet, what would it
matter to trace apparitions of old tropes of American nativism through these gestures? What
might it mean to locate public feelings of nationalism, belonging, and exclusion through flesh
and vernacular? Milk’s symbolism as pure(bred) and powerful stretches from early European
colonization to the rise of American empire. The classic iconography around the American
pastoral and its grand frontiers have long relished the simplicity and wholesomeness of milk and
dairy farms, and its image in the public consciousness has been both visceral and immediate.
Despite the insistence on the absurdism of radicalizing quotidian objects in the service of
white supremacist patriarchal violence, the ease with which white nationalists slip into images of
the ethno-state through milk is quite compelling. This section parses through these separate but
intertwining lexicons of milk—as wholesome and childlike and as dangerous and maladaptive.
In doing so, I uncover the complicated affective work of the dairy farm linking white settler
publics to the land and the possessive investment in dairy consumption as representative of
modernity. The fantasy of milk’s purity and healthfulness alongside the project of racialization
seamlessly stitches together an ethno-national state and its attendant modern food system as the
supposedly inevitable and natural world order, thereby surfacing that which becomes obscured
through historicizing aesthetic practices.
Dairy Dramas and Personhood
Our sensibilities around “milk-as-wholesome” are not merely an inevitable scientific
discovery or a cultural-inheritance, but a systematically curated social, economic, and political
force that orders everyday life. In the past decade, a number of monographs by historians and

55
philosophers have tracked the social history of dairying,
94
sanitation,
95
and animal containment.
96

These historical materialist projects make the case for why milk is an important site of inquiry
for understanding social life in more than human worlds.
97
In one of the earlier milk monographs
that takes seriously the question of whiteness, Nature’s Perfect Food by Melanie DuPuis, parses
through the ubiquitous fantasies of milk’s purity by tracing how dairy transformed from “white
poison” to natural food at the turn of the century.
98
DuPuis juxtaposes our contemporary
perceptions of milk as healthy and natural to how milk was often perceived in the 1800’s as a
lethal substance for the urban poor because it could be laced with additives like plaster of Paris
or paint to achieve a white, creamy texture in instances where the fat was skimmed or where the
cows were fed run-off from whiskey distilleries.
During the 19
th
century, the distaste for skimmed milk was so palpable, and the desire for
a creamy, white texture from consumers so strong, that dairy cooperatives adopted these deadly
practices for decades. DuPuis considers how this transformation from poison to national food
begins through milky myths and sentiments around mother’s milk, and how shifting relationships

94
Velten does this work by taking up, for example, the case of the 1850’s New York City Swill Milk
Scandal that resulted in over 8,000 infant mortalities (and numerous public health crises). Journalist Frank
Leslie wrote several scathing exposes on the scandal, but it often fell upon deaf ears for almost two
decades. Velten, Milk a Global History, 57-78.
95
See: Nimmo, Richie. Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human: Purifying the Social. Culture,
Economy and the Social. London; Routledge, 2010. Nimmo’s study of 19
th
century British dairy
industries unfurls the story of milk as the story of modern humanism, wherein the sanitation practices of
cattle-rearing and urban inspection/consumption of dairy was a means of purifying the social and
restructuring the boundaries between humans and nature, urban and city life.
96
Valenze, Milk.
97
Atkins, P. W. Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science, and the Law. Critical Food Studies.
Farnham, Surrey; Ashgate, 2010, looks at the relationship between sanitation practices and forms of
containing disease and perfecting milk with the rise of germ theory, where the capacities of man to retool
his environment designated borders between humans, animals, and nature. Both of these works consider
how nonhuman actors like bacteria, cattle, and tuberculosis affected milk consumption, the dairy industry,
and social structures at large.
98
DuPuis, E. Melanie. Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York: University
Press, 2002.

56
to breastfeeding along class lines created a gap for milk to become an indispensable children’s
food that transformed an ambivalent relationship to dairy into an entrenched one with meaning
and feeling that would eventually reach a global scale. Despite the lack of substantial changes to
regulations to dairy distribution and sales, the white poison moniker was replaced with
something more palatable for Americans: milk was food for our children; milk could secure the
future of our nation.
99

In the American assemblage of racial capitalism, an appetite for milk, in many ways,
prefaces the consolidating forces of whiteness through contested spaces of the gut. Dupuis
argues, “the perfect whiteness of this food and the white body genetically capable of digesting
it…exemplifies this story of progress, perfection, and power.”
100
Progress, perfection, and
power: such mastery signals a visceral genealogy in the construction of white subjecthood as
more than an episteme which curates particular tastes or preferences from a geographic locus—
or, the collecting of social, political and economic capital afforded to the enlightened liberal
human through its fleshy orientations. Rather, mastery over nature acts as the bedrock of
whiteness-as-script and diet(ing)-as-culture. E.V. McCullen, well known nutritionist in the
1920’s who held appointments at leading medical institutes such as John Hopkins (where he ran
institutionally funded diet and hygiene experiments on poor, underweight children in Baltimore),
makes short order of the link between dairy consumption and the rise of civilized man. Cited by
the National Dairy Council in various catalogs and snippets, he writes:
The people who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous
people, who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades
in the world, who have an appreciation for art, literature and music, who

99
Leslie, F. “Starling Exposure of the Milk Trade in New-York and Brooklyn,” New York Times, May 7,
1858.
100
DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, page 11.

57
are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect are the
people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products.
101

Appetites stray to an aesthetic and affective project of bodying which extends the human vis-à-
vis whiteness beyond the dermis to the eating, pleasure, sculpting, toning, disciplining of
wayward flesh and wild nature. The dairy farm is a project in taming the land and milk
consumption registers technologies of the body.
The history of dairying demonstrates how American eugenics plays a vital role in the
story of nutritional science and progressive era public health policy. Moreover, the eugenics
movement developed various public sensing projects—where observing, quantifying, touching,
and consuming helped train the public towards appetites and ways of knowing. One of those
projects took place in the theater of the bovine trials. Breeding domesticated animals was a
practice in U.S. farms since early European colonial settlements, but it was not until the shifting
labor/freedom configurations of a post-emancipation America that livestock breeding became a
widespread project of the state. European and U.S. scholars and scientists were engaging in
public debates between Darwinists and Malthusians who believed that genetic mutations were
random and based on survival (of the fittest) and the neo-Lamarckians who argued that the
pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain determines the course of evolution.
102
The politics of
sentimentalism would see a brief rise in Europe through institutions and social program
initiatives as an extension of the colonial administration project at the heart of benevolence in
British imperialism. In the U.S., however, progressive era reformers often favored and
popularized Darwinists understanding of genetics, capacity, and evolution.

101
The Wyoming Farm Bulletin, Vol 8. July 1918, pg 15.
102
Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an
International Eugenic Science, 1800–1945.” Disability & Society 18, no. 7 (December 2003): 843–64.

58
As these debates about breeding and selection over nonhuman and human matters took
place in institutions of higher learning, state houses, and scientific communities, their logics were
being rehearsed to the American public through livestock educational materials and the Bovine
Trials sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
103
The early 1900s saw an explosion of
pamphlets and advice columns created and distributed by researchers at the Department of
Agriculture focused on animal husbandry. The most popular and requested pamphlets were
written by D.S. Burch titled “Out-Line for Conducting Scrub Sire Trials,” “Runts—and the
Remedy,” and “From Scrubs to Quality Stock.” These pamphlets were specifically crafted for
layperson audiences. The rhetorical structure of the documents often opened with ‘letters to the
editor’ style advice scenarios featuring questions or stories from farmers, housewives, and up-
and-coming businessmen that sought to improve their profits, community infrastructure, or the
quality of food people were feeding to their families.
The tone of familiarity worked to make the logics of this emerging science feel
accessible. Each pamphlet presented images, like baseball trading cards, with statistics and
metrics written in clearly definable terms between the “runts'' and “purebreds.” Alongside
directives for best breeding practices that would improve communal economies and health, the
images depicting “runty bulls'' were an educational tool in training people to recognize signs of
ill-breeding. Taking up the majority of the frame in “Runts-and the Remedy'' is a “runt” and stats
such as age, weight, and causes that produced scrub-sites like “inferior breeding” and “poor
feeding.”
104
The rhetorical structures of associating the visual to metrics of life-management
presented modes of recognizing scales of biological difference through healthfulness. Burch

103
For a more in-depth historical account of regional/national discourse of Bovine Trials, see Gabriel
Rosenberg article: “No Scrubs.”
104
Mohler, John R. "Runts--and the Remedy" (1921): 225-240.

59
believed that “like gravitation and heat, heredity is a definite force that can be utilized to serve
those who understand its laws and principles”
105
and sought to make those laws and principles
accessible to the American public.
Moreover, though the documents created and distributed by the Department of
Agriculture focused on a range of livestock and vegetation, it was cattle-rearing that took center
stage in what newspapers and political cartoons would call the Bovine Trials. According to
historian Gabriel Rosenberg, the Bovine Trial pamphlets were so popular that people were tuning
in across the country.
106
These pamphlets included detailed instructions on the codes of conducts
for the play-judges, lawyers, law
enforcement officials as well
instructions on how to engage the
humans/animals accused of scrub
siring— from courtroom
procedurals to the execution of
cattle, to the after trial picnic in
which the defendant would be
served.
107
What is most
interesting about this state project
are the techniques deployed to
engage sensory publics. The
Bovine Trails were meant to be experienced as a communal affair which culminated in a picnic

105
Burch, D.S. “Harnessing Heredity to Improve the Nations Live Stock” (1920) p 347
106
Rosenberg, “No Scrubs,” 363
107
Burch, D.S. "From Scrubs to Quality Stock" (1921): 331-338.
Figure 1.2 image of “A Good Steer and a Runt” from 1920 “Runts–and the
Remedy”

60
or banquet of sorts, involving tastes, textures, and sights wedded to the highest exemplary of
reason: the rule of law. The slippage between rule of law and man’s re-tooling of nature
solidifies the sensorial and rhetorical relationship wherein the scrub or runt is a future that can be
avoided through the force of mastery. Failure to do so is a failure of the individual in not
overcoming the natural world.
The relationship between cattle rearing, consumption, and eugenics are more than
tangentially related—as 20
th
century dieticians, agriculturalists, and historians were quick to
assert. For example, Ulysses Hendricks, considered an expert horticulturist and historian of his
time, wrote:
A casual look at the races of people seems to show that those using much milk are the
strongest physically and mentally, and the most enduring of the peoples of the world. Of
all races, the Aryans seem to have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest
users of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high
development of this division of human beings.
108

Expelling runts, then, was not merely an economic project that would produce higher and
healthier yields of dairy products and meat per capita, but urgently and fundamentally impacted
human-species development along racial and ethno-national lines. The echoes of this logic haunt
the “Milk Zone” forums that inspired the “Milk Boys’ at the Museum of Moving Images,
separating those genetically incapable of lactose digestion as less developed and physically and
mentally.
The Bovine Trials served, over the course of three decades, as a widely used pedagogical
tool to naturalize Darwinist philosophies with everyday habits of thought, ushering in language
and iconography for governmentality that the public could witness, participate in, and develop a
sensing for through the trial system. It was a theater of taxonomies translated through animal

108
Hendrick, A History of Agriculture in the State of New York.

61
husbandry. The robust debates over public health, nutrition, and technological progress,
therefore, were not only happening in formal institutions, but through the common tongue and
spectacle of court cases in which average people were encouraged to participate.
Fat-Free Futurity
Milk and cream have long operated as symbolic foodstuffs in the American imagination,
in particular—conjuring a sense of nationalism and valorizing a pre-industrial, pre-“immigrant”
agrarian life.
109
During the prewar period, dairy linked white urban families to the rural farm—to
the land, to manifest destiny, to American Nativism
110
— as city workers felt increasingly
alienated from land to labor to mouth. The end of the 19
th
century saw a previously
unprecedented scale of migration into the U.S. and with the newly arrived Eastern and Southern
European migrants in the Northeastern states came the rising tide of American Nativism. Taming
the land was a tempered occupational force of the dairy farm. In this section, I take a scalar view
on how fat is disparately constructed as a problem across hemispheres. The state of exclusion
and inclusion into whiteness is understood through body-size anxiety in the 20
th
century as
shifting boundaries of racialism and labor become newly articulated as risk-coding as race-
coding.
The turn of the 20
th
century marked a crucial moment in the ongoing process of
consolidating the boundaries of whiteness as heightened racial anxiety spread through American
port cities with the arrival of new Europeans. With the flood of new settlers, Americans became
fixated on food, appetites, and stature/body size as a way to designate an ethno-national identity

109
Smith-Howard, Kendra. Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900. Cary: Oxford
University Press, Incorporated, Oxford University Press, 2013.

110
For more on American Nativism see: Norman L Friedman. “Nativism.” Phylon 28, no. 4 (1967): 408–
15; Sanchez, George J. “Face the Nation: Race, Immigration, and the Rise of Nativism in Late Twentieth
Century America.” The International Migration Review 31, no. 4 (1997): 1009-; Colman, “Some Roots of
American Nativism,” 137-146.

62
that still fit within the cultural vernacular of the savage versus the civilized, the pre-modern
versus the modern.
111
As the category of whiteness became bound and unbound through class
lines and American Nativist genealogies, the cult of slenderness emerged as a fleshy marker of
bodily propriety. Fat historical materialist scholarship has traced how portly European settlers
who sought factory work in industrialized cities signaled to the American public a crisis of class
and migrant contagion; violent practices of exclusion at the time demonstrate how whiteness, as
a racial category, is formed along the corporeal fat-other.
112
Milk would, once again, provide a
playhouse for public speculation and debates over hunger and fat. With the increased production,
transportation, and consumption of dairy products from rural farms to urban centers, the
overabundance of skim and whey run-off, typically recycled as livestock feed for smaller scale
family farms prior to monoculture farming practices, was discharged into local waterways.
113

Though the practice of dumping industrial farm waste into streams and rivers was not a new one,
by the 1940’s the environmental damage and sensory sore was so severe that, pressured by
environmental advocacy groups and consumers nauseated by the fumes, creameries were forced
to take action. The dairy industry was facing a problem of appearances that broke faith with a
centuries-long project of cultivating its parabolic goodness through joint processes of
racialization and occupation.
The unsanitary and unsightly practices of the creameries began to undermine the
wholesomeness, purity, and whiteness of dairy in the national imaginary, a mythologizing made
possible by disappearing labor—from lactating mammals (both human/nonhuman), to migrant
dairy workers, to the industrial infrastructures of production and transportation. With such a

111
Fraser, Laura. “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States.” New York, USA: New
York University Press, 2020.

112
Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Schwartz, Never Satisfied.
113
Donald Carmichael, “Forty Years of Water Pollution Control in Wisconsin,” 418-419.

63
material legacy, the odors of the 1920’s U.S. creameries presented a vexed political-ecological
entanglement that posed more than a problem of waste disposal and management and would,
therefore, require a re-education of appetites and senses. Ernst Kelly, an employee of the
National Dairy association in 1919, noted how despite a national intolerance for waste during the
interwar period Americans simply would not consume skim milk.
114
The difficulty of
reconstituting the milk solids into liquid form and the negative associations with skim—between
its vernacular use as lacking substance and therefore nutritional density and its primary function
as livestock feed— made it particularly unappetizing. Chemurgists attempted to rebrand dairy
discharge in a number of ways with varying degrees of success, as fillers in processed foods, as
plastics, and even as casein fabrics for Avant Garde fashions.
Headway was made in the 1920’s when newspapers began reporting on the perfected
technological marvel of powdered/skim. A New York Times article from June 13, 1920 titled
“Milk Powder Perfected,”
115
reported that the United States Public Health Service in Boston had
concluded successful experiments with dried milk powder on children in the tropics. Surgeon
General H.C. Cummins is quoted saying:
Babies of the tropics are now assured of a supply of milk as wholesome as that which
comes from the finest American Dairies. Aside from making possible the saving of
thousands of babies' lives through[out] the world, it will enable the dairymen to use
profitably large quantities of milk which formerly have been wasted.
116

Babies of the tropics acted as a laboratory for powdered milks digestibility in bellies and the
marketplace on the global stage, crafting a rhetorical motif whereby American innovation in
technologies of food production are sutured with the project of the human(itarian). On the other

114
The Utilization of Dairy Byproducts, the first article in the Journal of Dairying Science to write
extensively about powdered milk technology in 1919.
115
“Milk Powder Perfected” New York Times, June 13, 1920; “Powdered Magical Milk,” New York
Times, October 17, 1954.
116
Ibid.

64
side of the same coin,1500 underweight school children in Baltimore were fed powdered/skim as
well. The experiment, directed by E.V. McCollum, included monitoring children in their homes,
“regulating hours of their sleep, and selecting their food.”
117
These two projects modeled public
health research in the mid-20th century that emphasized how the lives of poor communities (of
color) were meant to be surveilled and re-matriculated into more appropriate appetites and
behaviors.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Home Economics created a series of
campaigns to spread awareness of the uses of skimmed milk that leaned into its health merits
from a scientific standpoint. One such report in 1934 from the popular “Aunt Sammy” radio
program, a daily, fifteen minute segment that showcased the latest tips for rural American
homemakers, focused on transforming skimmed milk’s image as “the step-child in the food
family–misunderstood, neglected, scorned, slighted and –wasted.”
118
The program focused on
supplying nutritional facts, urging homemakers to shift their long held feelings about the taste
and texture of skimmed milk shifting the conversation from taste, texture, to instead think about
economic foods and nutrient content. This content shift would lay the foundation for how
skimmed and powdered milk would make its appearance during World War II and its aftermath.
War-Time Bodies
American milk powder would have many afterlives in Asia and the Pacific—as memory
of war time hunger as well as in transformed global delicacies (such as Taiwanese boba milk tea
in the 1980s). Powdered milk was introduced into Asia food systems during World War I and
would become a staple in every U.S. military intervention thereafter. In Grace M. Cho’s
exquisite hybrid text, Tastes Like War: A Memoir, Cho strains a daughter’s grief through a

117
Ibid.
118
“Skimmilk in the Menu,”Aunt Sammy Radio, Jun 25, 1934

65
mother’s madness and begins with a powdered milk story. Cho situates how aging and illness,
love and loneliness make home in the stomach, through the appetites that tether the tongue to
global histories in recalling the uneasy dynamics left in the wake of her Korean mother’s Cold
War traumas. The memoir opens with scenes from the last few years of Cho’s mother’s life. Cho
describes the small suite her brother and sister-in-law built for their mom with a mix of affection
and anxiety and a conversation she had with her mother about her lack of appetite and
emaciating body:
“Mom, are you getting enough to eat?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What about protein?”
She nodded again, then snorted.
“They got me powdered milk.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, feigning surprise.
She became quiet as if she had already lost her train of thought and was deep in
some hallucinatory reverie.
“I can’t stand the taste of it,” she said. “Tastes like war.”
119

Cho is startled by this revelation. Her mother never brought up the Korean War unprompted, and
moreover, powdered milk operates as an innocuous substance often recommended to the elderly,
chronically ill, and young for its healthfulness. This moment opens a jarring remembrance
sequence for both mother and daughter, wherein technologies of militarism and empire stretch to
the viscera of the stomach and tongue.
Later in the chapter, Cho recalls the first time she began thinking through memory and
the stomach: during an elementary school project where students were asked to make a family
tree. In asking her mother about her family history, she learned that her grandfather died from
stomach cancer and her mother had another sister who also died from stomach cancer. Though
the official death certificates indicated “natural” causes of death outside of the immediacy of

119
Cho, Grace M. Tastes like War: A Memoir. First Feminist Press edition. (New York, NY: The Feminist
Press at the City University of New York, 2021),19.

66
war’s technologies: bombs, guns, and containment camps, the stomach maps the attendant
assemblages of war through food ecologies and social welfare infrastructure. Cho traces the
ephemera that is the taste of war, a hallucinatory reverie that remembers powder milk as actant
and extension of the U.S. military. The primacy of her mother’s memory marks an archive of
war-time bodies as they are carved out by the force of food and aid.
How did skim transform from reviled food waste to innocuous health food? By World
War II, milk powder had ascended to the national and global stage despite a continued distaste
by the American public. As Kendra Smith-Howard meticulously details in her history of Mid-
20
th
century dairy, “skim milk entered World War II before American soldiers did. The U.S.
secretary of agriculture asked for expanded production from dairy farmers in July 1941, months
before the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
120
Skim milk was meant to be America’s contribution to the
war effort and made sense as a humanitarian aid technology in the registers established by food
scientists, public health officials, and dairy lobbyists at the time. Through the distribution of milk
powder, skim acted as a material agent of war that warned of America’s presence even in its
absence of soldiers and in this moment transformed from an unwanted foodstuff into a desirable
modern food. As a representation of U.S. interests— that dissolves the boundaries between
humanitarian aid and U.S. military intervention—skim milk acted as a precursor for
understanding modern biopedagogies of bodily and dietary surveillance.
At the end of World War II, as the U.S. and its allies conducted starvation and re-feeding
studies on human test subjects to determine the best course of action for offering food relief to
starved European populations,
121
dairy corporations diverted all other uses of skim to its food

120
Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 77.
121
Guetzkow, Harold Steere; Bowman Paul Hoover. Men and hunger: A psychological manual for relief
workers. 1946.

67
production. However, this began to pose a problem in the post-war period because Americans
were still unwilling to consume skim milk. With fast rebranding, skimmed milk was being
marketed to American middle-class women as a miracle weight-loss elixir. Where previous dairy
advertisements attempted to target mothers and children, new marketing techniques emerged that
focused on how skim could help women achieve that perfect slender physique. Shifting from
iconography about nourishing the home and family, skim consumption was now associated with
weight-loss, attractiveness, and heterosexual romance. Pulling from familiar public sentiments
about the fear of fat-racial contagion, fat-free dairy products began crowding grocery shelves.
While the U.S. and USSR engaged in a battle for the title of social and economic global
superpower, the nuclear family emerged as a symbol of U.S. exceptionalism and managing
bodies became the project of white American women.
122

As skimmed milk and fat-free dairy products grew in popularity across the U.S., peddled
through fantasies of the American nuclear family, dairy consumption became entangled in the
aesthetics of nationhood for newly formed countries in the period immediately following formal
decolonization. Indexing dairy and meat consumption in the Global South began acting as a
marker of economic growth by international standards and is used, even today, to name the
changing conditions of middle-class appetites, consumption patterns, and behaviors that more
neatly align with the imperial body as entrée into modernity. Establishing dairy economies and
developing technologies to improve its quality, transportability, and shelf-life is a means by
which industrializing nations enter into modernity and the global economy.
One of the most prominent examples of dairying congealing postcoloniality and
nationhood to the benchmarks of white hegemony would be the eerily similar trajectories of the

122
Levine, Deborah I. “The Curious History of the Calorie in U.S. Policy:” American Journal of
Preventive Medicine 52, no. 1 (January 2017): 125–29.

68
rise of India and China as world leading dairy producers. Both of these stories begin in the
1970’s and 1980’s with the consumption of European and U.S. powdered/skim milk supplies. As
the next two sections will demonstrate, both India and China have long and complicated
narratives for milk’s function in society, and US and European food aid played a central role in
congealing old and emerging myths of dairy to the nation-state.
Bottomless Thirst: Asian Fat
A 2017 study published in the Association for Psychological Science Journal titled
“Unexpected Gains: Being Overweight Buttresses Prejudice Against Foreigners,” conducted
research on the link between body size, race, and perceptions of nationalities. Despite the syntax
of the title which connotes a looming fear for “overweight” Asians of prejudice from foreigners,
the study finds that fatter Asians are seen as more American and therefore less likely to be
regarded as the “forever foreigner” figure and experience various forms of exclusion and
violence. The sociological fixation on changing body chemistry and size of nonwhite bodies with
the introduction of Western, processed food diets is part of a larger conversation in
environmentalism and the obesity crisis discourse.
123
We know this story of fat racialization. It
appears along the golden arches of McDonalds in Chile, India, Sri Lanka, Los Angeles—the
impact of Western-industrial foods felt on added poundage, deteriorating health, and
disappearing local foodways. Fat and power flow in one direction. In a world populated with the
specter of a global obesity epidemic, the visual drama (and multinational-corporate
manufacturing) of the malnourished versus the overfed, and the realities of North/South currents
of extractivism, fatness is rendered a dead-end. My study of powdered/skim ruptures the easy
collapsing of fat with Western capitalist expansion. Rather, powdered/skim milk operates, on a

123
Guthman, Julie. “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies.” New York, USA: New
York University Press, 2020.

69
rhetorical and visceral level, differently than other forms of industrial foods that have been
circulated via U.S. empire–as not merely foodstuffs, but as symbolic national promise and a
mechanism for identifying proto-illness on “bad bodies”–and requires a different kind of
transnational untangling.
In Milk to Mandalay, Jonathan Saha describes milk as the “conquering colonial
commodity,” in colonial Burma, arguing that the imperial pastoral cattle imports of “foreign”
Indian cattle and the laws that sought to protect Indian bovine created vexed tensions between
human-animal racial form and governance.
124
Saha’s analysis of pastoral expansion posits that
colonial desire for dairy and its development spurred “material and imaginative territorialisation”
of Burma through land and stomach.
125
This section thinks through the afterlives of colonial
dairy appetites in 20th century India and China. My case studies–India’s Operation White and
China’s 1980’s post-Mao dairy boom– demonstrate that creating a dairy-consumer class in Asia
required an amalgamation of biosocial workings: from the use of transnational NGO milk
powder for developing middle class stomachs for dairy, the rise of milk-and-motherhood
national imagery, and the dissemination of global nutrition science discourse about citizen-
bodies and digestion. Dairy development measures both the growth of a nation’s economic
capacity on the modern global stage as well as how well its citizen-bodies can fight the stigma of
lactose intolerance as a proto-disease affecting the Asiatic figure.
In reading the expansion of India’s dairy economy through the 1970’s Operation Flood
alongside Hindu-Nationalist orator Sadhvi Rithambara’s “Sour Milk” speech, I trace how former
colonial administration projects transform through emergent liberal state infrastructures

124
Saha, Jonathan. “Milk to Mandalay: Dairy Consumption, Animal History and the Political Geography
of Colonial Burma.” Journal of Historical Geography 54 (October 2016): 1.
125
Ibid.

70
supplemented by transnational NGOs and how proto-fascist sentiments calcify through dairy
imagery. Then, I turn to China’s 1980’s dairy boom which was bolstered not by foreign food aid
itself, but by Western scientific discourses around nutrition science and “proto-illness” as means
by which to measure the modern nation and its healthy citizen-body. The fantasy of the citizen-
body is policed by and created through the promise of belonging and able-bodiedness tempered
by a rapid increase in dairy consumption. At a time where the U.S. dairy corporations marketed
skimmed milk as a miracle weight-loss elixir to its domestic audiences and was struggling to find
purchase for their dairy surplus, powdered/skim would act as the first point of entry –an
intermediary–for Asia’s appetite for dairy as more than a specialty health food for infants and
eldery people.
126

Verghese Kurien, known as the “Milkman of Indian” and the “Father of the White
revolution,” envisioned the Amul brand to operate as an umbrella organization for a dairy co-
operative that would bring together a collection of rural farmers across the country to standardize
the production, sale, and distribution of their dairy products.
127
India’s Operation Flood or “The
White Revolution” was a national dairy modernization project that included multiple stages that
sought to develop India from a “milk deficit” country to a surplus one.
128
The first stage utilized
powdered/skim milk from European and U.S. foreign aid packages to create and sustain

126
Erba, Eric M., and Andrew M. Novakovic. “The Evolution of Milk Pricing and Government
Intervention in Dairy Markets,” E.B., 1995.
127
See: Baviskar, B. S. “Milkman of India.” Edited by Verghese Kurien. Economic and Political Weekly
41, no. 24 (2006): 2455–57; Sodhi, Dr R. S. “Verghese Kurien: Cooperative Spirit: Amul’s Dr R.S. Sodhi
Writes on the ‘Milkman of India’ Who Led the Cooperative Movement Ending the Dairy Drought and
Spurred a Socioeconomic Revolution.” India Today. New Delhi, India: Living Media India, Limited,
August 30, 2021.
128
“Milk deficit country” is a popular term in development scholarship, though its origins are unknown, it
did begin showing up in studys by the late 1960s.

71
consumer demand for cow-milk.
129
This required targeted advertisements to a middle-class
consumer palette. Amul was particularly successful in their bi-lingual Hindi/English
advertisements that featured mothers and their childrens happily consuming the powdered/skim
milk products. Further, the ads complemented traditional cooking while emphasizing the
innovation of powdered milk–as a stabilizing ingredient that was safer than fresh dairy and
texturally better.
The powdered/skim was seen as a cleaner, more effective alternative to the fresh milk
available in urban centers as the supply of fresh dairy was inconsistent in the city centers.
130
The
second part of the plan was to bolster dairy sheds and scale up production with the use of
European cattle that rendered higher yields of cattle–at the expense of decimating native cattle
populations.
131
Simultaneously, the cooperative created a transportation grid that allowed for
products from rural dairy farmers to reach urban populations.
132
As the national dairy
cooperatives and wealthy elite designed a national grid system with roads and railways linking
rural farms to urban centers and processes of cooling and refrigeration throughout, the final stage

129
See: Shanti George. “Operation Flood and Rural India: Vested and Divested Interests.” Economic and
Political Weekly 20, no. 49 (1985): 2163–70.
130
See: K N Nair. “White Revolution in India: Facts and Issues.” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no.
25/26 (1985): 89–95; Bellur, Venkatakrishna V., Saraswathi P. Singh, Radharao Chaganti, and
Rajeswararao Chaganti. “The White Revolution—How Amul Brought Milk to India.” Long Range
Planning 23, no. 6 (December 1990): 71–79; Deka, Ram Pratim, Johanna F. Lindahl, Thomas F.
Randolph, and Delia Grace. “The White Revolution in India: The End or a New Beginning?” September
2015.
131
Ibid.
132
See: P Sarveswara Rao and B Ramachandra Reddy. “An Overview of Dairy Industry in India.”
Productivity (New Delhi) 55, no. 1 (2014): 43-; Atkins, P. J. “Operation Flood: Dairy Development in
India.” Geography 74, no. 3 (1989): 259-; B S Baviskar. “Operation Flood: Reviving Debates.” Economic
and Political Weekly 46, no. 5 (2011): 5–5; Shanti George. “Operation Flood and Rural India: Vested and
Divested Interests.” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 49 (1985): 2163–70; Doornbos, Martin, Pieter
van Stuijvenberg, and Piet Terhal. “Operation Flood: Impacts and Issues.” Food Policy, Food Policy, 12,
no. 4 (1987): 376–83.

72
of the plan was to invest in dairy infrastructure, from veterinary training, feed research and
education, as well as breeding techniques.
133

Environmentalists and economists have critiqued the veneer of prosperity offered by
Operation Flood for poor, rural farmers. Doornbos et al have argued that it is neither
economically or environmentally viable–often requiring more land, water, and energy to yield
very little profit from dairying. Baviskar has noted that there is fairly little oversight about the
“freshness” or quality of the milk and that transport requires high levels of energy for
refrigerators systems throughout, so it’s actually not the best consumer product K. N. Nair posits
that the risk of disease, lack of vaccine oversight, and inconsistent veterinary care creates
conditions of inhumane animal treatment and potential for the spread of disease. Bellur et al have
noted that despite the clear problems it has posed to poor farmers, the government and
transnational NGOs continue to push for loans and subsidies in
Despite these arguments that had been repeated early, often, and throughout Operation
Flood, its supporters continued to claim that it was an unmitigated success. At the completion of
the multi-year project that began in 1970 and ended in 1996, Kurien said in a speech: “Over the
course of Operation Flood, milk has been transformed from a commodity into a brand, from
insufficient production to self-sufficient production, from rationing to plentiful availability, from
loose, unhygienic milk to milk that is pure and sure, from subjugation to a symbol of farmer’s
economic independence, to being the consumer’s greatest insurance policy for good health.”
134

The quality of life for rural poor populations did not figure into national uplift, while the
language of hygiene, purity, and economic independence that Kurien characterized as part of the

133
Ibid.
134
Niti Bhan, “Lessons from the Amul Brand for grassroots enterprises,” September 10, 2012,
https://nitibhan.com/2012/09/10/lessons-from-the-amul-brand-for-grassroots-enterprises/

73
national dairy project would also emerge through the Hindu Nationalism of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and remains a container for populist affects.
While the National Dairy Development Board worked to make India the world’s leading
dairy producers (with 22 percent of global production),the fledging nation-state witnessed the
rise of dairy-nationalist discourse with the proliferation of Hindu-nationalist rhetoric that built
off existing images of dairying and the sacred-cow to stoke the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment
across the country.
135
South Asian feminist scholars and scholars of Indian nationalism have
written extensively about the rise and lasting impacts of the right-wing Hindu Nationalist party–
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
136
the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (RSS’s women’s wing),
137

and one of its most vocal female orators, Sadhvi Rithambara. Though the historical
developments of this right-wing discourse escape the scope of this chapter, I turn specifically to
the language and rhetoric of Sadhvi Rithambara’s speeches from 1988-1992 to consider how the
nationalist attachments of “dairy” function across different forms of ultra-conservative, proto-

135
According to the Food and Drug Administration of the United Nations report “Gateway to Dairy
Production and Products,” India is the world’s leading dairy producer. https://www.fao.org/dairy-
production-products/production/en/
136
See: Veer, P. T. van der. “Hindu Nationalism and the Discourse of Modernity: The Vishva Hindu
Parishad.” Accounting for Fundamentalisms, 1994, 653–68; Chacko, Priya. “Marketizing Hindutva: The
State, Society, and Markets in Hindu Nationalism.” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (March 2019): 377–
410; Froerer, Peggy. “Emphasizing ‘Others’: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in a Central Indian
Tribal Community.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 1 (2006): 39–59; Andersen,
Walter K., and Shridhar D. Damle. Messengers of Hindu Nationalism: How the RSS Reshaped India.
London: C. Hurst & Co, (Publishers) Ltd, 2019; Anand, Dibyesh. “The Violence of Security: Hindu
Nationalism and the Politics of Representing ‘the Muslim’ as a Danger.” The Round Table 94, no. 379
(April 2005): 203–15; Kamat, Sangeeta, and Biju Mathew. “Mapping Political Violence in a Globalized
World: The Case of Hindu Nationalism.” Social Justice 30, no. 3 (2003): 4–16.
137
See: Menon, Kalyani Devaki. “Violent Dharma.” In Everyday Nationalism, 80–104. Women of the
Hindu Right in India. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010; Basu, Amrita. “Feminism Inverted: The
Real Women and Gendered Imagery of Hindu Nationalism.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 25,
no. 4 (December 1993): 25–37; Bedi, Tarini. “Feminist Theory and the Right-Wing: Shiv Sena Women
Mobilize Mumbai” 7, no. 4 (2006): 19; Bacchetta, Paola. “Militant Hindu Nationalist Women Reimagine
Themselves: Notes on Mechanisms of Expansion/Adjustment.” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 4
(1999): 125–47.

74
fascists organizations and its legibility under Western feminist eyes. By utilizing gendered
language to emphasize belonging and the unnatural/unassimilable Muslim body to the Indian
nationstate, the RSS presented its vision of a liberated, democratic India via Indian womens’
bodies, where the threat of the Muslim Other was a problem of national purity and health.
Rithambara’s speeches were exceptional in their mass appeal, mixing images of Hindu
creation myths, folklore, and gendered language around India-as-Mother-Nation that incited
ordinary people to act to protect her, “mother-India.” Rithambara’s speeches were widely
attended, recorded, and played in public spaces and temples. They are characterized as full of
“rage” and “shrillness” -- a feeling that spoke to many young populists, especially women.
138

This signaled, in many ways, the arrival of Hindu women’s symbolic role in relationship to the
national body politic: as tether to ancient customs and portal to democratic futures. Feminist
scholar Amrita Basu, writes about how right-wing nationalist figures such as Sadhvi Rithambara,
Vijayraje Scindia, and Uma Bharati crafted a space that was, on one hand, attendant to women’s
labor in the national political imaginary, while on the other hand seen as exceptional in that they
“have all transgressed gender roles in both private and public domains. Unlike the vast majority
of Indian women, none of these three women is economically dependent on fathers, husbands, or
sons; none of their identities is defined by their roles as wives and mothers.”
139
Bishnupriya
Ghosh has documented and theorized the feminist debates around these right-wing female icons
that suggests that it is precisely through the Indian rural female body that Hindu-nationalist slips
into the promise of a democratic future for women’s inclusion in the nationstate. Further, Ghosh

138
For more on these queer tensions see: Anandi Rao’s “Reading Double,” 129-142; Rao reads the
documentary film The World Before Her and Queer girls in Hindutva politics as living queerly precisily
through these avenues of the state that allow them to live outside of national norms only in service of
nationalist politics that reinscirbe their hindu-ness.
139
Banerjee, Sandeep, and Subho Basu. “Secularizing the Sacred, Imagining the Nation-Space: The
Himalaya in Bengali Travelogues, 1856–1901.” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (May 2015): 609–49.

75
argues that the conjured language of gendered and feminized mythmaking around national
identity represented both ancient patriarchal beliefs that fit within the perimeters of the
postcolonial nationstate and the democratic futures promised by right-wing nationalists.
140
Both
Basu and Ghosh have read through the queer and erotic tensions presented by the RSS women’s
wing, that focused on homosocial spaces and rural, populist sentiments that carved out space for
forgotten women, and describe the energetic release through the oration performances
experienced by orator and audiences.
There has been much analysis, in particular, of Rithambara’s speech performances that
often-encouraged patriotic Indians to take up arms against their Muslim counterparts. Kalyani
Devaki Menon writes about Rithambara’s meteoric rise as a right-wing female spokesperson and
how she relied on the mixing and melding of vague Hindu mythology images and emergent state
policies, as well as an erotics or rage that allowed the general public to express and experience
feelings of their own dissatisfaction and desire via her presence.
141
In one Rithambara’s more
famous speeches that was recorded and broadcast across public airwaves, she uses a colloquial
Parsi story of migration with a particular RSS twist:
Wherever I go, I say, ‘Muslims, live and prosper among us. Live like milk and sugar. If
two kilos of sugar are dissolved in a quintal of milk, the milk becomes sweet!’ But what
can be done if our Muslim borther is not behaving like sugar in milk? Is it our fault if he
seems bent on being a lemon in milk? He wants the milk to curdle…The value of milk
increases after it becomes sour. It becomes paneer. But the world knows the fate of the
lemon. It is cut, squeezed dry and then thrown on the garbage heap. Now you have to
decide whether you will act as sugar or like lemon in milk.
142

140
Bacchetta, Paola, and Margaret Power. “Queering Hindutva: Unruly Bodies and Pleasures in Sadhavi
Rithambara’s Performances: Bishnupriya Ghosh.” In Right-Wing Women. Routledge, 2002.
141
Menon, Everyday Nationalism, “Violent Dharma,” 80-104.
142
Kakar, Sudhir. The Colours of Violence. New Delhi; New York: Viking, 1995. (quote found in Ghosh,
“Queering Hindutva,” 267-268).

76
Qissa-e-Sanjaan, or the sugar in milk, is an old Parsi folk story, where Persians seeking refuge
from persecution landed in Sanjan, a port in Gujarat. King Jadhav Rananlanded, ruler of the
time, did not speak their language so instead sent a glass full of milk to show that the land was
already full to the brim. In response, the envoy sprinkled a handful of sugar in the milk,
sweetening it and sending it back to the king. The message was clear: they would make the land
more prosperous.
143
Rithambara’s invective to “live like sugar in milk” begins an almost
romantic notion of Muslim exclusion, where it is the Other’s failure to sweeten, dissolve, and
assimilate that throws the nation out of balance. Rather, she asks the rhetorical question of if it’s
“our” fault that the Muslim chooses to act as “lemon.” Though the lemon transforms the milk
into paneer, the lemon itself is still apart from the milk, it creates tension, curds, divisions and is
ultimately destined to be wrung out, used and discarded. While the sugar remains in the milk–
inseparable from the liquid, the lemon is an object all its own that, even in transforming the milk
into something more profitable, can never be a part of it. Further, Basu notes the symbolic
meanings of milk and lemons as associated in couplets by the famous poet Tulsidas where
lemons represent selfishness and milk in contrast “is associated with the cow and mother, both of
which connote selflessness and are revered in Hindu tradition.”
144
The link between milk and
mother, and a lemon that transforms the substance itself, Basu argues, heightens a threatening
sense of contamination, alluding to a sexual metaphor of “defiling feminine purity.”
145

The rage of the people needed a release, and the fiery speeches of Rithambara and her ilk
resulted in harassment and mass riots.
146
The protofascist/women’s empowerment/savior

143
The myth she builds off is the Qissa-e-Sanjaan; Singh, The Sugar in the Milk, 149.
144
Basu, “Feminism Inverted,” 28.
145
Ibid.
146
Sangari, Kumkum. “Consent, Agency and Rhetoric’s of Incitement.” Economic and Political Weekly
28, no. 18 (1993): 867–82.

77
narrative is of particular interest as I study the uses of dairy imagery in nationalist discourse. As
Niraj Pant notes in “Facilitating Genocide,” the Western left and the Hindutva were unwittingly
and uncritically seen as aligned on the issues of India hosting the Ms. World pageant: American
feminists argued that it was sexist, and RSS argued that it was degrading to the sacred woman
figure.
147
The flattening of the violence against Muslims incited by purity myths and the female
performer/orator of Indian fascism locates something embodied and erotic in the Hindu
nationalist polity. On the other hand, the Western pastoral eugenics and its presence in the white
supremacist mapping of the Milk boys is invested in similar gender politics that police the
boundaries of heteronormative behavior through the literal, symbolic, and affective.
Meanwhile, as China opened its market borders in the 1980’s after the death of Mao
Zedong, powdered/skim milk began appearing in local shops as national agencies encouraged
families to wean their children onto dairy from a young age in order to develop an appetite and a
gut capable of digesting this “modern” food.
148
Within less than a 30-year period, a population
with a 92 percent rate of lactose intolerance would become the world’s second largest consumer
of dairy. How and why did this happen? Historian Thomas D. DuBois argues that, despite
popular historical opinion, China did have a long history of dairy consumption in certain
provinces that trace moments of contact and trade between continents. He goes on to describe the
processes by which modern China embraces dairy and cattle rearing, one such site being through
an appeal to good health:

147
Pant, “Facilitating Genocide,” Ghadar, May 1, 1997.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151025140744/http://www.proxsa.org/resources/ghadar/v1n1/niraj.html
148
Hu, Dinghuan, Frank H. Fuller, and Thomas Reardon. “Impact of the Rapid Development of
Supermarkets on the Dairy Industry in China, The.” Staff General Research Papers Archive. Staff
General Research Papers Archive. Iowa State University, Department of Economics, January 1, 2004;
Fuller, Frank, Jikun Huang, Hengyun Ma, and Scott Rozelle. “Got Milk? The Rapid Rise of China’s
Dairy Sector and Its Future Prospects.” Food Policy, Food Policy, 31, no. 3 (2006): 201–15.

78
The appeal to good health added to milk a second layer of symbolism [aside from
mother’s nourishment], one that in China’s fraught political climate was interpreted
equally as the health of the individual and the health of the nation. In Meji Japan, many
among the reforming elite had come to see an animal-based diet as the secret of Western
physical and mental prowess and advocated as a national priority the expansion of the
dairy herd and dissemination of dairying skills and cooperatives. China was not far
behind.
149

Mao Zedong, having been trained as a physical education student, often focused on the
relationship between the strength of the body and the strength of the nation.
150
In one of his
earliest student papers he writes, “The Country is being drained of strength. Public interest in
martial arts is flagging. The people’s health is declining with each passing day…Our country
will become even weaker if things are allowed to go unchanged for long.”
151
Milk finds its
purchase in the Chinese imagination as the secret to Western girth and strength by pulling at
existing beliefs about food, nutrition, body size, and national well-being. Hilary A. Smith notes
that these beliefs were cultivated on official institutional levels through transnational
organizations and government agencies where “the moralizing message that responsible citizens
drink milk, and responsible officials promote it, remains strong. Milk’s status as a morally good
food continues to be reinforced by influential bureaucracies such as the United Nations, by

149
DuBois, Thomas David. “China’s Dairy Century: Making, Drinking and Dreaming of Milk.” In
Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives, edited by Rotem
Kowner, Guy Bar-Oz, Michal Biran, Meir Shahar, and Gideon Shelach-Lavi, 179–211. (The Palgrave
Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 200.
150
“A Study of Physical Education” - Mao Tse-tung, 1917; For more on Mao and physical education, see:
Gao, Q.-P., N. Zhang, Q. He, and Z. Xiao. “On the Historical Value of the Study of Physical Education --
On Young Mao Zedong’s Sports Ideas.” Beijing ti yu da xue xue bao 30, no. 4 (2007): 476–476; Uberoi,
Patricia. “Body, State and Cosmos: Mao Zedong’s ‘Study of Physical Education’ (1917).” China Report
(New Delhi) 31, no. 1 (1995): 109–34; Anon. “The Nature of Mao Zedong’s Thoughts on Physical
Education.” Tiyu Kexue Yanjiu/Sports Sciences Researches 6, no. 4 (2002): 1–1.
151
Epigraphy from the introduction of Xu’s Olympic Dreams. Xu, Guoqi. Olympic Dreams: China and
Sports, 1895-2008. Harvard University Press, 2008.

79
patterns of trade and food aid, by the continuing growth of the Chinese dairy industry, and by
scientific discourse that frames lactose intolerance as proto-disease.”
152

In a 1995 article for Sociology of Health and Illness journal, David Armstrong
investigated the phenomenon of the new surveillance medicine in the 20th century and how that
impacts identity formation. Armstrong writes: “the fundamental remapping of spaces of
illness…[which] includes the problematisation of normality, the redrawing of the relationship
between symptom, sign and illness, and the localisation of illness outside the corporal space of
the body,” fundamentally changes how people think about the problematization of the normal.
The idea of proto-illness describes the “risk experience” or what Mikko Jauho describes as the
idea that even chronically healthy people can be viewed as “patients-in-waiting.”
153
Smith notes
how the language of pathology developed to describe healthy adult bodies– “lactose intolerance,
lactase deficiency, lactase insufficiency, hypolactasia. That lactose production usually ceases
after infancy was a discovery, in other words, but ‘lactose intolerance’ as a medical problem was
an invention.”
154
Lactose intolerance was mapped as a significant marker of proto-illness in the
20th century, where the discovery of a normal and interesting variation in human biology
became framed as a medical condition that required treatment to ensure the production of
healthy-citizen bodies.
Government intervention and the invention of lactose pathologies would not be enough,
alone, to create a national dairy appetite. The iconic White Rabbit Candy’s rise to prominence in
the Chinese cultural palette would mirror dairy’s trajectory. White Rabbit is a milk-based candy

152
Smith, Hilary A. 12. Good Food, Bad Bodies: Lactose Intolerance and the Rise of Milk Culture in
China. In: Moral Foods. (University of Hawaii Press, 2020), 262-284.
153
Jauho, Mikko. “Patients-in-Waiting or Chronically Healthy Individuals? People with Elevated
Cholesterol Talk about Risk.” Sociology of Health & Illness 41, no. 5 (2019): 867–81.
154
Smith, “Bad Bodies, Good Foods,” 655-656.

80
with a hard, jagged surface that softens into a chewy texture in the mouth. The white rabbit set
against blue and red blocky designs is easily recognizable from a distance. Originally produced
by ABC Candy Factory in 1943, the candy is said to have been reformulated from a British milk
confection and was marketed and sold as “Mickey Mouse Sweets.”
155
After the corporation
became state-owned during the Cultural Revolution, the packaging was redesigned with a
“naturalistic” image of a rabbit with the simple color schemes of blue and red with black
lettering. White Rabbit Candy would become a favored confection so closely tied to modern
Chinese cultural identity that Zhou Enlai gifted a bag of the candy to Richard Nixon when they
met in 1969.
156
The combination of the sweetened, milky taste wrapped in dissolving rice paper
presented the idea of a healthy, modern Chinese food–where the marketing claimed that seven
pieces dissolved in water would equal the nutritional value of a full cup of milk.
Poet Dao Bei writes about a city come to in somatic memory, through smell, and
describes the candy, “Surely the king of Candy, foremost for its semitransparent rice-paper
wrapper that dissolves on the tongue, triggering delight’s anticipation. White Rabbit milk is
extremely potent; they say that seven pieces equals one glass of milk, and so all malnourished
children thirst for it.”
157
He goes on to write how the candy “went through difficult times” when
it became associated as a “high-class sweet.” So, this joint project of feeding the malnourished
Chinese child and its association as a “high-class” candy created its circuits of desire and
commodity. Jones writes about how the 2007 White Rabbit scandal …. grappled against
“itineraries of legitimation in which White Rabbit Candy has come to be associated with certain

155
Jones, Rodney H. “Suicide Candy: Tracing the Discourse Itineraries of Food Risk.” In Communicating
Risk, edited by Jonathan Crichton, Christopher N. Candlin, and Arthur S. Firkins, 340–58. London:
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.
156
Ibid.
157
Dao Bei. “Smells.” Harvard Review, no. 49 (June 2016): 52-53.

81
expectations of quality.”
158
The cultural force of In Karen Gu’s creative nonfiction essay on
White Rabbit candy, toxicity, and decay, she writes about the sensations of eating the candy:
This is how you eat a white rabbit milk candy. Twist open the wax paper ends and feel
the thin rice paper dry on your fingertips. You can eat the rice paper. It will dissolve on
your tongue, and it will taste like the translucent film left in the rice cooker after dinner.
The creamy candy is hard to the tooth, and you’ll taste its condensed milky sweetness
when the rice paper melts away. Its surface is not as smooth as a tootsie roll, but more
jagged and angular, and you might think about how many times the candy melted a little,
and then re-hardened, in the process of being shipped from warehouse to warehouse,
making its journey all the way from China. You will coax the taffy from hard to soft in
the heat of your mouth.
The translucent film of left in the rice cooker, the hard surfaces more jagged than a tootsie roll,
the many states of solid-to-liquid-to-solid that transform the candy across its journey from China
present powerful imagery for how this confection (said to be replicated from an earlier British
sweet), becomes intertwined with the idea of modern Chinese food and appetite. The transition
from an economy that rarely raised cattle and consumed dairy into one of the leading consumers
of milk required the curation of a citizen-body made legible through milky national delicacies.
159

Following the rise of dairy production and consumption in industrializing nations is an
anxious discourse about the consequences of the underdeveloped world’s burgeoning taste for
cow meat and milk. Media articles and public debate speculate on the environmental impact and

158
Jones, “Suicide Candy,” 347.
159
See: Bai, Zhaohai, Michael RF Lee, Lin Ma, Stewart Ledgard, Gerard L. Velthof, Wenqi Ma,
Mengchu Guo, et al. “Global Environmental Costs of China’s Thirst for Milk.” Global Change Biology
24, no. 5 (2018): 2198–2211; Wang, Jingjing, Mei Chen, and Peter G. Klein. “China’s Dairy United: A
New Model for Milk Production.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 97, no. 2 (2015): 618–27;
Ghazi-Tehrani, Adam Kavon, and Henry N. Pontell. “Corporate Crime and State Legitimacy: The 2008
Chinese Melamine Milk Scandal.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 63, no. 5 (2015): 247–67; Bainbridge,
Jane. “China Is Forced to Improve Food Safety after Baby Milk Scandal.” British Journal of Midwifery
16, no. 10 (2008): 671–671; Zeng, Li, Lijie Zhou, Po-Lin Pan, and Gil Fowler. “Coping with the Milk
Scandal: A Staged Approach to Crisis Communication Strategies during China’s Largest Food Safety
Crisis.” Journal of Communication Management (London, England) 22, no. 4 (2018): 432–50.

82
fixate on the changing body chemistry and size of Global South peoples. For example, there has
been a surge of articles about China’s bottomless quench for liquid and powdered milk in recent
years, ranging from a focus on mass imports of baby formula from Australia and New Zealand
after several infant mortalities from tampered domestic products to heated debate over the carbon
and methane emission increases via national Chinese dairy cooperatives.
160

Articles about China’s appetite for milk paint a picture of a rapidly industrializing nation
that articulates its sense of modernity through the appetite for traditional Western diets. This
paradoxical narrative of how Chinese citizens feel that dairy is a natural food that can make them
stronger, bigger, and more competitive on the global market while simultaneously failing at the
project due to corruption/corruptibility.
In The Guardian’s piece titled “Can the World Quench Chinese Bottomless Thirst for
Milk?”, Felicity Lawrence details China’s development history in a post-Mao national order
where milk entered the cultural lexicon as a Western aesthetic long before Chinese people
consumed it. Lawrence’s piece essentially argues that the appetite for dairy developed from an
appetite for Western fitness, muscularity, and height that stemmed from multiple factors
including the broadcasting of the 1980’s Olympics on home televisions and the affordability of
refrigerators. She ends her article on a speculative note that stages the dire conditions of
environmental degradation and rapid industrialization:
If China’s demand for dairy triples again by 2050, as projected by state
targets and some financial analysts, the typical Chinese person would still
consume less than half of what the average European gets through. Given
the size of its population, that nevertheless poses an increasingly urgent
question: how many cows, and other livestock, can the world actually
sustain?

160
Jia et al., “China’s Milk Scandal, Government Policy and Production Decisions of Dairy Farmers.”

83
This narrative of industrializing nations expanding too fast (in population, appetites, and body
size) alerts us to an exacerbating speed of environmental collapse entrenched in ideas of
bodying. Bypassing the West’s own responsibilities for large scale, catastrophic ecological
violence since 1492, such an analysis of ecological danger (even if justified), is the very basis of
Western environmental paternalism that seeks to obscure its own unethical inaction by stoking
fears of containing the excessive racial other. This narrative plays out very specifically across
fatness and environmental damage.
161
The circuits of the U.S. empire and violence remain
largely invisible to most consumers of dairy. Instead, the complex feelings arise from
uncomfortable attachments between the self and governance.
Milky Intimacies
Thus far, I have unearthed a genealogy for the visceral force of American dairy as it
enters and influences a grammar of nation, modernity, whiteness, and thinness as markers of
proper citizens. Images and vocabulary around eugenics and scientific progress morphed through
the dairy dramas of Bovine Trials and public health projects for repurposing agricultural waste in
the 20
th
century. These various modes of common sensing—felt through an aesthetics of
infrastructure—surround us. In highlighting the curatorial nature of that surrounding,
denaturalizing our pull towards milk (as anything but common), I now turn to the tension in the
socialities produced through milk and economies of flesh. This section explores the slippages
between affectivity and temporality where dairy histories extend beyond shaping institutional
practices and policies—through military and foreign aid— and anchors itself in how bodies
come to recognize belonging in the now and later. Everybody has a milk story. In the flashpoints

161
Constance Russell and Keri Semenko. “Twenty One: We Take ‘Cow’ as a Compliment: Fattening
Humane, Environmental, and Social Justice Education.” Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.) 467 (2016):
211–20; Saldaña-Tejeda, Abril, and Peter Wade. “Obesity, Race and the Indigenous Origins of Health
Risks among Mexican Mestizos.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 15 (2018): 2731–49.

84
I examine here—literary milk vignettes in Ocean Vuong and Vivek Shreya’s queer
South/Southeast Asian experimental writing through ordinances for social welfare recipients—
both are suspended in a future tense. For diasporic figures and poor bodies (of color), consuming
milk can be entrenched in a desire for belonging, normalcy, and means of fixing the body so that
it might be able to survive a future not meant for many of us.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a genre-bending novel from Vietnamese American
writer Ocean Vuong. Formatted as a series of letters to little dog’s “ma”—described as a woman
with no soft edges who moves from a refugee camp in the Philippines to public housing in
Connecticut—Vuong explores the deep gnashes that grow in the aftermath of militarism,
migration, and attempts at assimilation for diasporic subjects. The text is riddled with sharp
pauses filled with moments of rage, fear, loneliness, and misunderstanding. Milk appears
punctuated throughout little dog’s letters—in tall glasses, in pools on the tile floor, on receipts,
and in plastic bags that he carries home from the corner store. It’s a quiet symbol of reaching
towards an American life even as that fantasy is constantly re-negotiated and in flux. In one
letter, little dog writes to his mother about that time on the school bus when he was nine and a
group of young white boys began harassing him. He recalls sitting on his own and the presence
of his yellow body breaking the otherwise white landscape when boys on the bus began
harassing: “Don’t you ever say nothing? Don’t you even speak English? Say something. Say my
name like your mom did last night.” That night, after telling his ma what had happened, she
offered no comfort, just the directive to never let anyone do something like that again. He writes:
The next morning, in the kitchen, I watched as you poured the milk into a glass tall as my
head.

'Drink,' you said, your lips pouted with pride. 'This is American milk so you're gonna
grow a lot. No doubt about it.'

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I drank so much of that cold milk it grew tasteless on my numbed tongue. Each morning
after that, we'd repeat this ritual: the milk poured with a thick white braid, I'd drink it
down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing
into me would make more of a yellow boy.

I'm drinking light, I thought. I'm filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the
dark inside me with a flood of brightness.

'A little more,' you said, rapping the counter. 'I know it's a lot. But it's worth it.'

I clanked the glass down on the counter, beaming. 'See?' you said, arms crossed. 'You
already look like Superman!'

I grinned, milk bubbling between my lips.
162

This scene brims with anxious feeling and want. Anxiety over mothering/feeding, the hardness
of refugee positionality, and the forms of limited protection broken people can offer the ones
they love. Ma cannot afford vulnerability and cannot offer little dog a soft kind of comfort.
Instead, she arms in the ways she knows how, by reaching towards American milk. American
milk--that touched the tongue of Asia and the Pacific through its military circuits--is the solution
that little dog’s mother has for his difference. American milk rings like a tinkering little anthem,
identifying uneven scales of power that Western foods hold in the modern global food system.
The legacy in which milk production and consumption indexes the health of a nation is felt in
fervent belief that little dog can alter his innermost self—a self marked as damaged because of
his small, frail body and queerness through yellowness. American milk, the substance of
modernity and progress, has the capacity to transform. Like my earlier reading of the white
supremacist chugging gallons of whole milk, milk for little dog and his ma will wash him in
masculinity; milk will temper his queer desires and fashion him into a big and strong man.
Attempting to bridge a gap slashed open through borders and kinship, mother and son rehearse

162
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 27.

86
this ritual of drinking milk, filling his small, yellow body with the white milky myth of American
masculinity.
Chugging the glass under his mother’s watchful eye symbolizes the curation of a proper
kind of body. That beaming boy clanking his glass on the table breathes in relief at finding
futurity in a world where he doesn’t fit. The logics of milk are not only inherited through our
literal gut microbes but are offered to us as fragile and feeble forms of protection from
generation to generation. For those who can, becoming big and strong or thin and attractive are
meant to make one’s life easier in an anxious world ordered through racial capitalism and body
hierarchies. It is neither about condemning nor condoning how people relate to their bodies, but
about sitting in the discomfort of their wanting—that wanting is a measure of recursively
recurring cultural moments. Little dog and his mother wanting the milk to rearrange his core
being into someone that fits-in is soaked in histories of empire that construct able-bodiedness—
as abled to do, abled to belong.
How can we contextualize the racial and gendered dynamics of childrearing and reaching
towards normalcy, the strong/abled body, and citizenship? How did we arrive at the conclusion
that drinking milk could make you Superman, who self-describes in the comics as a Kansas-
raised, all-American boy? Parsing through the tenderness and trauma around the mythologizing
over motherhood and feeding for poor women (of color), this section analyzes how the fantasy of
American milk seeps into desire and fractured senses of belonging. While middle class, white
American women embraced skim to achieve the national project of the nuclear family, skim
versus whole milk would take on new life forms in communities of color, particularly through
vexed relationships of motherhood and child-rearing. Understanding the relationship between
motherhood, feeding, and dairy requires a re-turn to public discourse over breast-feeding versus

87
artificial feeding in the 1800’s. As Ann Stoler reminds us, policing intimacies within the home,
from body to body, is a colonial administrative practice—one that, I argue, has evolved to have
new names in our contemporary moment such as wellness and public health.
A cluster of (feminist) milk scholarship looks at histories of breast-feeding economies
and practices to consider their social, cultural, and political meanings— many of which offer
analysis of gender and race around imbibing the other and the moral codes established through
patriarchal and capitalist regimes.
163
Emily West and R.J. Knight examine wet-nursing, gendered
labor, and motherhood in the antebellum South through a black feminist lens to confront the
enmeshed and uneven relationality of mothers and racialized labor against the backdrop of the
plantation economy and colonial administration.
Wet nursing within plantation economies marks the gendered subjugation and abject
commodification of black women as they were forced to nurse slave owner’s children while
being denied their mothering capacities for their own children. The antebellum South presented
an assemblage of breast-feeding economies, as a “spectrum of gendered exploitation where
enforced wet nursing sits at one end, women’s paid employment of “professional” wet nurses
exists somewhere in the middle, and informal networks of support where women shared in their
breast milk lie at the other.”
164
West and Knight paint a nuanced picture of how technologies of
management and child-rearing coalesce through the intimacies of enslaved and poor women’s
bodies and how that might inform our historical understandings of gendered care-giving. As
these forms of mothering-labor relations transformed in a post-emancipation era, breast feeding

163
Greta Gaard. “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2013):
595–618; LeVasseur, Natalie P., and Barbara J. Dunlap. “Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the
Present.” Journal of Human Lactation 5, no. 3 (1989): 146–47.
164
West, Emily, and R. J. Knight. “Mothers’ Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in
the Antebellum South.” The Journal of Southern History 83, no. 1 (2017): 37–68.

88
practices were cast under a microscope as a contested and hotly debated subject, especially in
over-crowded urban cities as anxieties over germ theory and racial contagion grew. Leading
scientists and nutritionists at the time typecast poor urban women’s bodies as unsanitary and
contaminated with the potential to transmit diseases leading to infant mortalities (Strings 2019).
In thinking about how the fear of the ethnic other creeping into the cities manifested itself
through fatphobic images and rhetoric, Amy Farrell details how it was during the 1900’s that the
fat (female) body acted as the staging ground for public speculation over the repercussions of
industrialization and modernization. Much like the debates around breast-feeding and the
contaminated poor, urban woman’s body, these speculations are made possible through a general
common sensing of fat as undesirable that stretches back to colonial discourses of the body. The
xenophobic body-anxiety of the 20
th
century was grounded in ideas of criminality and
underdevelopment that was linked not only as a mental disability (those lacking in intellectual
and rational capacity) but a genetically predisposed condition of newly arrived European settlers
that could be tracked onto the body. Farrell gestures to Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Woman to
understand how these public sentiments came to be in order. In thinking of penal and eugenicist
transnational knowledge formations that permeated public discourse (Mitchell and Snyder 2003),
I tease out the connectivity between fatphobia, shifting conditions of whiteness, and race science
that pinpoint the collisions between American Nativism and the imperial body politic. Lombroso
defined white criminals as exhibiting behaviors similar to those amongst the lower levels of
civilization writing that:
Female criminals are shorter than normal women and in proportion to their stature,
prostitutes and female murderers weigh more than honest women…. Prostitutes greater
weight is confirmed by the notorious obesity of those who grow old in their unfortunate
trade and gradually become positive monsters of fatty tissue.
165

165
Lombroso excerpt from Farrell, Fat Shame.

89
The fatty, monstrous, excessive sexual and consumptive appetites of the criminal woman set the
stage for the distrustful lens in which we view the fat (female) body (of color) and connects
contemporary biopedagogies of state and self-surveillance to the much older desire to contain
and manage the criminal ethnic other. The impetus to define and delineate fat origin stories is a
confrontation in class, whiteness, criminality, labor, and modernity—where the culturally
saturated fat body takes on fluctuating meanings through shifting ideas of health and punitive
disciplinary technologies of the body.
166
Integral to a sense of American Nativist ideology—
partly birthed through the asceticism of Puritanical origins—aside from naturalizing the white
settler body to the land, was a philosophy around taming: taming the land and taming the body
towards the story of progress, perfection, and power.
She of the Mountains is a multisensory illustrated novel by Vivek Shreya that renders
achingly the flows of gender, sexuality, and attraction—blended through reimagined Hindu
creation myths and the creation myth of the diasporic “self.” The protagonist’s sexuality and
body are constantly being ordered through binary logics: gay/straight, male/female, and thin/fat.
The central tension of the text expands what queer life and love can look like alongside those
binaries. The protagonist doesn’t offer the readers a name for himself, and instead gives us
identity markers (brown, gay, fat) that his body collects over time. The moments in which the
self and body arrive as subject are through sticky relations primarily in comparison and
contradistinction from white kids in his neighborhood or the straight boys he grew up around.
The protagonist is made to feel the dysfunction of his body through the perceived normalcy of
other bodies. In one story, he recalls his mother’s fears over his perceived gayness and the threat
of his unmanageable appetites:

166
Farrell, Fat Shame.

90
When you were little, I was so worried you would end up fat like your dad, fat like an
elephant.
167

He had often heard about his fat childhood from his mother, about how his auntie had
nicknamed him “butterball” when his ten fingers became so plump that they joined into
two lumpy mounds at the base of his arms. His mom had panicked and taken heed of a
co-worker’s advice that she switch his milk from homo to two-percent. Although his
fingers separated again, her fear loomed over his teenage years, evidenced by her
frequent descriptions of his childhood body as subtle warnings for his adult body.

There are two monstrous terrors that his mother fears—the animality of his father’s fat living on
in his future adult body, and the queerness that comes to live in the folds of his fatty arms and
plump fingers. A milk free from fat, according to his mother’s coworker, would change his body
and tame his appetites. The legacy of skimmed milk’s normative iconography around
healthfulness and thin-heterofuturity act as a promise for the protagonist’s fat, diasporic, queer
body. Shrink into an easier future, a future in which you can reach towards humanness. “From
homo to two-percent” holds sentiments and logics of racial formation and governance.
In 2014, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
(WIC) finalized a decades-long project to make 1% and non-fat skim milk the only dairy options
available for WIC recipients.
168
WIC is a supplemental food program for low-income mothers
that offer vouchers for pre-approved foods to parents who have completed clinic weigh-ins as
well as video courses on nutrition and childcare. Along with tracking weights for both mothers
and their children, recipients are required to watch infomercial style videos to re-train parents in
the early stages of child rearing and development around eating habits in order to produce
healthy citizens and reduce obesity populations within working-poor communities. Though a
number of parents and journalists have questioned the actual nutritional value of the hodgepodge

167
Shreya, Vivek. She of the Mountains. (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014), 57.
168
The rule change was made in accordance with research and analysis conducted by the International
Dairy Food Association (IDFA) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); states an
exception for children under two years old, though guardians must explicitly choose this option.

91
of foods available through WIC—such as requiring parents to take home anywhere from 46-68oz
of sugary fruit juices as a substitute for federally mandated fresh fruit allowances—the
organization maintains that it is invested in a healthy America.
169

The announcement that WIC would only allow the purchase of 1% or non-fat milk came
with little ceremony—inched forward by the desire to “end obesity within the next generation”
while simultaneously bolstering stagnating national dairy economies—it aligned with a state
commitment to stop the terror within from spreading throughout poor communities seen as more
inherently susceptible to obesity-fat. Years earlier, in the midst of the “War on Terror,” former
Surgeon General Richard Carmona warned that obesity, if left unchecked, would be a greater
threat to United States national security than terrorism: fat was the terror within. Later, former
First Lady Michelle Obama would state that childhood obesity was not merely an economic or
parental issue, but a national security threat that would impact the future of global safety. In such
a rendering, the fat body is at once the site of catastrophic global damage in the national
imagination and the willful, complicit, and victimized perpetrators of bodily disfigurement and
dysfunction. How does it feel to be a bodily problem and product of modernity as fat bodies of
color move through a world that has already marked them for death?
One possible entry into this question is through critical race scholarship that has engaged
the question of health and contamination as one rhetorically bound within notions of race science
and medicalization. Sabrina Strings traces a history of racialized “obesity-fat” through black

169
With a quick scan of the pre-approved foods on offer through their pamphlets, it becomes clear that
most food options are dependent on agricultural surpluses. Mason’s piece interrogates how those
contradictions go unnoticed in a system predicated on obesity-panic. Mason, Katherine. “Women,
Infants, and (Fat) Children: Hidden ‘Obesity Epidemic’ Discourse and the Practical Politics of Health
Promotion at WIC.” Fat Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2, 2016): 116–36.

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female sensualism, mediating between health/contamination narratives of the black female body.
She writes:
Ideologies of black female sensualism have historically revolved around black women’s
presumed sexual abandon during an era in which sexually transmitted diseases were
major killers. However, the most recent iteration of chronic diseases employs the (equally
old) stereotype of black women as gluttonous. I argue that this has resulted in a novel
reconfiguration of the trope in which sensualized African American women are converted
from “deadly” into “social dead weight.”
170

Strings asks us to consider how the rhetoric around the dangers of black women’s bodies shift
from infectious diseases (syphilis and tuberculosis) to chronic illness (obesity). This is one
example of how following the racial history of science contextualizes the rising fascination and
fabulation of the obesity epidemic in black communities without relying on classist and white
supremacist tropes to define those populations.
Neglecting how risk/race coding operate within obesity-fat discourses allows for the
manifestation of public health programs and initiatives that not only vilify fat people, but render
fat communities of color as inept, infantile, and irresponsible. Expanding outside of the U.S. and
returning to my earlier contention that body sovereignty and land sovereignty are intrinsically
bound, I consider the universalization of risk/race-coding applied to Indigenous communities in
the Pacific. In “The Burden of Brown Bodies,” Jaleh V. McCormack

and Lisette Burrows take
up obesity research in New Zealand that frame Pasifika as homogenous, problem-populations.
Their analysis of sociological and public health studies demonstrates how healthcare
practitioners and researchers not only ask leading questions (weighted down by Western
perceptions of the Pasifika body), but also flatten Pasifika histories, cultures, and futures into an
imaginary monolithic indigenous figure. Further, McCormack and Burrows argue that this

170
Strings, Sabrina. “Obese Black Women as ‘Social Dead Weight’: Reinventing the ‘Diseased Black
Woman.’” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 1 (September 2015), 108.

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homogenized Pasifika (crafted by researchers, foundations, and politicians) is typecast as
ignorant of true and valuable health standards, citing that the backwards culture of the Pasifika
people allows for the valorization of obesity, and therefore the death of their people. They note:
Glover, another public health researcher based in New Zealand, is quoted in a national
daily newspaper in Feb 2013 stating “quit-smoking and other health promotion
campaigns need to be long-term, backed by support and take account of cultural
differences. For instance, Pacific people’s beliefs around beauty and body image are a
challenge for obesity campaigns.
171

Here, a monolithic Pasifika belief system needs to be re-educated because they do not perform an
accurate enough depiction of fat shame. In such an order of things, these “backwards” views of
fatness (that have yet to catch up with the evolutionary timeline of fat I mentioned several
sections ago) is then leveraged by the settler state as a benevolent reason for continued
occupation and surveillance. Further, such narrative fails to grapple with alternate body-
cosmologies, body-diversity, and the enmeshed histories of establishing a colonial politic in
opposition to fleshy corporeal figures.
I use these two articles as examples in how moving towards a decolonial fat studies
requires us to interrogate how obesogenic research, that can find itself in progressive, radical,
and anti-capitalist movements and ideologies, actually recast old prejudices of racial
contamination into more palatable discourses through health and wellness.
172
We must consider
how these discourses are weaponized against black, Indigenous, and communities of color as
people advocate for better living/work conditions, anti-capitalist organizing, sovereignty and

171
McCormack, Jaleh V., and Lisette Burrows. “The Burden of Brown Bodies: Teachings About Pasifika
Within Public Health Obesity Research in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical
Methodologies 15, no. 5 (October 2015), 375.
172
In a similar vein, Lucas Crawford’s Slender Trouble: From Berlant’s Cruel Figuring of Figure to
Sedgwick’s Fat Presence offers a strong analysis of how even queer theory overdetermines the stagnation
and dead ends of fatness.

94
self-governance, and structural representation that can unwittingly paint said communities as
incompetent and complicit in their own self-destruction.
Policing women’s reproductive health and feeding children has a genealogy for mothers
of color in particular. Breast-feeding, even in our contemporary epoch, is a site of mothering-
anxiety fraught with shame, guilt, obfuscation, and gender/race/class expectations. In thinking
about the complex permutations of gendered caregiving and feeding through (literal) flesh
economies, it is apparent that colonial socialities (mis)aligned class and race through feeding and
child rearing; many of such techniques inform modern nutritional assistance programs and food
educational materials today. Surveilling motherhood through economies of feeding demonstrates
that what a mother chooses to feed her child is more than simple nutrients.
WIC recipients would not be the first beneficiaries of public assistance to encounter this
non-fat dairy consumption mandate, despite the evidence of skim’s healthfulness being quite
thin. Programs like the Special Milk and Head Start Program that offer free and reduced school
meals domestically as well as the hundreds of tons of powdered/skim milk shipped in foreign aid
packages for children and families annually since the mid-20
th
century also maintained the same
philosophies around fat consumption and containment. These biopedagogies of dietary/ bodily
surveillance and self-knowing uncritically suture an understanding of public good with the
eradication of fat.
173
WIC’s final rule change was the next logical step in the modern state’s
efforts to secure a global public health agenda and U.S. prosperity through the governance of the
racialized and working-poor, of containing the threat of racial, fleshy excess by claiming the gut.
In understanding how WIC’s final rule change and these queer diasporic writings act as a
legible national project of public good through military circuits, food aid logic, and the social

173
Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties;” Lyons, “Prescription for Harm;” White, “‘We’re Kind of Devolving.’”

95
history of dairying, this chapter brings into sharp relief how the viscerality of whiteness is
contingent on fatphobia as the obesity apparatus marks the limits for which we comprehend
bodily and sexual sovereignty. The obesity apparatus, what Nicole Land defines as the settler
social/bodily fantasy of health and fitness, operates as a shadowy superstructure that lingers in
our common sensing of race, gender, and the body.
174
Milky Appetites makes visible that which
has become internalized and naturalized about our phobic affinities to fat and how such
sentiments are upheld through contradictory relationships to food, gender, and the racialized
other.

174
Land, “Fat Knowledges and Matters of Fat: Towards Re-encountering Fat(s)” names the project of
hyper-surveillance, life/death management through state and medical industrial complex,
shaming/framing of at-risk obesity populations (particularly around the targeting of women and
communities of color) to serve the settler state as the obesity apparatus.

96
Chapter 2
The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire

I was tired of being a woman,
Tired of the spoons and the post,
Tired of my mouth and my breasts,
Tired of the cosmetics and the silks.

There were still men who sat at my table,
Circled around the bowl I offered up.

The bowl was filled with purple grapes
And the flies hovered in for the scent
And even my father came with his white bone.

But I was tired of the gender things.

-Anne Sexton

“The woman who boils potatoes year after year, with no thought of the how or why, is a
drudge, but the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given
weight will yield, is no drudge.”
-Ellen Swallows Richards

B. 1 slice whole wheat toast- low calorie bread

snk 1 small apple
1 low fat string cheese

L. 3 oz steamed skinless chicken breast
1 cup steamed broccoli

snk 3oz low-fat, sugar-free yogurt

D. 3 oz white fish w/lemon
¼ cup brown rice
1 cup steamed veggies

Total: 626 calories

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For as long as I can remember, I have been consumed by calories. The heat to energy
conversion was a language I learned early and often. While my public-school education softened
the traces of foreignness from my broken English, the string of dieticians and public health
professionals provided for by the Florida KidCare network taught me the language of nutritional
labels. My body—poor, fat, brown, first gen—was always marked at-risk and therefore fertile
grounds for nutritional health re-education by the state. I was the poster child for the economic
and social cost of childhood obesity to the nation and bodies like mine were the very reason
certain agencies existed. Since the age of twelve, I had cycled through fad diets, consumed
appetite suppressants, slimming malts, and laxatives mostly under the supervision of adults and
healthcare professionals. They all promised to fix my disordered eating and disordered body if I
were finally ready to start my life.
I was twenty, waiting tables, eating less than 650 calories a day, injecting myself with
Human Chronionic GondAtropin,
175
and taking feminist philosophy courses at the university.
I’m not doing this to be skinny for like, superficial reasons that would appease the white
patriarchy. I’m doing this to be healthy.
The idea of health would spare me from more complex understandings of governance, of
food politics and ambivalence, of colonial aesthetics that shape our collective affective and
bodily terrains. The idea of health and reaching towards it at whatever cost meant that a world
which I had only known as punitive, violent, and humiliating towards my body would finally let

175
Human Chronionic GondAtropin (HCG) is a pregnancy hormone that has cycled in and out of diet fad
favor in the 50s, 80s, and early 2000s. The diet requires patients to inject themselves five times a week
every two weeks with HCG while maintaining a 500-calorie starvation diet under the watch of licensed
medical professionals. There is a ritual of bi-weekly weigh-ins, educational resources on how best to
incorporate low-impact exercises and nurses hawking nutritional supplements. Major health risks—such
as organ failure—are often underemphasized as patients witness rapid weight-loss within the first two
weeks, only to plateau within a month and later regain the lost pounds once returning to a normal diet.

98
me live. Despite the physical ailments I experienced, the binge/purging cycles, emotional
distress, excessive financial burden, and potential for organ failure, I actively participated in diet-
debt making for almost two decades of my life whole-heartedly endorsed by family, friends,
strangers, and trained licensed medical professionals.
Why? What compelled this unflinching loyalty to self-surveillance, restriction, and
punishment that escaped the critical lens of my feminist training? Moreover, how was this
relationship between restriction and self-possession so clearly understood by all those around me
as a necessary price for a future worth inhabiting? The ontology of the calorie filled my days and
dreams long before I entered the field of Postcolonial food studies; approaching the metaphorical
table now, with my fleshy embodiments, attunes me to a dynamic story of the calorie and
metabolic personhood during an era of scientification. I use the term “scientification” to refer to
the processes by which the 20th century rendered human experience as quantifiable data in
spaces previously not considered part of the scientific process. In thinking alongside Denise da
Silva who argues that “social scientific knowledge would refigure Self-Determination in the idea
of development,” this chapter turns to how women’s labor in the home becomes reorganized as a
science of wellness that measured the developmental status of the U.S. in comparison to the
Third World and brown bodies in need of refinement.
176

As it goes, the story of the calorie is often narrated with white men at the center—white
men who were the model bodies for the experiments that derived nutritional health perimeters,
177

176
Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “Globality.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 33–38.
177
These texts have, in various degrees, engaged with the whiteness and masculinity of nutritional health
and how colonial ideology impacts scientific discourses of nutrition: Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black
Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2019): 169-197;
Mackert, Nina. Feeding Productive Bodies: Calories, Nutritional Values, and Ability in the Progressive-
Era US. Routledge, 2016; Landecker, “Food as Exposure,” 167-194; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter,
“Edible Matter,” 39-51.

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white men who sought scientific evidence to measure the inferiorities of the Othered, white men
who pushed forward public health initiatives in the image of those values they derived. Scholars
have written about the racist, classist, and gendered dimensions of the BMI scale,
178
while
historians have written about the profound impact of Wilbur Atwater’s calorimeter experiments
which he conducted at Wesleyan University—a ten-year project that was largely funded through
state military contracts.
179
Atwater’s data would be crucial to U.S. military intervention at home
and abroad in calculating efficient means for feeding troops, prisoners, and colonized subjects in
occupied territories. While these historical analyses offer important insights into how we come to
think about food, health, and the state, this chapter turns to twentieth century feminine/feminist
discourses of American womanhood (and the imperial sentiments it surfaces) to uncover how the
calorie became a shorthand for a politics of health and race through and as sensation.
The calorie, as the biopedagogical tool of self-management that we recognize today, was
made legible by twentieth century domestic scientists and food writers such as Ellen Swallows
Richard, Adelle Davis, Margarette Murray Washington, and Atwater’s own daughter Helen W.
Atwater, among others. Legitimizing the labor of the home as part of a national economy not
only functioned as part of the soft civilizing project of American empire—as Amy Kaplan
theorized in her work on manifest domesticity
180
—but uniquely developed a particular subgenre

178
Dougherty, Geoff B., Sherita H. Golden, Alden L. Gross, Elizabeth Colantuoni, and Lorraine T. Dean.
“Measuring Structural Racism and Its Association With BMI.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine
59, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 530–37.
179
See: Moran, Rachel Louise. “The Advisory State World War I Made: Scientific Nutrition and
Scientific Mothering.” In Governing Bodies, 10–37. American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern
Physique. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; Levine, “The Curious History of the Calorie in U.S.
Policy,” 125-129; Cullather, Nick. “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie.” The American Historical Review
112, no. 2 (2007): 337–64; Nick Cullather. “American Pie: The Imperialism of the Calorie.” History
Today 57, no. 2 (2007): 34-; Biltekoff, Charlotte. Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food
and Health / Charlotte Biltekoff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013; Biltekoff, Charlotte. Critical
Nutrition Studies. Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2012.
180
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. (Harvard University Press,
2002), 23-50.

100
of public discourse around food and vitalism which stretched food literacy into a blurred
public/private domain, enmeshing state welfare and public education with personal health,
hygiene, child rearing, and individual consumerism. During this time, various health and hygiene
campaigns were created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (such as the popular “Aunt
Sammy” radio show)
181
and commercial homemaking figures rose to prominence such as Betty
Crocker.
182
The state and corporate campaigns touting the latest health technologies and home
goods helped to supplant regional knowledge around homecare with universal practices that
established expertise in the field of domesticity as the science of wellness.
In reading twentieth century food literacy as an aesthetic, materialist, and
phenomenological index of race science, this chapter argues that the vitalism of the euthenics
movement sutures personhood to metabolics, where science and metaphor co-produce their own
entanglements. Euthenics began as a movement in the late 1800s as the study for optimizing
human wellness by controlling environmental conditions and lifestyle choices that produce
undesirable populations, disease, and dysfunction. Ellen Swallows Richard, one of the earlier
founders of the home economics movement and who developed national infrastructure and
curriculum for race/body betterment, defined euthenics as the future tense and tensing of the
American eugenics project, writing: “Eugenics is hygiene for the future generations. Euthenics is
hygiene for the present generation.”
183
Richard’s book, Euthenics: The Science of Controllable

181
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Home Economics and Farm Radio Service created a
fictitious wife (possible sister) for “Uncle Sam” named “Aunt Sammy.” The “Housekeeper’s Chat” began
in 1926 and many of the recipes and transcripts are archived in the Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes. Though
there was a general national broadcast script, the shows also took on regional/local dialects and cultural
tones to best connect with various audiences through an advice column format.
182
For more on the rise of “Betty Crocker” see Shapiro, “And Here She Is…Betty Crocker!” 87-99.
183
Richards, Ellen Henrietta Swallow. Euthenics, the Science of Controllable Environment; (Boston,
Whitcomb & Barrows, 1910), viii.

101
Environment, mapped her vision for a practical science of the body (the sensible world of
becoming) and the home (the real world of being) as a way to achieve mastery over illness,
disease, and degeneracy.
My turn to twentieth century dietetic writings is not merely an exercise in uncovering the
racist overtures of the early home economics movement. Rather, I seek to highlight how
sentiments, methods, and habits of thought from the euthenics movement impact our
contemporary approaches to public health, epidemiology, and feminist science studies research
that seek to understand how environmental and material conditions produce undesirable
populations (fat, disabled, chronically ill people) and uncritically seek to “fix” disorders without
interrogating how we are trained to recognize what constitutes as a disordered life and body. For
example, while scholars have written a great deal about race, neoliberalism, and the rhetorical
politics of Michelle Obama’s focus on childhood obesity (particularly about the symbolism and
representations of food literacy in “post-racial” politics), how might the conversation take on
new valences within the context of longer imperial food projects where the U.S. sought to
measure, train, and educate bodies of color, native subjects, and foreign-criminal appetites?
184

This context would suggest that Obama’s anti-childhood obesity campaign does not act as an
upheaval or radical break from white supremacist eugenics projects of the twentieth century but
continues curating the citizen-body through the very same domestic science and literacy tactics
that utilizes barometers of health and wellness to sanction and make legible demographic shifts
in the American imperial politic.

184
For more detailed discussions about Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, see: Beerman, Ruth J. “Toned
Arms or Big Butt? Michelle Obama’s Disturbed Notions of Body, Race, Gender, and Advocacy as Let’s
Move! Spokesperson.” In Disturbing Argument. Routledge, 2015; Jette, Shannon, Krishna Bhagat, and
David L. Andrews. “Governing the Child-Citizen: ‘Let’s Move!’ As National Biopedagogy.” Sport,
Education and Society 21, no. 8 (November 16, 2016): 1109–26; Bertaki, Monika. “Mother Knows Best:
The Rhetorical Persona of Michelle Obama and the ‘Let’s Move’ Campaign.” Accessed March 14, 2022.

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The making of the American calorie embodied a racial and labor logic that branded much
of U.S. domestic and foreign policy and the current neocolonial food matrix as both an extension
of and distinct project from European colonial taxonomy, central to which was the image of the
new American woman. The ontology of the calorie has been rehearsed in the private spaces of
the home and kitchen that transformed into laboratories of life-management systems—more
formally known as home economics programs—spearheaded by white women of America,
practiced in academia and public schools, in advertisement and public agencies, and circulated
from port to port in the guise of food literacy and anti-hunger campaigns that welcomed U.S.
military satellite colonies and repurposed agricultural waste. In looking at the literature of
nutritional guides from prominent domestic scientists, we can trace how a new language of
vitality begins to take shape in the home to describe the contours of the new American woman
and the nation she keeps.
My previous chapter mapped the racial and colonial logics of the gut through the study of
milky appetites, or gut affects: conquering the land meant conquering the gut; cultivating
appetites and the body meant civilizing cultures. I focus on the coercive, co-constitutive, and
enmeshed phenomena of the agro-food industries of the 20
th
century to consider how food
becomes pathologized through the prism of modernity and nationalism and is then felt on the
excesses of the body. I take the dairy industry as a case study to demonstrate how national
modernization and development paradigms– on an international stage–practices literal and
metaphorical curation of the modern cosmopolitan citizen body as a means of extending and
expanding the genre of the human into the emergent racial aesthetics of the twentieth century.
This chapter extends the body-project to the domestic sciences, which allowed American women
to participate in crafting cohesive narratives about U.S. empire’s civilizing project at home and

103
abroad. Simultaneously, nutritional reformers trained the public in new feelings and sensations
towards food divorced from cultural and ethnic meaning, which historicizes and contextualizes
the U.S culinary export of diet-food. Both phenomena expanded and policed definitions of
whiteness, able-bodiedness, and citizenship for the (migrant) working poor through colonial,
racial, and gendered sensibilities adapted to relational networks of health. Most importantly, this
chapter asks how metabolic personhood shapes who we are fighting to keep in the future.
Euthenics delineates the kinds of bodies that must be regulated in the now and the ones who will
eventually disappear in an optimized then.
Metabolic Personhood
The calorie is ubiquitous; the calorie saturates. Calorie literacy exemplifies the tensions of
biopolitics and governance, wherein the modern subject can be educated into a life worth living.
Five years after former First Lady Michell Obama began her Let’s Move campaign to end
childhood obesity within a generation, the July 2016 Food and Drug Administration’s final rule
change to the Labeling and Education act of 1990 was implemented: calling for the displaying of
calories per serving in food establishments and food distribution venues across the country.
185

Upheld by the Supreme Court and Affordable Care Act, supporters argued that displaying the
calories of prepared foods would lessen the burden on the American healthcare system while
honoring consumer choice.
186
This tenuous balance between public health and personal
responsibility, communal care and private choices, scaffolded much of the discourse around

185
“H.R.3562-101ST Congress (1989-1990): Nutrition Labeling and Education Act,” Congress.gov,
05/27/2022, https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/3562; “Changes to Nutrition Facts
Label,” FDA, 05/27/2022, https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/changes-nutrition-facts-
label; “Food Labeling,” Federal Register, 5/27/2022,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/05/27/2016-11867/food-labeling-revision-of-the-
nutrition-and-supplement-facts-labels
186
“H.R.1599-114TH Congress (2015-2016): Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015”
Congress.gov, 5/27/2022, https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1599

104
corporate transparency and consumerism in the early 2000s and 2010’s as the U.S. continued to
wage war on trans fats.
Spurring on the rule change was a landmark case in 2002 where Caesar Barber filed a class
action lawsuit against four major fast-food chains for purposefully withholding nutritional
information about the quality of their foods, arguing that doing so misled consumers about
possible health effects.
187
Barber and his legal team were characterized by the franchises’
defendants and major media outlets as trying to find someone to blame for his fatness, stupidity,
and poor life decisions. His detractors argued that the case was brought forward because Barber
was either an attention-seeker capitalizing on the traction of court victories against the tobacco
industry or a delusional fool with no sense of personal responsibility.
188
The case was presented
as a public spectacle, appearing as punchlines for pundits, writers, and comedians who attacked
Barber’s intelligence, sense of entitlement, and body size—markers that came to stand in for his
race, class, and education level. Though Barber’s suit is ultimately unsuccessful (a fate also
repeated by the Pelman sisters
189
), nutritional reformers and public health advocates continued to
push for transparency and consumer education with a particular focus on low-income
communities of color.
Two years later, there would be another “obesity litigation” case brought up against
McDonald’s, specifically, by plaintiff Katherin Fettke.
190
Fettke’s lawsuit would not only be

187
Sealey, “Obese Man Sues Fast-Food Chains,” ABC News, July 26, 2002,
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91427&page=1
188
“Obese Man Sues Fast-Food Chains for Health Woes,” Washington Post, July 27, 2002.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/jul/27/20020727-035012-8644r/; Freeman, “Oppression
through Poor Nutrition,” 2221-2259; “Tobacco Win Sets Table for Fast-Food Suits,” Chicago Tribune,
2002; Zefutie, “From Butts to Big Macs,” 1383-1415.
189
Benloulou, “Pelman v. McDonald’s,” 72. “McDonald’s Settles Fat Lawsuit for 8.5 Million,” New
York Times, February 15, 2005, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/jul/27/20020727-035012-
8644r/.
190
Katherin Fettke v. McDonald’s (2004).

105
profiled nationally but was also one of the few landmark victories against a fast food franchise
over nutritional requirements. Forbes magazine even wrote a feature piece about Fettke titled,
“McDonald’s Plaintiff Not Your Average McFatso.” The article makes sure to show that Fettke
is not a McDonald’s consumer herself, but a lifestyle and personal coach concerned with
“helping others live their dream.”
191
Furthermore, the article takes great pains to describe how
the case is unlike other “obesity litigation cases” because it is invested in targeting transfats that
harm even non-obese bodies.
192
Along with her affiliation with the American Heart Health
association, Fettke, a thin, middle-aged white woman is described as credentialed as the
“International Coaching Federation’s first Master Certified Coach”-- an organization for which
her husband served as vice president. Fettke is portrayed in the media as an accomplished,
credentialed, and concerned citizen in opposition to Barbers and the Pellman sisters, whose
lawsuits were framed as frivolous and stupid. Fettke’s thinness, whiteness, and her class status
(i.e. that she is decidedly not a McDonald’s consumer) does the work of purifying her intentions
with the lawsuit to understand her logic and actions as that of a concerned citizen fighting for
common-sense nutritional regulation for the undereducated public that could fall prey to poor
choices. The ideological quandary of nutritional literacy and the healthy citizen body is
complicated by whose bodies are able to articulate grievance and redress and how the viscerality
of fat (who has it/who consumes it) and race plays out differently in these court scenarios. I turn
to Fettke as an example of how white American femininity acts as arbitrator of the national
health project: as keeper, protector, and expert.
The 2015 FDA rule change represents the limits between the state and the body and the

191
“McDonald’s Plaintiff not Your Average McFatso,” Forbes Magazine, July 12, 2004,
https://www.forbes.com/2004/07/12/cx_da_0712topnews.html?sh=9d58710190ac
192
Ibid.

106
role of food literacy in shaping consumer choice. Even as Fettke’s iconic win was contingent on
transfat regulation in fry oil, why did the new FDA guidelines focus on calorie labeling as
opposed to more robust regulations of food grades or transparency around additives and
processing? Why was the calorie seen as the best shorthand for nutritional iconography that
would allow people to determine whether or not to consume an item? What ideologies linger
with the calorie as it fades into impressions of things left over: personal health and responsibility,
hygienic form, and wellness aesthetics? To begin parsing these questions about biological matter
through biopolitical mattering, I first turn to a genealogy of nutrition and coloniality to
contextualize how diet and consuming certain kinds of foods come to signify the boundaries of
the human. I then analyze twentieth century debates on nutrition, race, and food literacy
campaigns through which metabolics became central to ideas of personhood in American
empire.
Nutrition and Coloniality
How we think and feel about diets are deeply entrenched in technologies of life
management exemplified through colonial sentiments which find new meanings in American
empire. The stomach has been a central site of contested domination and meaning-making for
scales of racial and gendered differentiation since early European colonization.
193
Stories of
hunger permeated the colonial world and colonial writing was replete with speculation: why
were the Natives so different (lean, not prone to intestinal problems, and often without beards),
and more importantly, how might (de)coding those differences help white settlers’ survivability

193
See Postcolonial food scholarship that thinks the through links between diet, digestion, and
colonialism: Roy, Alimentary Tracts; Wazana-Tompkins, Racial Indigestion; Holland, Ochoa, and
Wazana-Tompkins, “On the Visceral,” intro; Wazana-Tompkins, “Sylvester Graham’s Imperial
Dietetics,” 50-60; Ku, Manalansan, Mannur, “An Alimentary Introduction,” 1-9.

107
on the land?
194
Fundamental to these questions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an
established logic which understood bodies as malleable, transformed by environments through
the humors: the internal mechanisms that filled the body with its various liquids of bile and
blood.
195

As Spanish colonization expanded into new territories, extracting from land and bodies,
the humors played a vital role in the classification process for bodily difference. Rebecca Earle
writes in Body of the Conquistador that indigenous peoples were thought to consume cold foods
such as fish, roots, and herbs where “cold food generated the abundance of cold humours that
characterised the indigenous body, and which consequently shaped their character. Diet, in other
words, was behind the distinctive indigenous body, as well as the docile indigenous character.”

196
Through such logics, bodily difference becomes coded through European moralism where
eating is the act of creating difference while also representing health, capacity and temperament
that sought to universalize an everyday sensing of bodily/racial difference as discrete and fixed
categories that could be identified across labor practices and social codes in the expanding
colonial world.
Race was not yet a fixed category but emerging as a cohesive embodiment and
ideology.
197
Ecomiendas and sistemas de castas were means by which the Spanish crown and the

194
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Food, Biodiversity, Extinctions: Caribbean Fauna and the Struggle for
Food Security during the Conquest of the New World.” Journal of West Indian Literature 24, no. 2
(2016): 11–26.
195
For a more detailed study of the humoral sciences, food, eating, and the body, see Earle, Body of the
Conquistador.
196
Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 19
197
Carrera, Magali M. Imagining Identity in New Spain Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in
Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012; Voss, Barbara L. “Gender,
Race, and Labor in the Archaeology of the Spanish Colonial Americas.” Current Anthropology 49, no. 5
(October 2008): 861–93; Twinam, Ann. "Racial Passing: Informal and Official ‘Whiteness’ in Colonial
Spanish America.” In New World Orders, edited by John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey, 249–72.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

108
elite sought to formalize bodily difference through genealogy as labor/class markers. Though the
casta paintings commissioned by the crown and nobility were powerful depictions of gene-
aologies and the kinds of social lives, kinship formations, and homes people could have—as they
depicted images of racially mixed heterosexual families designated with appropriate adornments
and sometimes images of particular foods—they operated more often as an ideal than a
manageable lived process.
198
Documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth century show that
racial and ethnic categories were contested among/between families as land right disputes were
taken to court and people self-reported or identified outside the strict codes of the sistemas de
castas.
199
As the ecomiendas was heightened and land was parceled out to European settlers,
some would point to the objects that clustered around them: European foods, clothes, livestock,
and temperaments that gave them rightful access to these resources. Using the humors to index
human difference introduced language around re-forming the body—what you consumed and
how much of it you consumed signaled differences that were then codified into the early
iterations of a racial-labor taxonomy.
200
Through understandings of the humoral sciences in
colonial medicine, eating became a cultural action, whereby Europeans could purify their bodies
and the land as testament to the superiority and capacity of their dispositions.
201

198
Deans-Smith, Susan. “Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain*.” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 2 (December 2005):
169–204; Loren, Diana DiPaolo. “Corporeal Concerns: Eighteenth-Century Casta Paintings and Colonial
Bodies in Spanish Texas.” Historical Archaeology 41, no. 1 (2007): 23–36; Rebecca Earle. “The
Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism.” The William and Mary
Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2016): 427; Guzauskyte, Evelina. “Fragmented Borders, Fallen Men, Bestial
Women: Violence in the Casta Paintings of Eighteenth-Century New Spain.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies
86, no. 2 (March 2009): 175–204.
199
Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 45-62.
200
Jackson, Becoming Human; Weheliya, Habeas Viscus; McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our
Species?” 9-89; Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “No-Bodies.” Griffith Law Review 18, no. 2 (January 1, 2009):
212–36.
201
Bancel, Nicolas, Thomas David, and Dominic Richard David Thomas. The Invention of Race:
Scientific and Popular Representations. Routledge Studies in Cultural History 28. New York: Routledge,
2014.

109
Race would become biologically fixed during the Enlightenment period as political and
philosophical questions around freedom and sovereignty posed serious problems for the ruling
elite who sought to maintain their profits from colonial extractivism. As race science scholars on
the figure of the human have argued, the language of scientific reform iterated definitive markers
of human difference that fit both within enlightenment freedoms and colonial domination.
202

Sylvia Wynter unravels this contradictory space of (un)freedom, where Enlightenment is
enmeshed in colonial violence as degodding and desupernaturalization were “processes made
possible only on the basis of the dynamics of a colonizer/colonized relation that the West was to
discursively constitute and empirically institutionalize on the islands of the Caribbean, and later,
on the mainland of the Americas.”
203
In other words, Wynter posits a two-prong subjectification
process whereby the dissolution of power of the Roman Catholic Church and reorganization of
sovereignty from “God’s rule” to self-government created the figure of Man 1 as spiritual and
health praxi were “degodded.” This desupernaturalizing allowed for a universal language around
being human to surface—an ethno-racial-science vocabulary and social infrastructure—that
charted the figure of Man 2 through speciesism and racial taxonomies where the colonizer-
subject position relates to negative spaces of Otherness.
204

The figure of democratic subject of rights shifted how people understood the body in
relation to its environments and the Individual in relation to public and political life.
205
The birth
of the European democratic subject of rights with the capacity to self-rule and self-govern was
legible through the unfreedoms of the para-human figure of the enslaved African, savage native,

202
See: Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.
203
Wynter, “Unsettling Coloniality,” 264.
204
Ibid 268.
205
Agamben, Giorgio. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Homo Sacer 1. Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1998.

110
coolie laborer, migrant worker whose exclusion from freedom and subsequent commodification
into a racial capitalist system was characterized by the aporia of predetermined biological
difference and presumed health status based on cultures of hygiene and sanitation deemed
irrational and unscientific.
206
The primary project of French and British colonial administration
was installing and securing European appetites as a metric for subjecthood and the human. This
becomes evident in how performances and images of difference were circulated through various
media and representations of carcerality (public trials, executions, autopsies), zoos, freakshows,
botanical gardens, and live exhibitions of deformed/malformed inhabitants of the tropics.
207

These spectacles trained public feelings and knowledges in recognizing aberration with racial
form, cultivating universal standards across vastly different cosmologies of the world and
ontologies of bodily difference.
208

The rise of germ theory in the nineteenth century shifted the priorities of colonial
medicine from purifying native lands to purifying the bodies of the natives themselves.
209
The
overarching narrative shift from humoral sciences to germ theory indicated emergent ontological
questions at points of colonial contact: were the foods we consumed separate and discrete from
the body we lived in?
210
Could the foods of the other fundamentally alter the (white) interior
self? The post-Enlightenment period attempted to answer these questions about contagion,
consumption, and becoming the other—not as a radical break with humoral knowledges around
the politics of eating, but by rerouting aesthetic form and symbolism through food as fuel for the

206
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; see “parahumanity”
207
Craton, Lillian. The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in
19th-Century Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009.
208
Davies, Helen. Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
209
Garner, Stanton B. “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion.” Theatre Journal 58, no. 1
(2006): 1–14.
210
Warwick, Colonial Pathologies.

111
body as a distinctly biological and closed system.
211
As race science scholars concerned with the
figure of the human have argued, the language of scientific reform proposed definitive markers
of human difference that fit both within enlightenment freedoms and colonial domination.
212

Gender and racialization, though disappeared through a language of empiricism in health,
is central to the “biomutationally evolved body” in regard to the punitive histories of women’s
eating and minoritized subjecthood.
213
The lingering woman question in the Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment period served a particular function in American Empire: modeling health, as
ideology and social practice, to sediment the racial and gendered logics of colonization into the
contours of biocitizenship. European racial taxonomies and its attendant scientific language were
vital to U.S. empire as it sought to make sense of its status as a former colony freed from
imperial rule alongside a growing desire for expansion and conquest. What the next section
argues is that as the stomach mapped the contestations of European empire in the making of the
human, the calorie, as a measure of vitality during American expansion, solidified the boundaries
of the citizen-body.
Euthenics Nation
Coloniality shifts and reframes understandings of health and eating as race becomes
biologically fixed through enlightenment logics and gender is sedimented across eating cultures.
This joint process of disavowal and approval, inclusion and exclusion, is quintessential to how
intimacies are mediated through European colonialism and American empire in the twentieth
century. In Tense and Tender Ties, Ann Stoler uses the term “imperial body politic” to describe
the processes that aggregate colonial desire-making as part of the biopolitical fashioning of

211
Landecker, “The Philosophy of Metabolism in Three Parts.”
212
See: Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being;” Lowe, Intimacies; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus
213
McKittrick and Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, 10.

112
sexualized/racialized selves—arguing that carnality and flesh operate not only within private
domains, but are reflective of “what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule—sliding
and contested scales of differential rights.”
214
Rights, then, are contingent and manifold with
degrees of separation as they are granted or denied to particular bodies (a power that is both
central to the state and productively—in the Foucauldian sense—diffused across populations).
While the nineteenth century reveled in the project of fixing the human as a cohesive
subject of rights, what is known as the American century fixated on the body as a site of
transfiguration. What was race and how could it be stratified in the post-emancipation era, across
expanding Western territories that displaced and decimated native peoples on Turtle Island and
México, through the U.S. military outfits that territorialized and occupied islands in the Pacific
and Caribbean, to the rush of Eastern European migrants into industrial urban cities? What were
the boundaries of inclusion? Whose bodies were fit for transformation through educational and
hygiene reform?
Six years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the complex and contested
reorganization of the U.S. plantation economy, sisters Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher
Stowe published one of the best-selling books of the 1860s, The American Woman’s Home:
Principles of Domestic Science.
215
Often regarded as one of the earliest and most successful
publications on the domestic economy (later known as home economics), American Woman’s
Home provided a blueprint for the modest and modern New American Woman. The Beecher
sisters, thought of as Antebellum reformers, sought to “elevate both the honor and remuneration
of all the employments that sustain the many difficult and sacred duties of the family state,”
216
by

214
Stoler, Ann Laura. "Imperial debris: reflections on ruins and ruination." Cultural anthropology 23.2,
191-219.
215
Beecher and Beecher Stowe, American Woman.
216
Ibid. Intro; 1.

113
re-negotiating labor-value of work done in the private sphere. They crafted a language for home
managers through this widely circulated handbook, training American women in the domestic
sciences through their specific qualifications and expertise.
Why did the Beecher sisters write a proto-feminist treatise on domestic labor at this
particular moment in America’s imperial formation? Though work was revered as a virtuous
activity of self and subjecthood à la Locke and Hegel, the context of the industrial age and
introduction to theories of thermodynamics shifted thinking around energy and output. Across
species and machines, the language of thermodynamics standardized a relation of energy to the
act of doing which introduced teleological questions about self-making in the era of
mechanization.
217
The Beecher sisters’ writings on the domestic scientist sought to reaffirm the
virtues of labor and homemaking as central to a healthy nation while simultaneously
differentiating a hierarchy of work across racial embodiment entangled between the human,
animal, and machine.
In a particularly telling section titled, “In the Case of Servants,” the Beechers describe the
evolution of racially segregated work in the home in both slave states and free states.
218
In
comparing white women who were accustomed to enslaved black women working in their
homes, they write: “the mistress, outdone in the sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her
superiority by skill and contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent
methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary, --if she could not take a hundred steps without

217
For a more in-depth history of Energy, see Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels,
Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
218
Though they were vocal abolitionists—Stowe most famous for her sensationalist and pornotropic
depictions of black life in Uncle Tom’s Cabin-- their writings reveal white supremacist racial logics that
promote the superior faculties of white American women in contradistinction to the racial and ethnic
others over whom she manages.

114
weariness, she could make twenty answer the purpose of a hundred.”
219
Ideas of efficiency for
work are echoed here, where energy capacity is not nearly as important as optimizing output.
Later, they write of an Irish maid hired in the home, who, though “a creature of immense
bone and muscle,” was let go because of her “heavy unweakened brain.”
220
Through much of
their writings, it becomes evident that the American woman, though not physically equipped for
labor, possessed superior mental faculties that solidified her status as domestic scientist and an
embodiment of efficiency. In this treatise that elevates domestic work, the New American
Woman, as a scientific homemaker, is not merely the force of energy, but a manager of energy
output that designates her as a powerful catalyst for policing race in the intimate domain of the
home.
By the early 1900’s, the language of home management would make its way into the
everyday vernacular of the American middle class through the popular presses. Helen Louise
Johnson’s Harper’s Bazaar series, “The Gospel of the New Housekeeping,”(which began in
1913) offers insight into the ideological shift in homecare from regional practices and folk
knowledges to a universal science of wellness that acts as entrée into modernity. Taking on the
tone of advice columns that were in vogue at the time, in Johnson’s third issue of the series she
writes about “Mrs. Home-Made,” a sixty-year-old homemaker who is struggling to feed her
family on a budget. Johnson describes how Mrs. Home-Made was educated in homemaking
“forty years ago, which meant, in general, no physics, chemistry, or biology, certainly no
economics even of the most elementary character. She had been taught to cook and to sew and to
‘keep house’ by her mother, who in her time had cured meats, salted fish, spun linen, dipped

219
Beecher and Beecher Stowe, American Woman, 430.
220
Ibid. 435.

115
candles, made the soap and many other household necessities.”
221
Johnson details how these
domestic chores were insufficient for the “intelligent feeding”
222
of her family, arguing that the
homemaker’s skills needed to change in the industrial age.
She writes that Mrs. Home-Made must be re-educated in how to “choose anew” and that
“slight knowledge of scientific facts” would transform her approach to food, eating, and child-
rearing. Knotted in this advice column is the story of personhood and metabolics, wherein Mrs.
Home-Made has the capacity to choose modernity through the science of homemaking once she
recognizes that food is “no longer viewed merely as something which would satisfy hunger while
it pleased the palate, but from the point of view of the nourishment rendered….[through]
proteins, fats, carbohydrates, balanced rations and hundred-calorie portions.”
223
What emerges is
a different language of sensing food—more important than texture, taste, or cultural history, is
relating food to a quantifiable measurement system that elicits standard responses from the body
after consumption.
The science of wellness, as self-making apparatus, is entangled in a liminal space as both
punitive and liberatory, as possible entry into the national body and barrier from full humanity.
Johnson expresses the anxieties of many home economists at the time about the transformation
of the home maker into a buyer. Reimagining the space of homemaking through the lens of
practical science allowed women to escape the “sense of ignorance, this subconscious loss of
power over things, [which] only increased the effect of that fatalism which the control of
machinery was leading man out from under.”
224
This anxiety marked a concern over what role

221
Johnson, “The Gospel of Good Housekeeping,” 71
222
Ibid. 72
223
Ibid. 71
224
Richards, Euthenics, chapter 6

116
home and womanhood would play under the ever-shifting conditions of industrial and imperial
expansion.
Domestic science and manifest destiny promoted an American model of modernity that
brought order to a world in chaos and fantasies about improving quality of life through uniquely
American economic ingenuity. In Anarchy of Empire, Amy Kaplan considers how the force of
the domestic is not separate from public life but is actually central to U.S. imperial expansion.
225

Kaplan argues that “the female realm of the domestic and the male arena of manifest destiny
were not separate spheres at all but were intimately linked,” as they “reimagined the nation as
home during a period of massive and violent expansion into Mexico and Indian lands (sic),
which raised volatile questions of the expansion of slavery.”
226
The next section considers how
the domestic sciences and the figure of the managerial white woman helped to recalibrate the
racial epidermal schema in American empire towards a more palatable fantasy of optimal health
at home and abroad.
227
In other words, how did the aesthetics of health, cast from ideals of
whiteness, able-bodiedness, heterosexuality, and Western modernity attend to the particularities
of efficiency as they were enmeshed in Progressive Era nutritional reform and colonial
laboratories of sanitation and hygiene, to give rise to biocitizenship in the twentieth century?
American Appetites and Pastoral Eugenics
The turn of the twentieth century marked a crucial moment in the ongoing process of
consolidating the boundaries of whiteness as heightened racial anxiety spread through American
port cities with the arrival of new Europeans. Wilbur Atwater’s theories of the calorie—as a
means of quantifying the nutritional value and corresponding energy output of any given item of

225
Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire.
226
Ibid. 26
227
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Repr. (Pluto Classics. London: Pluto Press, 2002), 84.

117
food—were gaining traction through military and domestic science circuits. Helen Atwater
translated her father’s research into guidelines for the American public, working closely with
government agencies such as the U.S. department of Agriculture to provide food literature,
infographics, lectures, and newsletters that broke down the composition of food materials into
fuel values. The knowledges produced about the calorie and its uses in homes, public institutions,
government agencies, and international exchanges would demonstrate the “plural and contested”
nature of a pastoral eugenics that operated as relational, in that “the affects and effects of the
guider [and] guided” refashioned the self and citizen.
228

228
I build and borrow from Nikolas Rose’s definition of pastoral power.
Figure 2.1. “Composition of Food Materials” chart (Hunt and Atwater 1916) US Department of Agriculture/Internet Archive

118
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century nutritionists and health reformers of the
Progressive Era envisioned the calorie as an essential tool to increase the well-being for the
working poor.
229
The idea that foodstuffs had value outside of taste, culture, and class symbolism
meant that reformers could introduce nutrient dense and cheaply made foods to the diets of the
working poor. Calories were supposed to measure the feeling of fullness in empirical terms that
could cluster abject matter into a singular human experience, where the measure of hunger and
vitality emphasized the body as an engine in need of fuel as opposed to thinking of the sociality
of consumption.
Helen Zoe Veit has traced the rise of a paradigm of equivalences in regards to foodstuffs–
where the discovery of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and the rise of the calorie as an
evaluation tool allowed for a sense of transference and replacement for all foods of “equal”
value.
230
The idea that foods with similar nutrients are fundamentally equivalent has been
challenged, of course, from the early days of Sylvester Graham’s whole wheat crusade to the
1980s countercultural cuisine that Warren Belasco examines, to contemporary concerns with
pesticide residues.
231
Yet, despite the myriad of tools for thinking about the fundamentals of
foodstuffs that challenge an assumption about the transmutability of food as being calculated via
the calorie, this numerical shorthand took hold in homes across America.
Part of the prevalence of the calorie as a scientific quantification system that could
determine food values--and by proxy, human-economic value– traffics through ideas around

229
For more info, see John Harvey Kellogg’s extensive writing on dietetics and the need for low-calorie
diets in several of his manuscripts: The Battle Creek Sanatorium system, Keeping the Body in Health,
Autointoxication or Intestinal Toxemia, The Itinerary of Breakfast, Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease.
230
Veit, Helen Zoe. Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American
Eating in the Early Twentieth Century. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
231
Belasco, Warren James. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry. 2nd
updated ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.

119
consumption, contagion, and interiority coded by anxieties over the flood of new settlers arriving
in the coastal cities. Americans became fixated on food, appetites, and stature/body size as a way
to designate an ethno-national identity that still fit within the cultural language of post-
Enlightenment Man and preserve the boundaries between the self and other. As the category of
whiteness became bound and unbound through class lines and American nativist genealogies, the
cult of slenderness emerged as a fleshy marker of bodily propriety
Fat historical materialist scholarship has traced how portly European settlers who sought
factory work in industrialized cities signaled to the American public a crisis of class and migrant
contagion; violent practices of exclusion at the time demonstrate how whiteness, as a racial
category, is formed along the corporeal fat-other.
232
For example, Peter Stearns traces American
diets and eating cultures in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, where a fear of fat was
grounded in class discourses as early Americans adopted French and British sensibilities around
slenderness as a form of racial and class distinction from the new flood of hefty working-class
settlers.
233
As reformers focused on how the poor could better manage their homes and incomes,
thereby making them more efficient workers and acceptable citizens, they reiterated and
naturalized the boundaries of whiteness through a visual and sensory lexicon that attached
appetite and body-size to mental and physical health and capacity. The fantasy that the poor and
minoritized could live well if they simply learned to manage their homes and stomachs better—a
familiar refrain in our contemporary epoch— meant that those able to prove themselves capable
of maintaining their figures could be accepted into the nation.
This narrative about capacity and citizenship was not merely felt through the Othering of
portly Europeans but was rehearsed in the public arena of nutritional education targeting children

232
See: Bordo, Unbearable Weight.
233
See: Stearns, Fat History.

120
and colonial subjects. In a 1932 speech on “Good Nutrition and Good Citizens” U.S. Secretary of
Interior, Ray Layman Wilbur said, “There is a close relationship between proper food and good
citizenship and improper food and bad citizenship. All of you know how the children behave
after Christmas or a birthday when the diet rules have been relaxed.”
234
He goes on to make the
connections between U.S. militarism and nutrition (sentiments that are echoed in contemporary
U.S. public health), arguing, “If an army fights on its stomach, and our military leaders tell us
that this was so during the last war, then certainly our children should have the greatest attention
paid to their nutrition so that as they go into the battle of life they will have the best possible
physical body constantly maintained at high efficiency by the most suitable kinds of foods.”
235

Wilbur makes plain the link between fitness, citizenship, and American militarism.
Further, the imperative to strive towards health and efficiency were on display throughout
the twentieth century where reformers sought to protect vulnerable populations from the
unfettered corporate cronyism and capitalist exploitation of said rapid growth. As the elite gained
monopolies over budding transportation, energy, and other commercial industries, U.S. borders
expanded into the west and the Pacific. Anti-imperialists, abolitionists, and progressive reformers
worked to stabilize the unequal socioeconomic and racial system (often in tension with one
another) left in the wake of failed Reconstruction. Simultaneously, U.S. military outfits in the
Pacific and Caribbean and home economists on the mainland were conducting experiments in
hygiene and sanitation that purified the bodies of the native—killing the Indian; saving the

234
Wilbur, Ray Lyman. “Good Nutrition and Good Citizenship,” Transcription of speech delivered
through House Keeper’s Chat programming. June 2, 1932.
235
Ibid.

121
man.
236
Technologies of health management emerged in this time period, continuing the work of
nineteenth century race science, and popularizing the eugenics and euthenics movements.
237

A new doctrine was emerging for American empire that transposed nineteenth century
colonial sensibilities around race, gender, and the human into empirical data sets on health,
eugenics, and evolutionary potential. Before the Great Depression, the calorie was often used as
a tool of surveillance in colonial institutions, military installments, and penitentiaries as a means
of population control and economic management. In the state-sponsored Native Boarding
schools from 1860-1978, young children were stolen from their homes, stripped of their
languages, religions, and cultural foods. It was in the early-1900s when these institutions
subjected Native children to weigh-ins, taking meticulous notes on how their new diets
transformed their bodies.
238
In a June 1938 newsletter for the American Medical Association in a piece titled “Revolt
in the AMA,” it’s outlined that American medical practitioners were having heated debates over
state-controlled health care and entitlement programs since the 1920s.
239
Along with a host of
other social programs that have invested in national nutritional literacy, the article details the
expenditures of the penal and corrections institutions of the Department of Justice and The
Bureau of Indian Affairs (which was involved in the operations and oversight of Native boarding
schools). Ultimately, the article gestures to the conflicts between practitioners who agree with
“socialized” medicine and those who disagree. Within the debates about State-operated medical

236
See: Veracini, Lorenzo. “Decolonizing Settler Colonialism: Kill the Settler in Him and Save the Man.”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 1–18.
237
See: Mitchell and Snyder, “Eugenic Atlantic,” 834-64.
238
Schuck, C, B G Wenberg, and M T Boedeker. “Evaluation of the Boarding School Diets of Indian
Children of the Dakotas and Observations on the Growth and Development of Adolescent Indian Girls,”
n.d., 27.
239
Stephenson, Howard. “Revolt in the A. M. A.” Current History (New York) 48, no. 6 (June 1, 1938):
24–26.

122
care is a particular scaffolding over the average American who can maintain a more autonomous
relationship between patient-physician care versus the more vulnerable or at-risk populations
who are regarded as in need of closer paternalistic care.
240

The impact of the anti-drudgery movement was felt broadly—it worked to distinguish the
human from the parahuman figure through the everyday and mundane acts of domestic
carework, where the citizen-subject understood the delineations of labor and management of
labor through distinct racial logics. It also allowed the New American Woman’s influence to
reach beyond regional audiences into the national and global arenas. Though in the U.S.
domestic sciences was still a regionally curated project, the ideas of certification and degree-
requirements produced experts in the field. The scales of racial difference in domestic work
modeled by the Beecher’s sisters’ earlier handbook thrived through a new generation of white
women who established certifications and home economics programs not only in the U.S. but in
the Pacific as well.
241
The calorie continued to make its appearance in training manuals, recipe
booklets, food labeling, and nutritional health iconography and documents well into the twenty-
first century.
The function of the calorie transformed after World War I in the midst of the Great
Depression, from a technology deployed by the state in laboratories of health and hygiene for at-
risk populations to a self-prescribed management tool of the biocitizen in service of the nation.
As unemployment and hunger grew, national guidelines and educational resources around calorie

240
Stephenson, “Revolt in the A.M.A,” 24-27.
241
According to historian Felice Prudente Santamaria, home economics programs began in the
Philippines as early as 1906 as part of William Mckinley’s “great education experiment,” where home
economics appeared in public schools directed by the Bureau of Education. To this day, there continue to
be university programs dedicated to “euthenics” that focus on good habits, time management, and
cultivating good citizens. Felice Prudente Santamaria. “Table Wars: Home Economics Becomes an
Accidental Advocate for Philippine Culture, 1904-1922.” Manila 8, no. 1 (2012):1-19.

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fundamentals were circulated in schools, to homemakers, and in government institutions. Herbert
Hoover, as president during the onset of the Great Depression, called his “police force”
242
—the
American woman— to arbitrate the ration system and calories across homes in America.
Perhaps the call to police calories in the home during the Great Depression created the
conditions of “calorie fetishism” that home economists found particularly gouache. Often
presenting scientific studies and nutritional advice that “should go down all right with your
daughters of these ages, because, by and large, the protective foods are not the food that interfere
with the current vogue of the willowy figure,” the Bureau of Home Economics created content
that designated what a truly modern American woman looked like through her moderate
relationship to the calorie.
243
From the hundreds of segments of the Housekeepers chat where
“Aunt Sammy” had informal conversations with the American farmer’s wife, it becomes
apparent in the archived scripts which specifically focused on nutrition, that home economists of
the time put a great deal of effort into rerouting misinformation about calorie tracking, restrictive
eating, and other diet tactics more invested in maintaining a slim figure than cultivating health.
As the show targeted predominantly rural American women, the material presented offered two
dichotomous images of the modern American woman: the first was an unserious woman who
used calorie tracking as a vanity project to keep up with what was fashionable at the time. Aunt
Sammy can be found making fun of such a woman, saying things like, “Maybe you have friends
who make a fetish of calories, and spoil every luncheon by insisting on counting them–right
there in public,” or “If you’re like me, you want to make a dash for the door every time you hear

242
Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 348.
243
“Nutrition Studies in the States” House Keeper’s Chat, Approved by the Bureau of Home Economics,
United States Department of Agriculture, Nov 3, 1937.

124
anybody say “count the calories.”
244
Counting calories right there in public, tempers a kind of
incredulity about the openness in which the calorie fetishist does her bodywork and the
discomfort she imparts on others by mediating her appetites in such a way. This woman–
conjured as willowy and interested in what was fashionable–was presented in contradistinction
from her more informed and serious counterpart. This other serious American woman was a
dedicated home manager who used science to improve the life of her family.
245
She not only
understood food in economic values, but could identify proteins, fats, vitamins, and
carbohydrates in the meals she made. Calories were not a tool to achieve beauty, but a system in
which to better measure food value, human output, and overall health performance.
246
The two
images of the American woman were further complicated by the hunger that permeated after
World War II, which provided, “a cornucopia of starvation research—a wealth of hunger.”
247

The distance between calorie tracking as a patriotic duty for public good and as an aesthetic
project for personal vanity demonstrates how larger cultural anxieties over competing images of
modern femininity and women’s role in the nation–as either shallow figure or substantive citizen
body–was crafted in relation to one’s knowledge and use of the calorie.
As home economists continued to stress moderation, nutritional fundamentals, and
simplicity for the average American, fad diets and weight-loss miracle cures circulated widely
across the country. This sense of moderation and curation of wellness is, perhaps, what makes
“health” such an insidious and difficult thing to untangle from the folds of the American citizen-

244
“Meals for the Woman who Dines Alone” House Keeper’s Chat, Approved by the Bureau of Home
Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, Sep 4, 1935.
245
“The Food We Eat” House Keeper’s Chat, Approved by the Bureau of Home Economics, United States
Department of Agriculture, Jan 21, 1938.
246
“Dangerous Fat-Reducing” House Keeper’s Chat, Approved by the Bureau of Home Economics,
United States Department of Agriculture, Jan 3, 1938.
247
Russell, Sharman Apt. “The Hunger Experiment.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 29, no. 3 (2005): 68.

125
project. The calorie appeared to take hold in the public imagination through two competing
relationships–one that can be easily diagnosed as harmful and restrictive and the other as
sensible. Home economists were not invested in thinness, per se, but in understanding the very
scaler and anatomic ways in which bodies would respond to food and how to optimize those
sensations in the everyday–not for pleasure, but for fueling efficiency. It was the making of data
sets and the rise of the language of optimization that instilled a sense of proto-illness to natural
phenomenons of human difference. If we think of the condition of orthorexia nervosa, which I
detailed in the introduction of this project, fundamental to this disordered relationship to food is a
desire to know the scientific, quantifiable, and material conditions in which a food item has been
grown and harvested and how it will interact with the body on the cellular level—a food literacy
that has gone too far.
--
In a 1944 correspondence with the editors of The British Medical Journal, a self-
identified medical “layman” F.S. Airey, writes in response to the last issue’s advertisement of the
American health magazine Hygeia. He writes, “The American Medical Association realizes the
demand for reliable instruction on health and disease…My own copies of Hygeia pass through
many hands…while Hygeia is produced on typically American lines, its articles are contributed
by properly qualified people, the style and subject-matter are appropriate, and the information
given is reliable.”
248
Hygeia was a popular family health magazine created by the American
Medical Association that would run over the course of most of the 20th century. What were these
typical American lines and what did they designate about the racialized-citizen body?

248
Airey, F. S. “A Health Magazine for The Layman.” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 4339 (1944):
341.

126
Hygeia’s 1936 issue featured an entry from Virginia E. Smith, a sixth-grade teacher from
Baltimore. She writes to share an interesting experiment she conducted with her class. She
begins, “At the end of a class period in which the sixth grade had been studying the effect of
various foods on the growth of people, one of the pupils happened to ask whether the food of the
Japanese had been responsible for their short stature.” Students then began a class research
project that sought to answer whether the Japanese were, on average, smaller; what were the
common foods in Japan; and whether the Japanese born in America were larger than those born
in Japan. What these set of research questions reveals is how people were attempting to
determine food, growth and biology. The students pulled answers from the influential work of
E.V. McCollum and his co-authored book, Food, Nutrition, and Health, amongst other material
available to them in their school library.
They found that “many years ago rice had been practically the only food eaten, but that
recently other things, mainly the roots and leaves of plants, have supplemented the rice and tea,
thus overcoming the deficiencies in the original diet.” The children also found that the Japanese
didn’t have the land to pasture so they didn’t drink milk. They noted the use of pickled radishes
and fish of all kinds. They found data that showed Japanese children born in the United States
“are larger at all ages than are the Japanese born and reared in Japan.” Though there are no
citations to the exact texts, articles, and data points that the students researched, it was clear that
there was a particular correlation between deficiency, place, and body size, where the Japanese
body came to stand in for a body of lack–in both land, technology, and food knowledge. The idea
that Japanese children born in America are larger than either “ancient” Japanese peoples or
Japanese children raised in Japan echoes the anxieties over changing Asian body size and the
psychological study of Asian body size and perceived “foreignness” that was conducted in the

127
mid-2000s.

Figure 2.2. image from Hygeia magazine, 1936-06: Vol 12 Issue 6, Internet Archive
The school research project culminated in what is reminiscent of elementary school
World’s Food and Culture days: the class demonstrated a “playlet” for the rest of the school
where three girls of varying heights displayed the size differences between the Ancient Japanese,
Modern Japanese, and American bodies. In their performance, “A small girl was chosen to
represent the ancient Japanese. She carried a tray containing rice and tea. A larger girl was
selected for the modern Japanese. She carried a modern Japanese dinner consisting of fish, rice,
sweet potato vine leaves and tea. A still taller girl was selected for the American. She carried a
good dinner of steak, baked potato, string beans, lettuce and tomato salad, bread and butter and
milk.” Smith enclosed a photograph of the display of the three girls of different heights with

128
trays in hand, dressed in “traditional” clothing, smiling happily against their diagrams. The walls
are decorated with Japanese dolls and paper cut outs while two white girls don “ancient” and
“modern” kimonos with identical, blunted bowl-cup wigs. The “healthy American” stands tall in
her skirt and blouse, carrying a tray that looks filled with significantly more food. What we see
represented across the slopes of their shoulders is a visual scale of Western modernity play-acted
in an elementary school and mapped out through the logics of the gut.
The influence of domestic science was seen in all avenues of life. Though a consensus
around the domestic sciences as an experimental field of study and knowledge production was
hotly contested throughout its formation, the visual iconography of home economists was
embodied by Eleanor Roosevelt, as reformer, political strategist, and First Lady. As she
expanded the roles and definition of First Lady, Roosevelt modeled the ideals of the modern
scientific homemaker for the American people. Pushing against the Hoover administration’s
slow and negligent response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression, Roosevelt
championed nutrition reform as one of her core projects as First Lady. As bread lines grew
longer across the country, Roosevelt endeavored to model how food was merely fuel for the
body and how the efficient homemaker could manage hunger if she possessed the proper tools
and knowledge. Roosevelt began by redesigning the White House kitchen with its archaic food
storage, cooking system, and lack of proper refrigeration to model the sleek interior of the
modern American home. Roosevelt embodied the progressive values of the time, and her
transformation of the White House kitchen announced a particular to science, wellness, and the
nation.
Though she took great care to design a kitchen with the latest gadgetry, Roosevelt took
even greater care to appear to have little desire or interest in food. The menus she approved were

129
notoriously ghastly meant to model Depression meals that average Americans could recreate in
their own homes. It was a well-known fact that if you went to dine at the White House during the
Roosevelt era, you needed to eat beforehand. The White House cook, Henrietta Nesbitt (one of
Roosevelt’s most trusted companions), was not a professionally trained chef, but a close personal
friend and homemaker who seemed to delight in concocting inedible foods.
249

Why did Roosevelt take such great pains in appearing apathetic to the pleasure of food?
By all accounts, Eleanor Roosevelt was a shrewd political strategist and visionary reformer who
expanded the role of First Lady in a time of uncertainty about America’s role on the global stage.
She was one of the most influential people of her time, conducting her own press conferences in
the White House and distributing her widely read daily column, “My Day,” from 1935 to
1962.
250
FDR was seen as the definitive head of state powers; Roosevelt performed a softer form

249
Shapiro, “The First Kitchen: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Austerity Drive,” The New Yorker, November 22,
2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/the-first-kitchen; Escher, “How Eleanor
Roosevelt and Henrietta Nesbitt Transformed the White House Kitchen: The Kitchen was new, but by all
accounts, it didn’t help the cooking,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 11, 2017.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-eleanor-roosevelt-and-henrietta-nesbitt-transformed-
white-house-kitchen-180965159/
250
It’s important to note that one of Roosevelt’s closest and most influential strategist was her lover and
companion Lorena Hickok. Hick urged Roosevelt to host her own white house press briefings (in contrast
to FDR’s fireside chats) and recommended that demand it be a women-only space, so newspapers were
forced to hire women. Hick also urged Roosevelt to write a daily column of her philanthropic and
political works, often spending many hours personally editing draft of My Day.
Figure 2.3 image of "Before and After Eleanor Roosevelt’s Redesign" White House Kitchen, The Library of Congress.

130
of governance more suitable for women: one that maintained the integrity of the American home
and family through modern ingenuity and forward thinking. This, in turn, reflected on ways in
which the New American woman could find her place in the nation, by arbitrating, managing,
and policing hunger in the body and boundaries of race in the domestic sphere at home and
abroad.
When read in the context of the thousands of personal letters exchanged between
Roosevelt and her network of queer kin and lovers, it becomes apparent that her performance as
domestic scientist was a strategic mapping of gender and self-making.
251
Where Roosevelt’s
public facing image was one of easy control, austerity, and a fervent belief that there was little
use for food beyond sustenance, her personal letters revealed a body full of longing, hunger, and
desires deemed excess by public sensibilities. Writing to one friend about the lush meals she
enjoyed while in France, she describes the food with an almost reckless abandon. In a letter to
her long-time friend and lover, Lorena Hickok, at the height of their romance, she writes: “I’m
getting so hungry to see you.” Envisioning and producing her persona as one of public servant
meant sanitizing and modeling a carceral relationship to hunger and a belief that food need only
be measured in calories to be meaningful to the American people.
Listening to our Hunger
In the wake of the calorie fetishizing of the 20th century, how have we learned to listen or
not listen to our hunger? More importantly, how do we continue to inhabit the racial and
gendered afterlives of the calorie in the intimate domain of the home and family? Raven
Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, powerfully demonstrates the psycho-affective hold of the calorie

251
Streitmatter, Roger. Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena
Hickok. Simon and Schuster, 1999; Harrison, Cynthia, and Blanche Wiesen Cook. “Eleanor Roosevelt.
Volume 1, 1884-1933.” The American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 123.

131
within the intimate spaces of the home.
252
Luster is billed as an “affair” novel where we follow
Edie, our 20-something year old black artist protagonist who is scraping by with a menial job in
the publishing industry when she begins an affair with a middle-aged white man in an open
marriage named Eric. Through the perspective of Edie’s sweaty, fleshy, sarcastic observations,
Leilani wraps the reader in a world of skin that is aching, familiar, and wholly disquieting.
Behind the veneer of sex and (in)fidelity, Luster is, at its most visceral, a novel about
domesticity, flesh, and homosocial racial contact. The main action begins when Edie finds
herself unemployed, homeless, and invited to live in her lover’s home by his wife, Rebecca, until
she can get back on her feet. This uncanny nightmare of a scenario feels realistic in that it could
only unfold in the distressing time of one’s life known as their twenties, is further exacerbated by
the mysterious presence of a young black teen in the home–Akila–who Edie later finds out is
Rebecca and Eric’s adopted daughter.
The latter half of the novel focuses on the intimacies between these three women and
how they mirror, orbit, and intertwine. We learn that Akila is a child of the foster system whose
desire to survive makes her a deeply mature and strategic character–a little black girl never
allowed to actually be a child. Akila’s relationship with Rebecca in particular is deeply fraught,
as it becomes clear that Rebecca’s thin, white body makes it impossible to comprehend the kind
of discomfort Akila feels as a black teen living in a rich white neighborhood. We rarely see the
two share any dialogue in the novel and witness their relationship mediated through subliminal
communications, where each one’s presence hoovers by the fridge or in plastic tupperwares with
food neatly portioned, calories counted.

252
Leilani, Raven. Luster, 2021.

132
In one instance, Edie watches a silent exchange between mother-daughter, “I sit at the
kitchen table and drink coffee from my Captain Planet Mug. Rebecca appears with wet hair. The
tips of her ears are still tinted with dye. She fills a Tupperware container with fruit, puts it into a
paper bag and writes 305 Calories on the front. Akila runs down the stairs, takes the bag, and
rushes out of the door.”
253
Later, “As I am looking through the cookbooks, Akila comes in from
a run. She does not acknowledge me. She takes a soda from the fridge, checks the calories, and
puts it back.”
254
Rebecca tries to perform the role of a good mothering by training Akila to think
in calories at every opportunity. It is a form in which she mediates the dangers of a body she
doesn’t fully understand. Rebecca believes she is just trying to keep her daughter healthy; she’s
trying to give her the skills she needs to access good health and good nutrition; but how Akila
learns to police her body is in relation to being racialized. It is the internalization that some
bodies should, can, and must learn to police themselves for their own good.
–
Months into my starvation diet—into splitting my days between calories— it was the
Fourth of July barbecue when I decided to have one cheat day. I wanted to eat. I wanted to feel
the pleasure of eating with other people who could still enjoy eating. I remember a feeling of
reverence rolling over me as I stared at the perfectly buttered bun that wrapped around the
hamburger patty and the two juicy slices of watermelon sitting pretty on my plate (185 calories,
respectively). The first bite was divinity: taste, texture, the give in chewing, consuming,
becoming. The sweet, cool taste of the watermelon quenched a thirst months-long in the making.
Yet, as my mouth chewed the food, as the food worked its way down my throat and through my

253
Ibid 145
254
Ibid 107

133
body, I could feel the disgust working its way out, rising in bile and shame. I couldn’t hold it
down; I forced myself to vomit.
When did my body learn to react to the feeling of fullness with disgust? The
contradiction of being unable to hold onto the food and the force required to expel it from my
body reveals the multiple directions in which disgust travels and the sensorium trained in tandem
to relations of power. Sara Ahmed writes, “if disgust is about gut feelings, then our relation to
our gut is not direct, but is mediated by ideas that are already implicated in the very impressions
we make of others and the way those impressions surface as bodies.”
255
In the latter half of the
twentieth century as health became an established metric for measuring national prosperity,
health practices and ideas shifted from the Western paternalism of international health
organizations to networks of global health that operate with universal scientific methods across
continents.
256
The idea of reform—drenched in its own enlightenment and colonial origin
stories—continue to haunt and shape international and global health, meanwhile Western
imperialism, for the general polity, is systematically disappeared though still very much
functions with the same extractive, exploitative, and murderous practices. This genealogy of
health traces the permutations of the colonial subject to the biocitizen; we are better able to
understand how health functions as a state imperial project that mutes these power dynamics
through fantasies of universal public good.

255
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2015.
“The Performativity of Disgust,” 83.
256
This shift from international health to global health is indicative of grassroots organizing and more
holistic approaches to public good (i.e. an understanding that good health is also related to access to clean
water, education, housing). Global health still presents many challenges, and an uneven power/Western
paternalism is very much present as organization standard. The scope of this extends beyond the reach of
this paper. For more detailed discussion on this, see: Adams, “Against Global Health?”: Arbitrating
Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense through Health. In Metzl J. & Kirkland A. (Eds.), Against Health:
How Health Became the New Morality, 40-58.
44
Mayer, “The Fat Illusion” in Shadows of on a Tightrope, ed. Lisa S. and Barb W. (Iowa City, 1983), 7.

134
The look of hunger is saturated with cultural meaning. While on a visit to the ONE
Archive in Southern California in the hot summer of 2018, I found myself looking over materials
of the 1970’s radical fat activist group, The Fat Underground, and various fat dyke zines from
the 80s and 90s for a glimpse into how activists and artists in the late twentieth century theorized
and organized around hunger. In one of the manila folders was a crumbled-up slip of paper
ripped out from the midwestern anthology Shadows on A Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat
Oppression. Circled in the most delicate pencil marks were the words of Vivian F. Mayer:
Fundamental means of social control affects every person in a society. One might
argue logically that the persecution of fat women takes away a woman’s right to
be fat. More accurately, since there’s no way to look at a person, and know by her
size whether she eats a little or a lot, the freedom women lose is the freedom to be
comfortable with our appetites.
I think of this now in relation to the history of the calorie, and the private and institutionalized
ways we learn to become uncomfortable with our bellies and desires.
Though the science around the calorie has changed significantly over the course of the
century as dieticians and health practitioners develop new studies and approaches to food and
eating, the vernacular used to sense health in our contemporary moment remains deeply
embedded in its early formation and continues to exact a costly toll on how we punish and
manage our bodies to fit within white supremacist normative ideals of health. The archives and
histories I access here are partial yet particular as they sprawl across decades and place; my
cultural reading practice looks for tendencies that wrap around the body. How can we track the
feelings habituated—made into a collective common sensing— that remain from twentieth
century scientific reform? Health’s rhetorical function serves to scaffold the national body in
technologies that live on our bodies today. These sensorial sentiments—the stuff of touching and
feeling— continue manifesting on our bodies long after science has moved on.

135
Chapter 3

Devouring the Inscrutable: Eating Asians on the Internet and the Politics of Enfleshment

….Once, a man paid
to watch you eat. There are countless ways
to justify company. Hunger, overdue balance,
whatever.
Cartoon savage licking the throne clean.
& isn’t that what you always wanted?
To be filled & emptied? To bite the hand
that feeds you? Even if the hand wants to be bitten?

-Hieu Mihn Nguyen, Pig

As the prevailing trauma of colonial violence remains lodged in the racialized
sensibilities of our postcolonial world, what would it mean to undo the visceral lessons of
colonialism in the habits of mind and emotive reflexes of the postcolonial subject?

-Neetu Khanna, The Visceral
Logics of Decolonization

The Asian-Body Problem
I’m at a premiere showing of Crazy Rich Asians—a romantic comedy that turns an erotic look
towards East Asian bodies, Chinese wealth, and the dreamy cityscapes of Singapore. We’re in a
theater in Los Angeles that typically caters to a middle-class (mostly white) audience, but
tonight’s patrons are noticeably yellower. Even though I know that representation won’t save us,
I can’t help but get caught up in all the excitement for a kind of arrival in American film, in
feeling the presence of Asian Americanness which suggests that the contours of the “forever
foreigner” archetype might start blurring at the edges.
The main action dazzles in that sleek way of romantic comedies, a genre that deals in the
commodity of cuteness. I find the most interesting moments of the film are not the glittering
displays of opulence, Asian modernity, or the romance, but in the minor pauses that haunt us—

136
the brown faces of workers served up as a jump scare or the disembodied hands of migrant
laborers skillfully crafting the elaborate meals and place settings for the elite or the solemn
domestic workers receding into the background of most scenes. This vertical storytelling paints a
vivid picture of Singapore’s history of racial and class stratification.
In a scene announcing Singapore’s distinct imperial alimentary tract, the characters—
seated in a gilded dining room (said to be partly inspired by Donald Trump’s bathroom)—feast
from a table filled with transnational foodstuff: fried chicken wings and nuggets, dumplings,
hokkien fried noodles, murtabat, curries, piles of crab legs—simple foods, says the host aunty
while a woman in a black-and-white maid’s uniform stands watch over the lunch party. The
audience is drawn to the scene of the table as the family gathers for a lunch filled with the gaudy
and slapstick subversions of Asian tropes in American cinema by pulling from the familiar
feelings of Asian diasporic place-making experienced through a family meal. Goh Wye Mun,
played by Ken Jeong, gleefully enters the frame with awkward bows and sporting a heavy mock-
Figure 3.2 Still from "Crazy Rich Asians" 32:05

137
accent (reminiscent of Long Duk Dong in Pretty in Pink) before breaking into his American
accent: “I’m just messing with you. I studied in the States too: Cal State Fullerton.”
257

During the meal we bear witness to the unfolding vision of a distinctly cosmopolitan
subjecthood
258
—a body slipping between shifting territories and an acculturation of capital in
the right direction. Goh Wye Mun proceeds to act as host throughout the meal in a scene that can
feel familiar to many Asian/diasporic subjects who have been encouraged to “better eat it all
because I’m watching you,” while being subject to invasive comments about body size and
career choices.
259
The following exchange between Goh Wye Mun and his young daughters puts
into sharp relief the distance between Asian capital and flesh—the central tension in this
chapter—when his children ask if they can leave the table to go play:
You haven’t finished your nuggets yet sweetie, okay, there’s a lot of children starving in
America, right, I mean, take a look at her [her points to the lead, Rachel, played by
Constance Wu] she’s American, really skinny, you want to look like that?

The little girls shake their heads and say, “No.”

Then EAT your nuggets!
260

The theater erupts in belly-laughter. I feel laughter shaking my own soft rolls of fat that
wiggle against the armrests of my seat, but it soon catches in my throat. Stuck. Hanging. Why
did we laugh and why did I stop? Emily Yoshida writes about this scene in Vulture, arguing that

257
Jon M. Chu, Crazy Rich Asians (August 15, 2018, USA), DVD.
258
Here, I am sitting with Inderpal Grewal’s definition of the cosmopolitan subject in Transnational
America. Her important text charts how information technology operate across multiple centers–what she
calls “connectivities'' in order to understand how the transnational, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan subject
each engages with an uneven distribution of privilege and power as represented by both the geopolitical
interests of the nation state and the individual biopolitical aspirations of the liberal human (18-22). The
cosmopolitan subject, then, is one that toggles between shifting territories and borders and acculturation
through the production and consumption of global goods and services. This scene from Crazy Rich Asians
exemplifies these types of knowledge and fleshy exchanges between Asiatic bodies and the economic and
cultural capital they accrue.
259
Chu, Crazy Rich Asians, 32:15
260
Ibid, 32:27

138
“It’s the kind of caustic, potentially subversive punch line that Crazy Rich Asians at its best
should thrive on—one that immediately recontextualizes every white mom’s use of that line
about starving children in third-world countries as the kind of malevolent obliviousness it always
has been.”
261
There is a pleasure in the inversion and subversion of the classic image of Western
opulence and Asian scarcity that precipitates, on the one hand, the arrival of a “new” global class
order, and on the other, signals Singapore’s far older class/race/colonial arrangements.
262
I pause
on malevolent obliviousness–that evil-doing can be oblivious or unintentional, and think about
what is left unsaid in the space of such a statement is how the images come to circulate, weigh,
and stick to the Asian body. Who is this figure of the “starving/skinny Asian” and why does she
linger?
“When is it okay to laugh at something? How is enjoyment implicated in the
reproduction of power relations?”
263
Dorinne Kondo poses these knotted questions as she writes
about the space of theater, performance, and critique to think through the negotiations between
audience, performer, and critic as revealing the multiple scales in how productive power operates
across performance spaces. Kondo’s case study of the theater and the dramaturg unravels the
threads of power between making, looking, and re-making, wherein the somatic and the
discursive linger in the visceral responses of the acculturated body to intimacies of race, class,
gender, sexaulity, etc. In other words, the negotiations of power and looking results in what

261
Yoshida, “Crazy Rich Asians Is a Shiny, Affluence-Porn Rom-com with a Big Immigrant Heart,”
Vulture, August 8, 2018, https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/crazy-rich-asians-review.html
262
As Eric Hayot argues in The Hypothetical Mandarin, China, historically functioned in European
modernity as ecliptic, “as a horizon of horizons” meaning that for much of its relationship with Europe in
the 17th and 18th century, China was seen as a comparable civilization that presented a competing
economic and social system that felt both a challenge and unknowable threat. See intro, page 10. This is,
in part, what makes a postcolonial study of China difficult, in that its people and culture were never
formally colonized and exemplified the specificity of European self-making against the Other.
263
Dorinne K. Kondo. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2018), 11.

139
Kondo names as affective violence or reparative mirroring. Where affective violence is
experienced as its own kind of stiffening–the stark awareness for the shape of one’s otherness
pressing against (racial/colonial) gestures, laughter, confusion–the reparative mirroring offers
minoritarian subjects the sensation of invigoration that comes from being seen/perceived in
fullness, with tenderness.
264
This insightful analytic offers an entry into conversations about
representation and audience response to cultural production outside the parameters of
“authenticity” discourse, wherein minoritarian work must either align with “authentic” portrayals
and neat political arrangements or are seen as racist/sexist/classist misrepresentations. Rather,
affective violence and reparative violence welcome us to think about the multitude of affects that
circulate in a performance and how critical/creative work-in-process forces a pause, examination,
and re-placing of feeling and flesh.
When is it okay to laugh, then, is not a question about a political correctness that models
itself after “good” or liberal civility, but gestures to the vitality of what the body knows (or
doesn’t) and how we might better learn to read those moments of intuition critically. In my
experience of the knotted affects of Crazy Rich Asian’s “caustic subversion” that I describe
above, sitting with the stuck, stalled, throated laughter from my own body enables me to more
closely examine the spectral figures that render the joke about starving Americans legible. The
surrealist joke flips the discourse of a psychic-racial injury caused by imagining Asian hunger
and images of the starved Asian body–wherein Asia is seen as the “principal site of famine for
centuries,”
265
while also leaning into incredulity over the possibility of starvation in America.
The joke finds its sense through incongruity: the idea that Asian-fat not only exists, but is

264
Ibid 11.
265
Scrimshaw, Nevin S. “The Phenomenon of Famine.” Annual Review of Nutrition 7, no.1 (July 1987),
3.

140
desirable. The figure of the starving Asian, global capital, and Asian inscrutability map out what
is (im)possible about the story of Asian flesh and fat. I am made to pause on the realness of my
own fat Asian diasporic body, on where my flesh can travel and what racial and cultural markers
can be read onto my incongruous surfaces.
Others have noted how Asian American studies does not offer a theory of flesh or the
body, often prioritizing coherence of a national body and political body over a corporeal one,
foregrounding analysis of abstract forms of labor and capital.
266
Rachel Lee, for example,
describes this phenomenon as an “anxiousness [over] biologization,” a fear that a turn to the
corporeal would reinscribe white supremacist racial science onto heterogenous Asiatic bodies in
service of concretizing a political identity.
267
Chris T. Fan considers how Asian American studies
is unable to pinpoint its racial grievance outside of the post-1965 immigrant exclusions that
produces the model minority figure as the cleaved/discursive/and political body of the field.
268

Or, as Vivian Huang writes: “This structural scaffolding of Asian American subject formation,
then, is difficult, largely because there is no obvious recognition or expression for the emotional
labor of feeling Asian American in the United States. The contradictory balance of Asian
American feeling, of racial mourning and melancholia, is difficulty registered by a public gaze,
all the more so because model minoritarian scripts persist.”
269
The emotional labor of feeling
Asian American is partly a desire for and the work of making legible an injury that can easily
map onto racial-minoritarian frameworks of grievance/repair from what is actually a nebulous

266
Asian Am Studies does not offer a theory of the flesh in the same way that Black Studies does–and this
does something particularly interesting for fields like Disability and Fat studies that take for granted
Asian Am/diaspora work when thinking about the fat/disabled/sick body.
267
Lee, Exquisite Corpse, 8.
268
Fan, Chris T. “Asian/American (Anti)-Bodies.” Post45, https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-
essays/asianamerican-anti-bodies/.
269
Huang, “Some Island Unknown to the Rest of the World,” PhD diss. (Yale University, 2016), 15.

141
assemblage of loss that stem from a multitude of geopolitical and historical locations.
270
The
labor of feeling Asian American is to make a thousand aches–phantom, ghostly, touching– into a
recognizable shape.
In this chapter, I look at how the figure of the “starving/hungry Asian” came to
proliferate global cultural imaginations and how Asian/American and diasporic relationships to
food, eating, fatness, and intimacy have developed in tandem and response to those images.
“Devouring the Inscrutable” argues that the specificity of Asian diasporic
271
biopolitical
methodologies allows us to account for competing and emergent national interests alongside
military circuits of food and fitness, and its influence on consumption practices of the “good”
citizen-body. Though this chapter primarily traces an Asian American studies genealogy and
reads mostly self-identified Asian American cultural workers, I use a diasporic and decolonial
framework to understand deterritorialized biopower as well as complex attachments to
competing national-bodies. The performances of food and eating in Asian/American and
diasporic cultural production that I explore throughout this chapter engages with a wide range of
ways in which creators and creatives play with the Asiatic body and the slippages between
devouring/being devoured.

270
Fan and others describe this as a response to transnational and postcolonial scholarship that urged for
the dislocation of “America” as the only site of analysis, and to instead look to flows of labor, capital, and
empire through non-nation-based power relations. For more on this, see: SuzukiI, Erin. Postcolonialism
and Asian American Studies. In: The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies. Routledge, 2016.
p. 66-78; Lye, Colleen. “Introduction: The Minority Which Is Not One.” In America’s Asia, 1–11. Racial
Form and American Literature, 1893-1945. Princeton University Press, 2005; Wei, William.
“Introduction.” In The Asian American Movement, 1–10. Temple University Press, 1993.
271
I move between Asian/American/diasporic throughout this chapter to signal different orientations to
place, nation, and cultural/political affiliation. When I write about “Asian American” I am often referring
to a specific field formation as it centers Asians born/in proximity to America. I use diaspora to describe
the competing feelings and lived experiences of Asians via and in migration to emphasize how the haptic
plays a role in the curation of Asianess–as cultural sense and political orientation at various junctures.

142
For all its trappings and ghostly hauntings, the model minority figure is also a body.
While often interrogated through the power of discursive meaning-making and the
representational power of upward mobility that signals the liberal-promise of the United States
fulfilled, Asian American studies has been hesitant to think through the muscles, sinew, fat, and
bone of the model minority. James Kyung Jin-Lee makes clear why illness, disability, aging, and
otherwise non-normative bodies of any kind are an ontological impossibility for the model
minority, writing:
It is the model minority that insists that Asian America’s children enjoy the bodies that
make their upward mobility not only possible but necessary in an economic system built
on ableism and health as its paragon. And this possessive investment in normatively
desirable bodies means not simply the maintenance of the presumably healthy body
you’re born with, but also its constant cultivation, a neurotic care of the self that can
optimize one’s economic potential, one’s human valuation. What is really at stake is the
extent to which the ideology of able-bodiedness typifies the allegiance to racial and
gender ideologies of an ideal Asian American body, dancing–for many happily, for others
miserably–in the larger constellation of the reproduction, medicalization, and
industrialization of the healthy and nondisabled model minority.
272

The model minority, as a conglomerate of economic potential and labor value, must possessively
invest in ableism to protect its function in white settler society. Yet, it is not merely the model
minority that insists on perfunctory health, normative embodiment, and an aesthetics of wellness.
An Asian Americanist political identity (bridged and birthed from a particular 1970s East Asian
masculinist enterprise)
273
framed through the “resistance” body/figure is also invested in displays
of physical strength, toughness, and expert control. In particular, Asian American masculinity

272
Jin Lee, Pedagogies of Woundedness, 10-11.
273
As Erin Suzuki explains: “This mode of Asian American cultural nationalism–exemplified by the
manifesto set forth by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, and Lawrence Fusao Inada in the editor’s
introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers–argued for the creation of specifically
Asian American canon that sought to revive the historical, material, and cultural contributions of Asians
in America and strenuously resisted the persistent stereotyping of Asian Americans as feminized, Oriental
and Other.” Suzuki, “Postcolonialism and Asian American Studies,” 53.

143
seeking to combat orientalist tropes of effeminacy and Otherness, articulates its own
hypermasculinity, sometimes with deadly consequence.
274

Takao Rivera mediates on the 2013 killing of Chun Hsien Michael Deng–an 18-year-old
college freshman rushing Pi Delta Psi, the Asian American fraternity founded in the “post-
Vincent Chin Asian American consciousness of the 1980s.”
275
Deng died after being tackled to
the ground at full speed during the “glass ceiling ritual.” The ritual requires pledges to endure
and overcome re-enactments of the traumatic legacies of racial violence and historical injustice
(such as the murder of Vincent Chin and the destruction of Korean shops during the LA riots) as
a way to materialize Asian American subjectivity. Blindfolded and told to run to the brother on
the other end of the room, pledges encountered older members who inflicted racial slurs and
physical assault on the initiates so that they would learn to endure acts of violence against Asian
Americans. In Rivera’s evocative analysis, he writes that Deng “was not killed for being Asian
American; rather, he became Asian American through being killed.”
276
Deng’s body can only
become Asian American through shared racial grievance, through a toxic Asian American
masculinity that both rejects and mirrors white supremacist violence. In this hazing ritual, the
specter of the model minority is beaten and punched and pushed to reanimate the racialized
body; you emerge as a body fit for survival or you don’t at all. Rivera graphically illustrates how
a politicized Asian American subjectivity–in effect made through resistance narratives–requires

274
Here, I am talking about the growing number of Asian American and Diaspora men who participate in
MRA spaces, either online or IRL. See: Liu, Angela. “MRAsians: A Convergence between Asian
American Hypermasculine Ethnonationalism and the Manosphere.” Journal of Asian American Studies
24, no. 1 (2021): 93–112.
275
Rivera, Takeo. Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American
Masculinity. 1st ed. (Oxford University Press, 2022), 1.
276
Ibid.

144
curation, labor, and perhaps even (self-inflicted) harm to make and remake the Asian American
male body.
In thinking about the messy affects of walking through the world as a body unmoored,
this chapter links the emotive with the fleshy. Asian American food studies have, perhaps, come
closest to theorizing the Asiatic flesh. As Mark Padoongpatt writes, “foodways provides a unique
framework…that demonstrates how social hierarchies of power have been inscribed on bodies by
categories created and maintained by other human senses besides sight, namely, taste and
smell.”
277
I argue that, for Asian/American and diasporic subjects, food and eating are a mode in
which bodies that are otherwise inscribed as mechanical, surplus, or inscrutable are able to find
expressive modes for feelings of love, regret, forgiveness, and sympathy.
278
Food acts as an
affective object that transcends the limits of untethered Asian emotions, which are seen as stilted,
stunted, and inexpressible through “traditional” means. As these affectively imbued biological
processes (of feeding, eating, digesting) come to mediate complex, intergenerational feelings,
food and the Asiatic body have also been mobilized in the imperial American repertoire as a site
of incongruity and terror. Thinking through the scalar and lingering affects of the stomach, this
chapter asks: how does Asiatic flesh travel and adhere through points of contact with its own
biological processes–of weight-gain and loss, hunger and fullness, illness and aging?
The first section traces how Asian American and diaspora studies has grappled with the
body-problem; or rather, the crisis of Asian inscrutability. Inscrutability, I argue, becomes a
prevailing racial category for Asianness as the body is deemphasized for more abstract concepts
of capital, labor, and objecthood. While one could argue that we are currently living in what can

277
Padoongpatt, Mark. 9.“Oriental Cookery”. In: Eating Asian America. (New York University Press,
2013): 186-207.
278
I will return to this point in more detail in the following paragraphs.

145
be described as a golden era of Asian/America and diasporic media representation, the
“inscrutable” still offers a useful category to think about the tropes of Asianness distilled through
European orientalism. Moreover, this section considers if there are ways to think about
inscrutability beyond the negative discursive form of lack, wherein the other is simultaneously
exoticized and de-humanized. In thinking about Asian American feminist relationality and
performance, for example, Vivian L. Huang uses the analytic of inscrutability “as inherited from
historical tropes of Asian and woman as the unknowable other…[that] does not foreclose
intimacy but rather gestures to the racialized and gendered systems of knowledge used to cognize
sociality as such.”
279
To think of the formation of the inscrutable as a productive force that
toggles between the negative space of passivity in the performance pieces she analyzes, Huang,
like Kondo, sits in the entanglements of exchange, looking, crafting, and stillness. It is with these
particular insights about power differentials in which I move towards my objects.
Section two thinks through what I am calling the orientalizing of famine. Working
through 20th century archives on hunger and famine alongside Edward Said’s theory of
Orientalism, this section analyzes how the aesthetics of hunger and starvation during the Bengal
famine of 1945 and the height of the U.S. food aid distribution to re-feeding starved European
populations after World War II draw a distinct line between where hunger belongs and where it
doesn’t. In reading the development of colonial India’s famine codes and the failure of colonial
governance during the Bengal famine, I look to see how scientific, public health, and
international policy render some spaces and bodies more susceptible to starvation and hunger–
where Asian starvation is naturalized. I ask: how and when does the figure of the “starving

279
Huang, Vivian L. “Inscrutably, Actually: Hospitality, Parasitism, and the Silent Work of Yoko Ono and
Laurel Nakadate.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 3 (September 2, 2018),
197.

146
Asian” populate food and nutrition archives of the 20th century to reveal the politically expedient
narrative of Western global supremacy that mark the limits of modernity and the savage brown
bodies out of place and time?
280

Finally, the last section turns to the proliferation of contemporary cultural images of
Asians eating on the internet. What can these cultural works tell us about the Asiatic body and its
relationship to food and hunger? Where is the division between devouring and being devoured?
How do these performances offer different ways of imagining a theory of Asiatic enfleshment–
through the emotive, sensorial, and visceral? I examine how food and eating mediates feeling for
intergenerational and transnational Asian/diasporic bodies across three sites: the trope of sliced
fruit in Asian diaspora food memoir, the unchanging bodies of Asian femmes in Korean
mukbang videos where thin Asian women eat and eat and eat but never get fatter, and in the fat,
queer, Southeast Asian diasporic poetics of feederism found in the works of poets and artists
such as Hieu Mihn Nguyen and Mark Aghuar, amongst others.
In my previous chapters, I explored the relationship of powdered/skim milk to the global
South and to the bodies of the Asian diaspora; I investigated the history of the calorie as a way to
measure and contain appetites and how it has shaped hegemonic ideas of health, disease, fat, and
the body/body-politic as it relates to the nation state. It is with these contentions in mind that I
return, once again, to the 2017 study published in the Association for Psychological Science
Journal titled “Unexpected Gains: Being Overweight Buttresses Prejudice Against Foreigners,”
the New York Times’s summary of the findings suggests the following: “The research raises

280
I say politically expedient, because even as diplomatic persons requested food aid for the increasingly
dire circumstances in the Indian subcontinent, aid was denied by Roosevelt who did not wish to threaten
relations with Churchill–a man who allegedly said that India’s famine was because they were “breeding
like rabbits” and the “let them starve,” see: Limey, “Churchill’s Legacy Leaves Indians Rethinking Hero
Status,” BBC News, July 21, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53405121

147
questions about how cultural stereotypes affect perceptions of identity…. Emotionally expressive
Asian-Americans, for example, may be perceived as more “American” because Asians are
typically viewed as being more reserved, they write.”
281
Fatness and emotiveness are rendered as
outside the Asiatic figure, something that transforms the body’s allegiance, being, and place of
belonging. Devouring the Inscrutable seeks to understand the underlying logics of precisely
these transformations.
Inscrutable Asians
The 2011 web-based comic “The Average Asian Aging Process”
282
features six panels
depicting the life phases of an average Asian woman. Slender neck, long shiny black hair, a
cinched waist and a passively smiling face—the “Age 18” and “Age 20-30” frames are the exact
same image save for the color of the woman’s shirt. The third panel features little children and an
updo, but the body and placid face remain the same. In its gentle humor and banal appearance,
the comic depicts a particular fantasy of Asian femme entropy: that the Asian woman inhabits a
body stagnant from change during young adulthood to middle-age, only showing signs of aging

281
Chokshi, “Overweight Asians Seen as More American,” New York Times, August 3, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/science/overweight-skinny-asians-americans.html
282
April 2011 https://imgur.com/gallery/OcRKK; this 2011 meme is easily searchable, and has been
circulated widely, even so far inspiring think pieces about how perceptions of Asian women’s beauty,
age, and desirability. See: Shirley Lee, “Asian, Don’t Raisin,” Liminal (literary magazine), January 28,
2021. https://www.liminalmag.com/time/asian-dont-raisin.
Figure 3.2 “The Average Asian Aging Process https://imgur.com/gallery/OcRKK

148
after a post-menopausal explosion into Asian aunty-hood. This particular fantasy is reminiscent
of the colonial-romance cookbook descriptions that Padoongpatt uncovers in Jennifer Brennan’s
The Original Thai Cookbook, in which she invites her readers to a scene of being whisked to a
dreamy dinner in a picturesque Thai home where one is “greeted by an exquisite, delicate boned
Thai woman, youthful but of indeterminate age.”
283

The menopausal explosion appears in its own frame, obscuring the body. Afterwards, we
are privy to the Asian aunty who sits boldly in the frame with her sunglass-covered eyes staring
back at the viewer, wearing an expression that can only be described as haughty. We see the
details of her face more closely than in the other panels—cropped permed hair with no shine,
rounded and sagging cheeks, a large nose and arched eyebrows. There’s a distinct expressiveness
to her even in such a minimal comic design. The Asian aunty is less manicured (but more
stylized), and rounder (but more present) than the younger versions of herself. The last frame
features a shrunken, chubby granny, barely tall enough to fit in the frame, staring up with an
amused look on her face—relaxed, infantile, and joyful.
I chuckled when the comic came across my social media feed many years ago. I
remember sending the meme to family and friends, who often complained about their colleagues
and co-workers mistaking them for interns or students despite their actual positions in the office
or university: you just look so young. We felt amused that someone so perfectly captured an in-
joke about the myth of Asian femme youthfulness that was often subtly used to undercut our
expertise. The Asian femme body remains frozen, an unchanging beauty that would remain until
the fatal moment of transformation into the Asian Aunty—she who is at once adored, feared, and
often the site of utter embarrassment.

283
Quote replicated from Padoongpatt, “Oriental Crookery,” 193.

149
The myth of Asian femme entropy that toes the line between joke/life tells us something
about the common sensing of the Asian femme body as biologically othered; alien and peculiar,
encrusted in a life of inscrutability.
284
The comic situates how low affects can describe a
grammar of Asian-ness, femininity, and the body through what Sianne Ngai names as the
mereness of an aesthetic object that “accompanies the perception of the minor differences against
a backdrop of the generic.”
285
In turning to the “undeniably trivial,” in a comic that exhibits the
minor categories of the interesting, cute, and zany all at once, this meme cuts to the core of a
common-sensing about the Asian femme body, offering a look at how the crisis of Asian
inscrutability is theorized in our everyday internet archives. It tells us the story about how
Asian/diasporic women’s bodies are perceived and under which conditions they grow, change,
thrive, and diminish in value and inches.
Understanding Asian inscrutability requires, in part, understanding when and where
Asian American studies, as a field, orients itself. The crisis of Asian inscrutability can be
described through two primary phenomena: the first being how the field has made sense of the
uneven experience of racial grievance that produces a dense set of affects around feeling Asian
American. As I will examine in the following paragraphs, scholars have analyzed how the
heterogenous proximities to injury and grievance or even a sense of political consciousness
around Asian-Americaness is not only difficult to internalize by Asian diasporic subjects, but
even more complicated to articulate externally, where Asian racialization often is invisible,
indeterminate, and considered unrelated to larger issues of race in United States. The second

284
Here, using common sense in the ways that Stewart Hall and Kara Keeling do—as a powerful site to
examine scales of power and negotiate politics/the political.
285
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. (Cambridge, Massachusetts London,
England: Harvard University Press, 2015), 4.

150
phenomenon is the field’s reckoning with transnational and postcolonial critiques that emphasize
global currents of power and colonial hauntologies to decenter nation-based discourses.
A subject in flux
In what is described as its radical first wave, Asian American studies is characterized as a
social and intellectual movement that sought to articulate “a domestic cultural nationalism”
which focused on reclaiming a hyphenated-American identity and carving out a space for the
history of Asian Americans as foundational to the American-citizen project.
286
William Wei’s
1993 The Asian American Movement described the unifying principles of “Asian America” as, in
part, a socioeconomic one where it operated as “essentially a middle-class reform movement for
racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment in a culturally pluralist America.”
287

Scholars have tracked the dehumanization of Asian subjects through first, the 19th century
yellow peril discourse, where Asian immigrant labor was both a necessity and threat to American
liberalism.
288
Techno-orientalist scholarship has traced the connectivities between Asian
dehumanization as it has been mediated through labor and technology, tracing a history that
begins with Chinese railroad workers, to Filipino factory workers, to the death of Vincent Chin
and the rise of Japanese auto industry.
289
The transition from yellow peril to model minority–
from perceived threat to productive citizen–maps the multiple ways in which the Asiatic body is

286
Suzuki, “Postcolonialism and Asian American Studies,” 53.
287
Wei, The Asian American Movement, 1.
288
Shim, Doobo. “From Yellow Peril through Model Minority to Renewed Yellow Peril.” Journal of
Communication Inquiry 22, no. 4 (October 1, 1998): 385–409; Wu, William F. The Yellow Peril: Chinese
Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1982.
289
Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in
Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Asian American Studies Today. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2015; Saito, Natsu Taylor. “Model Minority, Yellow Peril: Functions of
Foreignness in the Construction of Asian American Legal Identity Symposium in Honor of Neil
Gotanda.” Asian Law Journal 4 (1997): 71–96.

151
routed through histories of American empire: as vectors of disease,
290
sweatshop workers and
unskilled mass labor,
291
technologists,
292
and upwardly mobile racial subjects that consolidate the
bootstrap fantasies of American liberalism.
293

Each of these mappings of Asian racialization and dehumanization operate under the
umbrella term of Asian American; the complex origins, competing histories of violence, and
uneven relationship to centers of power for heterogenous communities were subsumed under an
American national term. Yen Lee Espiritu’s fundamental text, Asian American Panethnicity,
explores how Asian inter-/intra-ethinic and political affiliations submerged difference in service
of a common legible identity that could seek recognition and redress from the state, often to the
detriment of the most marginalized and excluded.
294
Critiques of earlier Asian American Studies
question their overemphasis on nationalist, masculinist, and middle-class investments, and thus
paved the way for the discursive turn that has characterized much of the field since.
One example of the productive turn for Asian inscrutability are how literary and cultural
studies scholars have theorized Asian American subjectivity as constantly in flux and thereby
problematizing the biologization of race inherited through colonial race science.
295
What does it

290
Ngai, Mae M. “The Legacy of Vincent Chin: A Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration.” Amerasia
Journal 28, no. 3 (January 2002): 1–6; Wu, Frank H. “Embracing Mistaken Identity: How the Vincent
Chin Case Unified Asian Americans.” Asian American Policy Review 19 (2010 2009): 17–22; Kurashige,
Scott. “Detroit and the Legacy of Vincent Chin.” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 3 (January 2002): 51–55.
291
Shah, Contagious Divides; Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the
Government of Species. Duke University Press, 2016.
292
Chun, Jennifer Jihye. “Building Political Agency and Movement Leadership: The Grassroots
Organizing Model of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.” Citizenship Studies 20, no. 3–4 (May 18,
2016): 379–95; Siddiqi, Dina M. “Do Bangladeshi Factory Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood in the Post-
Sweatshop Era.” Feminist Review 91, no. 1 (February 2009): 154–74.
293
Lowe, Immigrant Acts.
294
Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Asian American
History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1992.
295
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Perverse
Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Brah, A. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting
Identities, 2005.

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mean to locate a political identity based on the fantasy of European colonialism?
296
Lisa Lowe’s
famous work on heterogeneity, marks the limits of cohesion and emphasizes place, context, and
contact in the making of Asian American subjectivity. Arguing that Asian American studies is
pulled between “the desire for an identity represented by a fixed profile of ethnic traits,” but is in
fact challenged by “notions of identity and singularity which celebrate ethnicity as a fluctuating
composition of differences, intersections, and incommensurabilities.”
297
For Lowe and others,
feeling Asian American is an unstable category that is (un)made, re-made, and mitigated through
touch and timing. Candace Chuh recognizes the modes in which the field is a “subjectless
discourse” --that is both a challenge to identify in larger U.S. racial discourse and a productive
promise for how and where we can identify Asian Americanness even without a body proper.
This focus on heterogeneity--on locating Asianness as aesthetic, representational, and where it is
not visible but still there--contributes to inscrutability being a primary mode in which Asian
American studies talks about racial formation, “to the presence of something not shown.”
298
As
Chad Shomara posits, these shifts in the field to detach Asian Americanness from identity,
moves the primacy of subjects to one of objects where, “the unsettling promise of racial form lies
in finally untethering Asian American Studies from identity. How else might Asian American
studies be oriented if not toward the subject?”
299
In other words, could Asian American studies
locate Asian Americanness not through the recuperation of the individual liberal subject, or the
figure of resistance, or the subject with reconfigured agency, but could instead think through the

296
Will return to this in my section on Said’s Orientalism
297
Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity:
Marking Asian American Differences.” Diaspora (New York, N.Y.) 1, no. 1 (1991), 27.
298
Lye, Racial Form, “Introduction,” 7.
299
Shomura, Chad. “Object Theory and Asian American Literature.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Literature, by Chad Shomura. Oxford University Press, 2020.

153
space of object-body-feeling relationalities that complicate global flows of capital and narratives
of linear progress?
Another important turn for the field of Asian American studies was its reckoning with
transnationalism and postcolonial theory. As transnational and postcolonial scholars urged Asian
Americanists to think beyond national borders and consider how “it is no longer clear–if it ever
was–that the subject [“American”] is a discretely bounded, discretely knowable entity merely
modified by a specific adjective [“Asian”].”
300
The diasporic and postcolonial subject emerged
in the 1990s as a means to explore “global orientations, activities, and relationships” that
“decenter the United States as the privileged frame of analysis and revises the one-directional,
teleological immigration narrative of ‘Asian America.’” This disrupts the model-minority
success story perpetuated by an Asian American subject who achieves their full economic
potential, thereby legitimizing the myth of U.S. meritocracy.
301
The framework of diaspora and
postcolonialism–and, to a large extent, Third World feminisms– stressed the importance of
specificity and place to push against orientalist notions of a homogenous Far East/Orient and
required special attention to difference. Moreover, by thinking of the U.S. as one of many global
itineraries, it allowed for the rise in necessary scholarship on settler colonialism and the
transpacific.
Grappling with transnational and postcolonial critique also emphasized a Marxist analysis
of labor and capital. Lye notes the following:
Under the influence of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s critique of the
concept of totality and an Americanized British cultural study, the prevailing
tendency was to conceive of racial formation as a supplement to class analysis

300
Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, “Introduction,” 3.
301
Ponce, “Diaspora As Frame and Object of Analysis in Asian American Studies,”Cheng, Cindy I.-Fen,
ed. The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies. (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2017), 66.

154
and to make the need to account for race a prime motivation for inaugurating a
post-Marxism. Ironically, despite Asian American studies’ preoccupation with the
category of race, its analytic emergency as a means of explaining–or explaining
away–historical causation has in some ways exacerbated its dematerialization and
mystification.
302

Additionally, in Gayatri Spivak’s quintessential essay on subalternity, she argues that race, as a
mode of analysis of domination and stratification of difference, once moved out of the West and
applied as a blanket analysis across postcolonial and third world contexts loses persuasive
significance.
303
Spivak argues that race–as it is understood through skin color and biology
cannot be applied to experiences and places that may view the meaning of skin color in different
ways, therefore silencing expressions of subaltern self-understandings and priorities for the
primacy of race in social analysis.
304

While this push for specificity and locational histories has been an important addendum
in thinking about global flows of power, my previous chapters have shown how pulling at the
connective tissues between competing nationalisms is especially necessary in a time of neo-
fascism. For example, in thinking about the symbolic pull of milk, purity, and health to
nationalist iconography and imagery in both the U.S. and Indian context–there are certain ways
in which rhetorical gestures breathe into each other and if we fail to reckon with them
simultaneously, we miss the ways sentiments and sensations recur across borders to reflect
renewed colonial affects. Moreover, a framework of decoloniality stresses the significance of
racialization to the colonial/modernity project. Anibal Quijano argues that “the coloniality of
power, established upon the production of the idea of ‘race’ has to be admitted as a basic factor

302
Lye, Racial Form, 6.
303
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” 281
304
Ibid, 294.

155
in the problem or nation-states or nationality.”
305
All forms of labor, production and exploitation
were organized under “the axis of capital and the world market,”
306
meaning, a capitalist
economy and world system came into place; and biology and culture (now known as race and
ethnicity) were codified into racial categories through European medical science, marriage laws,
property rights, and other colonial ways of ordering social relations.
I would argue that the postcolonial and transnational turns in the field of Asian American
studies have emphasized understanding Asian Americanness and diaspora through abstract
concepts of labor and capital–from Iyko Day’s Alien Capital to Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures.
The combination of these two pivotal moments–the complication of a fixed and cohesive subject
and the turn to deterritorialization–have paved the way for the affective and new materialist,
micro-scalar turn. Recent scholarship seeking to bridge the gap between affect and material
worlds are from scholars such as Rachel Lee, Mel Chen, Sianna Ngai, and notably, Anne
Cheng’s Ornamentalisms, in which she asks, “Is there room in the dehumanizing history of race
to talk about a figure whose survival is secured through crushing objecthood?”
307
These new
works focus on displacing subjectivity as a way to push against white supremacist and colonial
notions of personhood via the untetheredness of Asian diasporic feeling and touch.
In offering a theory of the yellow woman, Anne Cheng turns to “attachments that are
metonymic” and therefore “superficial” and “migratory” to talk about the “synthetic inventions
and designs” that make up the Asiatic figure.
308
Cheng argues that the figure of the yellow
woman or Asiatic body does not adhere to the properties of enfleshment through the same
commodity flows and circuits as has been theorized by Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers.

305
Quijano, "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America."229
306
Ibid. 216
307
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism, 2021, 1.
308
Ibid, 19

156
In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers offers critical
interventions into gender and racial formation in the Americas by thinking through flesh, black
kinship, histories of containment, and dispossession. She argues that the Middle Passage and
enslavement represent “zero degree of social conceptualization” in which the symbolic integrity
of “male” and “female” as two subject-positions lose validity and differentiation within a regime
of captivity and dispossession, only to be rearticulated as dichotomous positionalities through
white supremacist patriarchy.
309
Spillers’s theorization of flesh and episteme pushes scholars of
embodiment to contend with the history of the slave trade and chattel slavery as not only brutal,
dehumanizing acts, but as the foundational blocks for systems of recognition and meaning that
allow Americans to make sense of the world. What cements this system of recognition is the
flesh of the African who is caught—suspended in liminal, in-between space. Flesh is rendered, at
once, no longer African and yet out of reach from the normative, white Americanness through
transit across the Middle Passage.
Though Cheng recognizes how her work is deeply indebted to Spillers’s, she also notes the
necessity for a different genealogy for Asiatic embodiment as the limitations of subscribing
theories of Asiatic femmehood routed through the same racial and commodity proximities of
black enfleshment does not fully capture Asian femme life possibility. For example, in
examining the iconic image of Afong Moy–The Chinese Lady–perched in her oriental Saloon,
acts as a salient example of ornamentalism. Juxtaposing the popular images circulated of Sartijee
Bartman that display her body in prominent and central ways–with a particular emphasis on her
voluptuous buttock and the shape of her vulva–Cheng reads how Afong Moy’s body recedes into

309
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2
(1987): 65–81.

157
the background of the saloon that features lush textiles and curtains, intricate porcelains, ornate
flower arrangements and silken fabrics that encase her body. The Chinese Lady is made into a
feast for the eyes through her object-personhood, through the sensation of a life in texture. Cheng
uses the image to illustrate how a theory of the yellow woman necessitates a different point of
departure than the language we currently use in feminist theory and critical race theory to talk
about the body, and points to the synthetic, stylistic, and inorganic as a particular assemblage of
non-personhood that orders the grammar of the Asiatic figure.
Moy has been a rather popular object of analysis for scholars of Early America and
Asian American studies, due in large part to the relatively large newspaper archive left in the
wake of her exhibition days from 1834-1850. There is no shortage of ways in which Moy has
been analyzed–through the lens of Marxist, psychoanalytic, orientalist fetishism.
310
Examining
the image, what I am most struck by is the pronouncement of a rounded face, the promise of
something soft underneath a body swallowed whole by silk fabrics. The rendering itself nods to
Carolus Linnaeus’s racial taxonomical classification of the asiaticus fuscus (asian tawny) who is
“sallow and melancholic” and “protected by loose garments.”
311
There is a melancholic feeling
to the image as Moy’s body is staged as though she is coiled tightly into herself, folded hands,
tucked in tiny feet.
The two images together–of Moy and Baartman, present a neat concentric circle around
the burgeoning eugenics of the time. The same classification system denoted a particular scale of
attributes and affects that directly correlated with different kinds of humans and their attitudes,
where the African is seen as fat, lazy and gluttonous while the Asiatic is sallow and melancholic.

310
Cheng, Ornamentalism, 15.
311
Hoquet, Thierry. “Biologization of Race and Racialization of the Human: Bernier, Buffon, Linnaeus.”
In The Invention of Race. Routledge, 2014.

158
In reading the comic above juxtaposed with this image of femmesness through style, textile, and
an object to be feasted on alongside other objects, we can read how Asiatic femme flesh is the
biological sublimated through the object for ornamental Asian American femmehood. It is also
the biological mechanisms like weight gain and menopause (seen as loss of reproductive
capacity) that takes her outside the stream of heterotemporality, and outside the bounds of an
Asiatic national identity.

One of the more recent renditions of Afong Moy comes through the cookie-art of baker
and activist Jasmine Cho features the loose, bulky garments that are rendered more ornate than
the details of her placid face. Creating elaborate portraitures through cookie icing art, Cho has
exhibited her creations in museums and classrooms across the country and internationally as a
Figure 3.3 "Cookie Portrait of Afong May" by Jasmine Cho for NPR

159
consciousness raising project. In a feature piece on NPR, she says that “cookies can make
anything more palatable.”
312
Moy’s figure sits astutely on her chair in an uncanny replica of the
original image, the blue fabric color is soft and inviting. There is something cute and precious
about the delicate watercolor details painstakingly crafted onto a small cookie canvas. What the
edible delight of America’s forgotten Asian history makes apparent is how the tension between
being (literally and metaphorically) devoured links the slippage between ornament and
personhood. Sianne Ngai offers a way to think about the Asian ornament and the automaton that
oversaturates interpellations of Asian bodies. Ngai’s first explores the concept of “animatedness”
in her work on minor affects to trace the dynamics of vitality and automatic mechanization in
racialized representations of emotional expression. In looking at abolitionist literature and
Claymation animation, she argues that representational renderings of black bodies are overly
expressive and leaking with unruly emotions while captured images and representations of Asian
bodies are seen as inscrutable, non-emotive, and non-expressive. The exaggerated corporeality
and physical pliancy of the racialized body-spectacle, animates a theory of ambivalence towards
racial representation in the abstract–and instead concentrates on how these affective networks
produce the fantasy of “mechanical” or “malleable” workers where workers of color are, as Kyla
Schuller describes, “set into motion like the commodities they produce, and their individual
feeling serves only as unmarketizable excess.”
313
Ngai further builds on this relationship between
representation, ambivalence, and industrial economy through her framing of “cuteness” as

312
“Cookie Artist Teaches Edible Lessons in Asian American History,” NPR, August 31, 2019.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/31/756005776/cookie-artist-teaches-edible-lessons-in-asian-
american-history
313
Excerpt from: Guilmette, Lauren. “Expression, Animation, and Intelligibility: Concepts for a
Decolonial Feminist Affect Theory.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2020): 309–22.

160
bringing out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously–a desire to both keep and
dispel that which evokes such powerful emotions.
Cookie renderings of Asian American figures toe this line in the realm of the devourable
through an aesthetic of cute. What is a more visceral example of the destructive and productive
power of Asian cuteness than a cookie portrait of forgotten Asian figures in American history
meant to be internalized and devoured? The play in-between the production and dissemination of
Asian American history alongside the ephemeral in the edible is a mediation between feelings of
tenderness and how bodies and labor move across transnational circuits of capital.
Leslie Bow builds from Ngai’s articulation of minor feelings to consider how “as personified
things circulates in a global market” and objects imbued with Asianness traffic across place the
object’s “reception is conditioned by local imperial histories.” Bow considers the malleability of
abstracted Asiastic form and figure, where the meaning of racialized Asian objects changes
based on the looker/place. She writes:
That is, depending on its audience, the Mandarin Citrus-squeezer can be variously
read as orientalist, as a parody of orientalism, as anti-Chinese, or as whimsical
homage to Chinese heritage. Yet the infamous history of mammy cookie jars and
law jockeys situates anthropomorphic form as intimately bound to the circulation
of negative racial feeling in the US.
314

In part, the title of this chapter–eating Asians–is acutely represented through the object-
personhood made into edible matter and opens up ways to think about how the Asian
American/diasporic body is rendered into something recognizable precisely through the palate.
“You put your soul into all this art onto this edible form for it only to disappear into your
stomach or somebody else’s but it’s just a reminder of the impermanence of life. Even though

314
Bow, Leslie. “Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii-Style, and the Asian Thing.” American Quarterly 71,
no. 1 (2019), 32.

161
the impermanence of life is there I think the echoes continue out through generations.”
315

Though part of Cho’s work is invested in Asian American visibility in the making of American
civic life and her activism is entrenched in that particular form of identity-based nationalism,
how she talked about impermanence and edibility opens up something interesting to think about
in terms of being animated through the edible/the stomach.
Orientalizing Famine
Following another strain of uncomfortable laughter, I turn to an instance in which Asian
eating and American hunger come to bear–yet again over the incredulity of hunger in America.
In a 2021 viral TikTok video, user Teresa Morcho shares her incredulity over a German
advertisement that was sent over to her by a follower. Morcho’s video begins with her looking
directly at the camera and saying, “I thought this was a joke. I honestly thought someone was
trolling me. But they’re not. I had to go do my own research and I found the video. Brace
yourself.”
We cut to her computer screen where we see a sad looking little girl holding a teddy bear,
sitting on a back porch staged with an aura of ambiguous poverty–chipped paint, fallen leaves, a
chain-linked fence (which has a carefully hidden American flag tucked into the left corner of the
frame). Soft, melancholic piano music plays in the sepia toned background as a German
voiceover begins to describe the conditions of hunger, scarcity, and poverty in which the little
girl lives. The advertisement pulls from the standard language of benevolence and
internationalism popularized in the 1980s by the Save the Children Fund and United Nations
Children’s Fund (formerly known as UNICEF. The big reveal comes when the camera takes a

315
Chen, “DIY Activism through Cookie Art,” The Daily Campus, April 6, 2022.
https://dailycampus.com/2022/04/06/diy-activism-through-cookie-art/

162
close up shot of her unsmiling face as the German voiceover reads the statistic that “49 million
Americans are struggling with food insecurity.”
As the ad comes to the close with the German woman appearing on screen to wrap her arms
around the child (a moment we’ve seen many times before in this particular genre that represents
a symbolic global embrace), the German woman implores German citizens to send much needed
aid. “America needs Germany’s help. Now.” Morcho pulls the camera focus back on her one last
time as she looks into the camera, head shaking, “I--I have no words.” Watched by over 8.5
million viewers on TikTok alone, people shared comments about how shocked they were, how
they laughed through the incredulity, and how ultimately, that anti-hunger ad wasn’t wrong, but
it definitely felt strange. Later, fact checkers revealed that the ad was, indeed, a parody video
meant to raise awareness about food insecurity in America by the “Great Nations Eat” campaign.
Along with other videos–staged as from China and Slovenia–the nonprofit organization Share
Our Strength sought to “disrupt” how people viewed hunger.
316
Aligned with the core principles
on the Great Nations Eat website, they state: “There are more ravenous individuals than you may
understand, and no network is insusceptible. From the older on fixed salaries to families battling
with scaling back and delayed joblessness, Hunger has moved into upscale neighborhoods, into
suburbia and likely to an area close [to] you.”
317
As the humor of the video becomes interpellated
across many temporal layers (the campaign's earlier launch focused on the shock value of a
Chinese ad that communicates the following: “Thirty years ago, nonprofits might have asked
American consumers to help solve Chinese hunger. These ads ask how China (and Slovenia, and

316
Adele Peters, “These Anti-Hunger Ads Ask People in Other Countries to Donate to Help Feed
Americans,” Fast Company, July 15, 2015. https://www.fastcompany.com/3048452/these-anti-hunger-
ads-ask-people-in-other-countries-to-donate-to-help-feed-americans
317
From the “Great Nations Eat” about page https://greatnationseat.org/

163
Germany) can help the U.S.),
318
Here, we witness an understanding about proximities to hunger,
wherein hunger is placed on some-bodies in particular places.
The advertisements, the sense of incredulous laughter elicited by the viral TikTok, allows us
to ask: what are hunger’s proximities? Whose bodies are prone to disaster? In which direction
does relief and aid flow? In recent years, the discourse on food insecurity has changed drastically
as more Americans are living at or below the poverty line. National Geographic recently ran a
story about “The New Face of Hunger,” featuring images of suburban, middle-class appearing,
and even white children. The problem of food insecurity and the non-profits that seek to end the
crisis of hunger, want the public to understand that hunger is now likely in an area near you.
This rhetorical framing of hunger’s proximity pulls us towards the evocative questions that
Eric Hyatt asks in the Hypothetical Mandarin where he unpacks how the
Oriental/Asiatic/Mandarin body has existed as a site of exception, most acutely demonstrated by
the 19th century French phrase: tuer le mandarin (“to kill the Mandarin”).
319
Hyatt examines
how the derivative forms of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments asked “If the ‘great
empire of China’ were suddenly destroyed by an earthquake…how would the average European
react to the news? Though he might, in the initial shock ‘make many melancholy reflections
upon the precariousness of human life…in a soberer moment consider ‘the effects which this
disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe,” before going back to his real life.
Essentially, boiling down to how the empathy rapidly diminishes based on proximity to the self-
risk and how economic insecurity is a motivating factor of interventionism. As contemporary

318
Adele Peters, “These Anti-Hunger Ads Ask People in Other Countries to Donate to Help Feed
Americans,” Fast Company, July 15, 2015. https://www.fastcompany.com/3048452/these-anti-hunger-
ads-ask-people-in-other-countries-to-donate-to-help-feed-americans.
319
Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, “Introduction,” 5.

164
food insecurity campaigns attempt to re-proximate the face of hunger closer to the American
body, they play into a theory of the haptic.
This section asks: who was the old face of hunger and where did they live? By examining
how hunger became spectacularized through humanitarian relief work and images to orientalize
food insecurity as a Global South problem that requires Western NGO intervention. By
analyzing how the ideological battle over economic world systems in a decolonizing world was
mapped through and against relief literature that produced the figure of the “starving Asian''
during the Bengal Famine. Though the orientalizing of famine is not exclusive to Asia and is, in
fact, a framework in which the Global South is understood as in need of paternalistic care from
the very same imperial organizations that have created the conditions of crisis in which the
hungry and starved bodies exist, I am particularly interested in Asia and Asian diaspora not only
because of how Asian cuisine has circulated to signal an evolved and sophisticated upper class
palette, but because of the meteoric rise in eating-content produced by Asian/diasporic bodies.
--
Famine literature from the west has asserted that “Famine has been a recurrent feature in
the history of South Asia since the earliest recorded times,”
320
or that “Asia is the continent with
the highest number of hungry people in absolute terms.”
321
How do we make sense of this
rendering of the Starving Asian figure against the moral and environmental panic over the
growing appetites for meat and dairy in Asia where the West is terrified of Asia’s unassailable
appetites? I make no attempts to diminish the very real issues of hunger that deeply impact
people across the globe. Rather, I am interested in how hunger becomes the prevailing image of

320
“Famine in South Asia” Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-
sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/famine-south-asia
321
“World Hunger: Facts and How to Help,” World Vision, July 21, 2022.
https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/food/world-hunger-facts-how-to-help

165
particular areas of the world. It’s a complicated juggling act where Asians are characterized as a
starving people, who, at the same time, instill a great deal of fear and uncertainty over how much
they’re eating or will be eating. With the rise of entitlement approaches to famine–that focused
on socio-economic structures as opposed to food supply shortage, something important happens
here around consolidating US capitalism and European benevolence against the backdrop of
communism and Third World decolonization.
Historians have traced how World War II offered “a cornucopia of starvation research—a
wealth of hunger,” where field data, monographs, and government reports from re-feeding
programs for concentration camps, Warsaw ghetto hunger study, Belgian prisons, French mental
hospitals, reports about famine in the western Netherlands, and data from Japanese internment
camps yielded quantifiable sets of data points for severe starvation and hunger.
322
Europe began
crafting scientific quantification systems to predict and alleviate famines since the late 1800s.
The prevailing logics around public entitlement, resources distribution, and food supply were
coded across two primary understandings: Thomas Malthus famine causation theory, a moral
argument, which posited that the rate of human population growth made food production
unsustainable and famine inevitable, and the Esther Boserup's theory of agrarian change which
argued that the British agricultural revolution provided the tools and technologies necessary to
feed the growing human population and mitigate hunger.
323

The British economized and systematized the study of famine over the course of the late
1800s, much informed by the agrarian change principles. Competing politics over famine
causation–and embarrassment over “recurring famine in a colony [India] that was a large

322
Russell, “The Hunger Experiment,” 68.
323
Fischer-Kowalski, Marina, Andreas Mayer, Anke Schaffartzik, and Anette Reenberg. Ester Boserup’s
Legacy on Sustainability: Orientations for Contemporary Research. Springer Nature, 2014.

166
exporter of food”
324
–led to the development of the famine codes in India between 1883 to 1901.
By 1896, the Indian National Congress passed resolutions “ascribing famine to the burden of
British rule.” They instituted the famine codes, not as a means to actually prevent and alleviate
famine in India, but instead to delineate reporting guidelines for local magistrates and
procedurals for relief works. Ultimately, the codes provided maps and schedules as counter-
representation to the circulation of famine photography that circulated in public presses.
325

Armed with statistical, measurable data points, British officials were quick to remind the public
of the “grim fact” that famines in India were inevitable and stretched “as far back as history can
trace,” and would, most likely, continue to occur due not to the fault of their benevolent colonial
rulers, but to their own nature, both temperament and climate.
326

The extractive practice of British colonialism wedded with the assumption that India was
simply prone to hunger, set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1942 Bengal famine which has an
estimated death toll of anywhere from two million to four million people.
327
Contemporary
historians and scientists have pushed back against previous assessments of the famine as being
primarily caused by the cyclones that hit the coasts and destroyed rice fields, as opposed to being

324
Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013), 198. Further: Regional magistrate, Romesh Chunder Dutt, wrote
in an open letter to the viceroy about the ten famines over the course of forty years, with up to fifteen
million deaths combined as a melancholy phenomenon, and failure of a supposed civilized British
administration.
325
Arnold, David. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. New Perspectives on the Past. Oxford,
UK; New York, NY, B. Blackwell, 1988; Kaur, Rajender. “The Vexed Question of Peasant Passivity:
Nationalist Discourse and the Debate on Peasant Resistance in Literary Representations of the Bengal
Famine of 1943.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 3 (May 4, 2014): 269–81; Prasad, Rajendra.
“Agricultural Science in India and Struggle against Famine, Hunger and Malnutrition.” Indian Journal of
History of Science 54, no. 3 (September 1, 2019).
326
Bender, Jill. “The Imperial Politics of Famine: The 1873–74 Bengal Famine and Irish Parliamentary
Nationalism.” Éire-Ireland 42, no. 1 (2007): 132–56; Bhattacharya, Sourit. “Colonial Governance,
Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine.” Ariel: A Review
of International English Literature 47, no. 4 (2016): 45–70;
327
Sinha, Manish. “The Bengal Famine of 1943” 887-893.

167
an after effect of European war and militarism. Rather, they note how the severity of the famine
was exacerbated by the British government’s collection of grain stores for military outfits and
failure to provide aid during the most crucial moments due to military strategy to block Japanese
occupied Burma from accessing food supplies.
328
Furthermore, hoarding and speculative buying
alongside the British leveraging its relationships with allied forces, such as the U.S., to stall the
distribution of food aid as punishment for a growing decolonial/ Indian national movement,
resulted in the disastrous condition in which rural villagers suffered the most.
329
For much of the
20th century, the Bengal famine was not categorized as a result of war, and therefore were not
eligible to the newly established aid programs of the international community. The spectacular
images of starvation across Europe during this time left no room for empathy/sympathy for the
Starving Asian figure, imagined not as a result of colonial governance, extraction, and war, but a
default natural state.
Edward Said defines orientalism as both an airy European fantasy that co-produces the
material condition of the world in which we move. He writes: “Orientalism is not a mere
political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions;
nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and
expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is
rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological,
historical, and philological texts.”
330
The orientalizing of famine in India was a systematically
produced set of knowledges to not only support eugenics principles which rendered Indian
bodies as at-risk, it was also an aesthetic project that came to define emaciation, thinness, frailty

328
Edkins, Jenny. “Legality with a Vengeance: Famines and Humanitarian Relief in ‘Complex
Emergencies.’” Millennium 25, no. 3 (December 1, 1996): 547–75.
329
Sinha, “The Bengal Famine of 1943” 887-893.
330
Said, Orientalism, 12.

168
as markers of the Asiatic body. As Tanushree Ghosh describes in her powerful reading of famine
photography: “the anxiety that the visual depiction of emaciated, starving bodies could
potentially produce is immediately assuaged by the immediate juxtaposition of pictures of food
being dispensed at relief camps.”
331
The starving Asian body, then, operates across two
ideological principles:, the first being the natural state in which hunger inhabits the Asiatic body,
and the second that maintains said body is a receptacle for Western aid. This formula would play
out from the earliest anti-hunger campaigns–such as the Save the Children Fund, originally a
British charity begun by women’s rights activists who were moved by images of starving
children in India.
The Asians are Eating
The Asians are eating and the world is worried. There is no shortage of think pieces about
the growing consumption of meat and dairy across an expanding middle-class Asia.
332
As Asian
capital increases, so too do the concerns over climate and environmental degradation and overall
nutrition and population health issues of mass consumption of foods primarily produced by and
eaten in the West. The Asians are eating and they’re letting us watch. This section examines how
Asian/diasporic relationships to food and public performances of eating reveal an entanglement
with the Starving Asian figure. In the sharing of sliced fruit, food becomes a medium in which to

331
Ghosh, “Witnessing Famine,” 334.
332
Campbell, “How Chine Could Change the World by Taking Meat off the Table,” Times Magazine, Jan
21, 2021. https://time.com/5930095/china-plant-based-meat/
Rossi, “The Chinese are Eating More Meat Than Ever Before,” Mother Jones, July 31, 2018.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/07/the-chinese-are-eating-more-meat-than-ever-before-
and-the-planet-cant-keep-
up/#:~:text=In%20the%20early%201980s%2C%20when,much%20as%20the%20United%20States.
Lawrence, “Can the World Quench China’s Thirst for Milk,” The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/29/can-the-world-quench-chinas-bottomless-thirst-
for-
milk#:~:text=The%20ad%20said%20explicitly%20that,survive%20competition%20from%20other%20na
tions.%E2%80%9D&text=Like%20most%20ethnic%20Han%2C%20who,milk%20was%20hard%20to%
20digest.

169
express complex intergenerational emotions that inscribe the inscrutable asian body with
interiority. I look to the creation of Korean Mukbang content and form to think about how the
Asian femme is enriched by a plethora of magic foods that fill her up but never changes her
body. Finally, I turn to queer performances of eating/feederism and see how that lands differently
on the Asiatic body. Through my readings, I am not interested in finding the body of Asian
diasporic resistance or eating and fattening as an ultimate site of resistance but am interested in
parsing out how Asian/diaspora (re)produces enfleshment through its relationship to food and
eating.
– –
Love is a plate of sliced fruit—at least according to the recent development in the genre of
Asian diasporic food writing. Painstakingly peeled, cut, and delivered by an Asian parent for a
snack, after-meal treat, or ever rare apology, sliced fruit has come to inhabit precious mantle
space in Asian diasporic nostalgic imaginings—next to the mangoes and drawer full of plastic
grocery bags.
333
The plate of sliced fruit has been wrung out in popular magazines such as Bon
Appetit and Taste, offering a glimpse at popular diasporic food-memoir that speaks to the
different ways immigrants and migrant communities express powerful emotions through the
medium of food. Food journalist Priya Krishna writes about the variety of fruits for which her
father would scour her Texas suburb, and details the painstaking work of cutting and serving the
precious fresh fruit after family meals. She writes about the entanglement between the act of
slicing fruit and love: “I’d like to think that cutting fruit was how my dad expressed his love to
us. We didn’t have big heart-to-hearts. We didn’t attend father-daughter dances. But watching

333
Andrewleewrites, “Why Do Asian Parents Always Like to Give Food,” An Asian American Christian
[blog] June 26, 2021. https://anasianamericanchristian.com/why-asian-parents-give-food/

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that guy painstakingly break down a pomegranate for our post-dinner enjoyment was all I needed
to see.”
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The images of father-daughter dances, open proclamations of heart-to-hearts name
white, Western expressions of attachment, and what Krishna details, is meant to stand in place of
what a sliced plate of food could represent for her Indian father—a portal to his homeworld and
innerworld, when the invitation is recognized as such. It’s interesting that moments of the
haptic—bodily touch—such as father-daughter dances, or the seeing, naming, recognizing of the
other that is required of a heart-to-heart—is replaced with what can be described as an opaquer
relationality, one routed through the gut. (Why is food oftentimes the medium in which
Asianness becomes legible across genres, genders, and generations? Why not an act such as
running heating coconut oil through someone’s hair for example, circulated as a common
practice of intimacy for Asian diasporic subjects?) Why is it that sliced fruit cuts through the
tough exterior of an Asian parent?
Yi Jun Loh—an engineer turned cook and food writer—describes how conflicts between
mother and child were resolved in his home through the simple offering of, “Come eat fruits.”
The small phrase held a big world; it was a signal of a truce being drawn. And when dinner
ended with an extra plate of cut fruits, those harsh words and hot tears didn’t sting so much.” He
goes on to write about her perception of Asian mothers to a younger generation of diasporic
Asians, writing, “All Asian kids know that our moms do love us, despite their cold demeanor,
tough exterior, and sky-high expectations. They just show it in different ways.”
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The plate of
fruits, though sometimes gendered to the Asian-mom figure but not exclusively, names a
contemporary narrative experience of Asianness in which emotional expressions from Asian

334
Krishna, “If I’m Cutting Fresh Fruit, It Means I Love You,” Bon Appetit,
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/cutting-fresh-fruit-for-dessert.
335
Yi Jun Yoo, “Bowl of Cut Fruits Is How Asian Moms Say: I Love You,” Taste, April 19, 2019.
https://tastecooking.com/bowl-cut-fruits-asian-moms-say-love/

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bodies must be mediated through objects—in this case, sliced fruit. Though the cluster of sliced
fruit writing is a fairly new phenomenon in the last five or so years, the idea that Asian emotional
expression needing to mediate by outside objects or acts of service—and, more specifically, the
acts of cooking, eating, and serving food—is quintessential to Asian American and diasporic
cultural production and studies. Especially in this particular genre of writing, nostalgic objects
link a generation of adult Millennials’ storytelling about family trauma and healing. The 2016
Academy Award-winning animated short, Bao, written and directed by Asian Canadian
filmmaker Domee Shi, captures the tensions of becoming a visible minoritarian subject while
simultaneously remaining the inscrutable other. The tensions of subject/personhood negotiations
with alienated onlookers created a swirl of discomfort, as several reports indicated how mostly
white audiences mocked, laughed off, and made loud their confusion about this form of food-
storytelling that so clearly depicts the lived emotional experiences of Asian diasporic subjects.
The ten-minute short depicting the tenuous relationship between immigrant mother and
child, including a depth and range of emotions from an Asian mother’s over-protectiveness, to
growing apart across cultural differences, to eventually reconciliation around a dining table,
received mixed reviews from audiences. In the titular climax scene where the mother, hoping to
reconnect with her ever-distant “bao-child” spends the day preparing all of his favorite foods
only to face another one of his callous rejections when he chooses to spend a night out with
friends–the dumpling-boy dons his sunglasses and leather jacket, the universal symbols of
teenage rebellion. When he finally returns home, with his white fiancé and begins moving out of
the house, we see a struggle between mother and dumpling, that culminates in the climax of the
short mother eats the son to keep him from leaving her. The short offers a resolution to the
conflict, hurt, and tension (by way of dessert buns offered by the son, now returned to his human

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form), and depicts a happy and complete family. The story line is rather simple but dense with
feeling. As one writer noted, “even without all the cultural nuances and intricacies, ‘Bao’ is
about growing up. While the experiences depicted may be specific to Chinese culture, the themes
are universal if viewers know how to step outside their own perspectives.”
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I found myself
having been deeply moved by the scene, thinking of how these moments landed for different
bodies.
While I found myself moved, sobbing, and reflecting on my own relationship with my
Asian immigrant parents and the typical desire to at once be free from and close to them, other
audience members outright laughed or sighed in frustration. One person in the theater even said a
quiet, “What was that?” to their seatmate. Sitting in the theater, I felt a familiar pulse of anger
and indignation–the stiffening of my body marked by the limits of their comprehension. It did
not take long for me to realize that these polarizing experiences were not limited to my own
anecdotal evidence. The internet quickly churned out tweets, retweets, and think pieces
responding to a slew of people wholly divided on the short. The conclusion was: if you didn’t get
it, it wasn’t for you, and American audiences/white audiences don’t know how to relate to Asian
experiences.
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The public debates focused on the trifecta of injury, recognition, and
representation–wherein hegemonic culture needed to redress ambivalence over the inscrutability
of Asian diasporic experience to achieve more equitable futures. Returning to Leslie Bow’s
arguments for the aesthetic category of cuteness and Asian-objectness allows us to understand
how this anthropomorphized dumpling traffics across racial audiences. The cinematic language
of the short–from the soft rounded color palette, to the detailed renderings of home cooking–

336
Patrana Radulovic, “The Polarized Reactions to Pixar’s ‘Bao’ are rooted in Culture,” Polygon,
December 18, 2018. https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/26/17505726/pixar-bao-dumpling-short-reactions
337
Yam, “Pixar’s ‘Bao’ Mixed Reactions from White Peeps Who Don’t Get It,” Huffington Post, June 27,
2018. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pixar-bao-mixed-reactions_n_5b33c87ee4b0cb56051e7c82

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spoke directly to an Asian diasporic audience. The plot, itself, is a traditional coming of age story
which people across races, ethnicities, and places should be able to relate. However, it is
especially potent for Asian diasporic subjects, where the bun– as interchanged offering between
mother and son as an offering of peace–reflects how complex Asian feelings are mediated
through food.
If we look at how food and eating come to mediate complex, intergenerational feelings as
a response to orientalizing famine/hunger, the push and pull between giving food and controlling
body size makes sense to the fantasy of national belonging. In 2015, the now defunct
performance collective Sad Asian Girl Club produced a video titled, “Have you eaten?” It begins
with a disembodied female voice (presumably of mother or caregiving) calling out for “Olivia”
and “Esther” to come eat. A split screen follows the perspectives of “Olivia” (Korean American)
and Esther (Chinese American) as they sit alone, facing the camera while the disembodied voice
speaking Korean and Mandarin respectively, echoes from the audience’s perspective.
Throughout the meal, as the voice makes comments about the girls’ body, clothing, and
mannerisms, the audience watches as Olivia and Esther respond to the attacks with either quiet
irritation or defeated acquiescence. The voice says:
To Esther (in Mandarin): “Don’t eat too much. You’ve gotten fat recently.”
To Olivia (in Korean): “Wait. You’ve gained weight, haven’t you?”
To Olive: “I mean, just look at the portion you’re eating.”
To Esther: “And you have tattoos, you want to be just like a white person.”
To Olivia: “If you look at your friend, she’s skinny and always smiling.”
To Olivia: “Just start losing weight and then we can go to Korea to fix your eyes,
raise your nose, shape your face.”
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Olivia tries to eat the meal, but ultimately agrees to fix her face and smile to avoid
conflict at the table. The scene at the table portrays how precarious and tense it can be for the

338
Sad Asian Girl Club, “Have you Eaten” Youtube Video, 2:35, November 16, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiam42_1Xd8&t=64s.

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Asian diasporic femme to navigate. Food, eating, and changes to the Asian femme body has
acted as symbolic in Asian/diasporic literature. When the femme’s eating habits change, it
signals forms of internal distress or political consciousness–moments of awakening, disruption,
and rejection of the cultural norm. This trope stretches from Ruth Ozeiki’s classic My Year of
Meats where we follow two protagonists: Jane, a Japanese American documentary filmmaker
working for a Japanese production company to market BEEF (sic) to Japanese housewives, and
Akiko, a former graphic designer turned reluctant housewife who is married to said show’s
producer. Throughout the novel, as each protagonist comes closer to a state of awareness or
asserting her own autonomy and intention, she experiences forms of indigestion, changes in
eating habits, or vomiting. In particular, Akiko’s daily task of recreating recipes from the
programming becomes increasingly more dire as her body refuses the beef-laden meals,
regardless of how hard she tries. Her husband, who demands she call him John, does not notice
her increasingly deteriorating mental state, but remarks on the physical changes to her body–the
thinness signals her failure to both provide him a child and digest the meat he champions.
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a three-part novel set in modern-day Korea and follows
Yeonh-hye, a graphic artist and homemaker who, after a visceral nightmare, stops eating meat.
The story is told through the split perspectives of her husband, brother in-law, and sister In-hye.
In the first segment of the novel, Yeonh’s husband remarks on how unremarkable he finds his
wife–and it is her remarkableness that he takes comfort in as he has decided to live the most
conventional life. His world is turned asunder, and he becomes increasingly more desperate and
unhinged as Yeonh-hye quietly refuses to eat meat, and he is unable to come to terms with her
new behaviors. We get sharp descriptions of Yeonh-hye hollowing out, flesh emaciating.
Eventually, her sister, In-hye, becomes responsible for her care, and due to the pressure of it all,

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hospitalizes her. In-hye watches as her sister continues to become more vegetative, more plant-
like. It is only when In-hye watches an emaciated Yeonh-hye be force fed by the hospital staff,
that she grabs her sister and runs to another hospital. The novel is read as a meditation on
human-plant relationality, on the slippages in and between vegetation and a state of vegetation.
The use of eating as a primary mode to locate Asian femme transformation from “unremarkable”
matter to non-human matter makes a compelling case for how eating operates as a catalyst that
disrupts Asian femme entropy.
In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s dark academia satire, Disorientation: a Novel, we meet Ingrid–a
Taiwanese American Ph.D. candidate in her final semester. In a world in which rival superstar
grad student Vivian, of the Postcolonial Studies department, is winning awards for her political
and racial analysis of the same literary figure Ingrid is writing about, we find Ingrid to be
apolitical and unsure how she even ended up writing about Xiao-Wen Chou–the (fictive)
foremost Asian American poet of modern times. As Ingrid journeys across the archive and the
narrative adventure takes us down unhinged and unexpected turns, Ingrid begins manifesting
new eating habits. It begins with constant snacking (which her white boyfriend tries to steer her
away from by remarking on how certain foods will affect her digestion), craving “junk” food,
and eventually moving away from the whole foods salads she prepares with Stephen to the
handmade lunches of her youth. As her political consciousness evolves, so does her appetite. The
Asian femmes’ relationship to food in these literatures has been scripted as part of the process of
becoming fully into a body.
--
Korean Mukbangs, or eating shows, began more than a decade ago and have since
developed a large international following. Originally, these broadcast performances featured

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single people who would eat their meals and chat with an audience via a streaming interface as a
way to stave off the loneliness of single life in Korea. Soon, mukbang content caught on
nationally, and began appearing on televisions shows and popular kdramas.
339
The content
quickly evolved from casually eating a meal in front of an interactive audience to replicate a
sense of camaraderie in an alienating world into a spectacle of consuming huge quantities of
opulent specialty dishes in a single sitting. Today, mukbangs are some of the most popular
videos on YouTube and TikTok, garnering millions of views per video for the most famous
content creators.
340
There have been a smattering of academic articles that attempt to deconstruct
this eating content phenomenon through a wide range of perspectives–often from the viewpoint
of narrative or psychology.
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I am interested in reading through form to analyze how Korean
mukbangers play with the tropes of Asian femme entropy as well as Asian masculinity and
fitness.
Mukbang content is a deeply sensorial viewing experience that emphasizes the sounds of
cooking, slurping, chewing, crunching, and swallowing as well as a focus on food textures, with
sensual filming of the glistening, gummy, slimey, soft, powdery, and smooth. The most
successful content activates viewers’ senses by mixing textures and sounds so that as one gets
caught up in the crunch of a tempura prawn, one suddenly experiences a slurp of cold noodle or
soft gulp. Some creators journey audiences from meal preparation to cooking, from table to
mouth. Others offer an opulent display of foods that they “play” with–squeezing candies and
jellies, cracking open oysters or eggs, letting the cameras roll unedited on multiple views of
platters with steam rising from the tops of spicy noodles or fried chicken coated in melted

339
Kang, Lee, et al, “The Popularity of Eating Broadcast,” 2237-2248.
340
Kim, “Eating as Transgression,” 1-16.
341
Park, “Narrativing and Contextualizing Mukbang,” 1-19; Kircaburub, Harris, et al, “The Psychology of Mukbang
Watching,” 1190-1213.

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cheese. Over the course of a decade, the genre of Asian eating videos has consolidated common
forms such as color saturation, camera angle, editing cuts, thumbnails, and exactly where the
body sits in the frame–editorial cues that signal how the audience can anticipate and devour the
scenes to come. Surveying the most viewed mukbang content creators–Zach Choi (13.9 million
views), Jane ASMR (16.5 million views), Hongyu ASMR (13.2 million views), and Hamzy (9.7
million views) --reveals the kinds of eating performances that elicit pleasure and good feelings.
Each of these creators develops a specific style and sense of personality and yet, the content
cloisters around particular forms that almost guarantee that comments about the content are
mostly positive. Even in a global culture in which people have a tenuous relationship to public
eating, these creators manage to remain unobtrusive and palatable.
Not all mukbang content is received with the same level of enthusiasm or appreciation.
Audiences are vocal in letting creators know of the kind of bodies eating that they do and do not
want to witness. Often described as mesmerizing or fulfilling to watch, the most popular videos
tell us something about what forms of eating are seen as desirable, whose bodies do we feel
comfortable watching, and how those bodies leverage aesthetic categories to captivate their
audiences. Moreover, the videos demonstrate the parameters of the modern Asian body’s
relationship to food and eating, as Asian cultural and literal capital expands through certain parts
of the world, thereby delinking the Starving Asian body through displays of public eating. These
popular mukbangers present a relationship to food that is based on excess and pleasure, and a
relationship to the body that is expert and controlled.
Successful eating videos share several common factors: the eaters are of one body type, ,
they eat neatly as they carefully navigate the line between the pleasure of eating and the pain of
overeating in general or overeating specific food types. Lastly, each video suggests through its

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editing that the eater is capable of actually eating and digesting the meal. Audiences, by and
large, experience pleasure while watching thin, conventionally attractive bodies eat. While there
is a subgenre of Korean men mukbangers who also create lifestyle content around their fitness
routine, Korean women mukbangers give off the appearance of effortless thinness. Moreover,
their thinness/fitness is attached to the other pleasurable performances they display. As though
plucked from a populist fantasy, one viewer comments that, “Zach Choi is really just someone
who enjoys eating, and one day just decided to share his love for food to the world. “This brings
to the forefront what feelings become mediated through Zach Choi’s love of food for the viewer?
How does watching him prepare and devour a meal reroute the viewer’s relationship with eating?
Popular mukbangers do not eat sloppily. Not all of them are delicately eaters who
carefully place items in their mouths, making sure not to smear their make-up or get sauce on
their faces. For example, Hamzy only reached a higher subscriber count by presenting a more
relaxed aesthetic–sitting in her living room, sporting a no-makeup look, eating a meal from her
coffee table. While some mukbang content have eaters covered in sauce as they enthusiastically
chow down on their meal, the most watched and positively received videos do not include a lot
of mess. Zach Choi even goes so far as to wear a signature pair of black disposable gloves in
every video. Spilled food and smudged cheeks are enjoyed as quirky outtakes that humanize the
content creator.
Moreover, these videos are careful in negotiating between pleasure and pain, and the
feeling of plausible eating scenarios. While the quantity of food might be large, bright red (to
show extreme spice level), full of sugary toppings, or drenched in copious amounts of cheese and
sauce, the mukbang content that is most watched and circulated never shows any discomfort
while eating. The dish is spicy, but just right. The desserts are sugary, but the young and healthy

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mukbanger does not have to worry about worn out cavities or a blood sugar spike. The food
quantities are huge but considered relative to one’s appetite. The feeling of plausibility is not
overridden by the fact that these bodies eat and eat and eat but never change. While Korean men
mukbangers invite audiences to imagine how the curate their bodies off-camera–engaging in
fitness blogging or posts on other social media platforms–the concept of Asian femme entropy
smooth over any uncertainty about how the eaters can consume without gaining weight.
I share these overarching characteristics in mukbang content form to gesture to how
inscrutability, display, and interiority are reorganized for these Asiatic figures through a deeply
embodied and sensorial eating project. Yet, still, as the body remains central to the framework,
encrusted in the alimentary and digestive, we are given little cause to think of the bodies–frozen
in place of palatable eater–as an enfleshed and biological being. Queer Vietnamese American
poet, Hieu Mihn Ngyuen, bites at these moments of stagnation in this way:
the myth you tell to scare yourself
into loneliness. Copper totem rusting blue
in your throat. Once, a man paid
to watch you eat. There are countless ways
to justify company. Hunger, overdue balance, whatever.
Cartoon savage licking the throne clean.
& isn’t that what you always wanted?
To be filled & emptied? To bite the hand
that feeds you? Even if the hand wants to be bitten?
& is that defiance? Standing naked
at a dinner table while oil drips
from your chin, wanting the man
to touch you, but he won’t. & you want
to be the kind of person who doesn’t need
to feel beautiful, but you are. You are
predictable in your longing. Grotesque muse
spinning marrow into lace. Spit bride
glistening beneath a chandelier
stunning, even just for a moment.
342

342
Nguen, Pig.

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While the images that Nyguen conjure asks us to understand a history of eating and asianess
/Cartoon savage licking the throne clean---in another poem he writes “Once, while lying in his
bed/a man asked me to quiet/ his dog by speaking to it in Vietnamese, said/well, she is your
people.This double-mark—of asianness/eating/erotics/femmeness arrives through moments of
contact, are mediated through the desires and affections of white men.
In Nguyen’s second poetry chapbook, Not Here, he explores questions of sexuality,
kinship, Vietnamese identity, and fat pleasure. The intimate poems throughout engage in
temporal mis-placement through the white male gaze, where the narrator’s white lovers’ body-
in-parts act as a time machine that simultaneously marks itself on the queer brown body and
makes it more palatable to the narrator’s Vietnamese mother. Nguyen writes that his poems
reflect his own mother’s process to accepting or understanding his queer identity. One of the
modes of relationality is through whiteness’ desire to consume the Asian body.

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Coda

Training the Revolutionary Gut

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as its perceived binary
opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The
“sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness
as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary.
When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and
support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When
sickness is temporary, care is not normal.

-Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”

BLESSED ARE THE SISSIES
BLESSED ARE THE BOI DYKES
BLESSED ARE THE PEOPLE OF COLOR MY
BELOVED KITH AND KIN
BLSSED ARE THE TRANS
BLESSED ARE THE HIGH FEMMES
BLESSED ARE THE SEX WORKERS
BLESSED ARE THE AUTHENTIC
BLESSED ARE THE DIS-IDENTIFIERS
BLESSED ARE THE GENDER ILLUSIONISTS
BLESSED ARE THE NON-NORMATIVE
BLESSED ARE THE GENDERQUEERS
BLESSED ARE THE KINKSTERS
BLESSED ARE THE DISABLED
BLESSED ARE THE HOT FAT GIRLS
BLESSED ARE THE WEIRDO-QUEERS
BLESSED IS THE SPECTRUM
BLESSED IS CONSENT
BLESSED IS RESPECT
BLESSED ARE THE BELOVED WHO I DIDN’T
DESCRIBE, COULDN’T DESCRIBE, WILL
LERAN TO DESCRIBE AND RESPECT AND
LOVE
AMEN
-Mark Aguhar, Litanies to my
Heavenly Brown Body

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Former First Nations Chief, Theresa Spence began her two-month hunger strike on
December 11, 2012. Occupying Victoria Island in the Ottawa River she faced the Canadian
Parliament in order to focus attention on the ongoing crisis in Attawapiskat. The Attawapiskat
reserve on the James Bay Coast in northern Ontario faced a housing crisis where most residents
lived in tents, trailers, and temporary shelters due of housing shortages.
343
A 2009 flood
destroyed many of the reservation’s buildings and most of the homes were infested with mold as
well as lacking in proper insulation and adequate water supplies. For years, residents did not
have consistent access to clean drinking water. Exacerbated by the flood, people now had to boil
tap water or rely on expensive bottled water for daily use. Reservation leadership declared a state
of emergency on October 28, 2011 (the third time in three years), a crisis that would finally
break to international news.
Loosely affiliated with Idle No More, Theresa Spence’s hunger strike was one of several
direct actions campaigns and a larger chain reaction to the years of treaty violations and land
devastation in Canada. However, during the two months of her hunger strike, Spence became the
focal point of public spectacle, as she presented an easy target of ridicule for pundits and
politicians to skirt around and dismiss fatal issues that affected indigenous communities.
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Many
in the media questioned whether she was performing an authentic hunger strike, noting how she

343
Aura Bogado, “Why Theresa Spence is Still on a Hunger Strike 7 Weeks Later,” Colorlines, January
23, 2013. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/why-theresa-spence-still-hunger-strike-7-weeks-later
344
Myra Rutherdale, Erin Dolmage, and Carolyn Podruchny, “Bodies of Water, Not Bodies of Women:
Canadian Media Images of Idle No More Movement,” Active History, May, 22, 2015.
http://activehistory.ca/papers/bodies-of-water-not-bodies-of-women-canadian-media-images-of-the-idle-
no-more-movement/ ; Ben Makuch. “Chief Spence is Clouding Idle No More with her Problems,” Vice,
January 10, 2013. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvq9k/the-problems-of-chief-spence ; “Fast Fallout:
Chief Spence and Idle No More Movement Galvanizes Canadians around Money Management and
Accountability,” January 15, 2013. https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/fast-fallout-chief-spence-and-idle-no-
more-movement-galvanizes-canadians-around-money-management ; Matt Sheedy, “Idle No More is
about More Than Chief Spence,” Wagging Nonviolence People Powered News and Analysis, January 27,
2013. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2013/01/idle-no-more-is-about-more-than-chief-spence/

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drank fish broth, and, lived in a fat body that wasn’t showing signs of the starvation one expects
from a hunger strike.
345
Our bodies respond to the aesthetics of starvation/hunger. The spine
tightens as your lungs lift your chest up and down; you hear the gallons of blood pumping
through you in your eardrums. Our bodies let us feel the difference in life as we look at sullen
eyes, sallow skin, labored breath, and emaciated torsos. The aesthetics of self-starvation occupy
a liminal space on the scales of liveliness that unsettles the normalcy of the sovereign state
through juxtaposition, contradiction, and feeling. Yet, Spence’s fat body presented a different
idea of a dying body—one from neglect, ill-education, and incapacity to take care of the self.
Weeks into her hunger strike, the federal government released an audit of Attawapiskat, which
revealed that the state spent $104 million on the reserve between 2005 and 2011 (though they
provided no proper documentation of actual bank transactions). The audit was mean to discredit
complaints of federal misconduct, naming the unlivable conditions of the reservations as the
consequences of Native mismanagement.
346

Concerns about the authenticity of the hunger strike and Spence’s financial ethics brought
her authority as a leader into question. The media could now question the Idle No More
movement as they had positioned Spence as its leader. Newspapers and television personalities
gleefully reported that Spence was consuming fish broth and medicinal herbs to discredit her
very intentional methods of protest, misunderstanding its ritual and political actions. Leanne

345
Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay on Theresa Spence: ‘You Call that A Hunger Strike?” National Post,
January 4, 2013. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-on-theresa-spence-you-call-that-a-hunger-
strike
346
“Attawapiskat Audit Scrutinizes Reserve’s Keeping on Millions Spent,” CTV News, January 7, 2013.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/attawapiskat-audit-scrutinizes-reserve-s-record-keeping-on-millions-
spent-1.1103496?cache=%3FclipId%3D89530%3FautoPlay%3Dtrue%3FautoPlay%3Dtrue ;
“Attawapiskat Audit Says Federal Funds Spent without Records,” CBC, January 7, 2013.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/attawapiskat-audit-finds-no-evidence-due-diligence-121748012.html.

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Simpson wrote several pieces on the complex spiritual and symbolic gesture of the fish broth
where she notes:
Fish broth. It carries cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg. It symbolizes hardship and
sacrifice. It symbolizes the strength of our Ancestors. It means survival. Fish broth
sustained us through the hardest of circumstances, with the parallel understanding that it
can’t sustain one forever. We exist today because of fish broth. It connects us to the water
and to the fish who gave up its life so we could sustain ourselves. Chief Spence is eating
fish broth because metaphorically, colonialism has kept Indigenous Peoples on a fish
broth diet for generations upon generations.
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What does it mean for a Native woman to thrive even in the face of death when her body is
always demanded as sacrifice for the liberal nation state? How do we make sense of a fat hunger
striker when decay is not the only aesthetic of death in the 21
st
century? Our bodies respond to
the aesthetics of fat. The muscles tense as you feel through every inch of your limbs to hold your
shape in place as the fat body haunts you. Our bodies let us feel the difference in a life as we
look at rolls of flesh, rounded bellies, flaps of skin and meat. Simpson beautifully and
passionately opens a space for deep reflection on histories of colonialism, gendered sovereignty,
and slow death for which the media cannot account.
Spence’s body, instead, became a symbol for First Nations peoples’ inability to self-
govern and self-regulate. Conservative politician, Ottawa-Orleans MP Royal Galipeau, told a
crowd that he had gone to see Spence on Boxing Day. Although Spence was fifteen days into her
hunger strike, Galipeau ignored her health and instead focused on her grooming: “‘I stood in the
circle around Chief Spence,’ Galipeau said. ‘I noticed that manicure of hers. I tell you Anne
can’t afford it,’ he said, referring to his wife.”
348
This comment is both an indictment of Spence’s

347
Leanne Simpson, “Fish Broth and Fasting,” originally posted in Opinion, January 16, 2013.
https://hommedeseptiles.tumblr.com/post/40932766490/fish-broth-fasting.
348
Tonda MacCharles and Nevil Hunt, “Conservative MP and Senator Belittle Chief Theresa Spence, Idle
No More Movement,” The Toronto Star, January 30, 2013.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/01/30/conservative_mp_and_senator_belittle_chief_theresa_s
pence_idle_no_more_movement.html.

185
alleged mismanagement of tribal funds and also indicates how femme rituals are denied to
indigenous women, women of color, and bodies that fail because they are conscripted as
exceeding the human already.
Spence allows me to think through fat-death aesthetics and, what Audra Simpson terms
“gendered settler sovereignty.” In her article, “The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta
Saunders and the Gendered Cost of Settler Sovereignty in Canada," Simpson examines the
affective modes of indigenous women’s deaths (and bodies) in relation to the geopolitics of
settler colonialism.
349
Theresa Spence’s hunger strike asks us how to make sense of the fat body
and the hunger-striking body as supposed opposite poles of embodiment and consider these fat
femme fugitives as world-makers.
This dissertation has engaged in the myriad of ways in which women, femmes, and
minoritized subjects have (mis)aligned with state and nationalist interests, development logics,
and political action in the home and in the public domain primarily through the complex sites of
food, eating, and national health rhetoric. Each of the chapters engages in the messy modes in
which foods become pathologized, moralized, and politicized as it traverses the biopolitical
space of the gut. In my study of milky appetites, or gut affects, I focus on the coercive, co-
constitutive, and enmeshed phenomena of the agri-food industries of the 20
th
century to consider
how food becomes pathologized through the prism of modernity and nationalism and is then felt
on the excesses of the body. I take the dairy industry as a case study to demonstrate how national
modernization and development paradigms– on an international stage–practices literal and

349
Simpson, Audra. "The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler
Sovereignty." Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 1.

186
metaphorical curation of the modern cosmopolitan citizen body as a means of extending and
expanding the genre of the human into the emergent racial aesthetics of the twentieth century.
Simultaneously, my focus on home economists, nutritional literacy, and the emergent
scientific discourse about energy extends the body-project to the American women via the foods
that she eats and the knowledges that she produces. In doing so, this figure participated in
crafting cohesive narratives about U.S. empire’s civilizing project at home and abroad.
Nutritional reformers trained the public in new feelings and sensations towards food divorced
from cultural and ethnic meaning, which historicizes and contextualizes the U.S culinary export
of diet-food. Both phenomena expanded and policed definitions of whiteness, able-bodiedness,
and citizenship for the (migrant) working poor through colonial, racial, and gendered sensibilities
adapted to relational networks of health. Most importantly, this chapter asks how metabolic
personhood shapes who we are fighting to keep in the future.
In juxtaposing and contextualizing the recent phenomenon of Asian “eating” content
(such as popular Mukbang videos and daily eating vlogs) alongside the figure of the “starving
Asian,” I contextualize the sensory ecologies of eating Asians on the internet within a history of
food and militarism, famine and occupation, medicalization and colonialism. By reading a wide
range of contemporary performance archives of Asians performing eating against the mid-
century famine and rhetoric policies of the U.S, my analysis demonstrates how the act of eating
(and the kind of body doing the eating) tells a congealing story of race, gender, thinness, and
nation that pushes and pulls in popular imaginations of Asian flesh.
At the heart of these chapters is a question about how we perceive bodies and capacities,
as failures or success in relation to whether one reaches their “potential”—a promise that is
filtered through the image of immaculate physicality as the pinnacle of the healthy citizen-

187
subject. The lesson on fats from the 20
th
century is quite clear: consuming fats are a danger to the
body; being fat is a danger to the self. And yet, fat bodies continue to make the world softer. In
Mark Aguhar’s poem Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body, a popular piece that saw heavy
circulation in the wake of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, the narrative is broken into two
parts that play between a call to curse or bless. While the first half of the poem is a call to curse-
making where a fat trans femme of color pushes back against the ways they are deemed
unacceptable, the second half of the “prayer” is a call to bless. Aguhar, through a simple form of
repetition that drums into a rhythm of call-and-response ease, marks bodies typically seen as
dysfunctional and cursed (the sissies, boi dykes, people of color, trans, high femmes, disabled,
fat girls, etc) as not only worthy of existence in the future, but as meaningful contributors in the
present. In their last line, “BLESSED ARE THE BELOVED WHO I DIDN’T DESCRIBE, I
COULDN’T DESCRIBE, WILL LEARN/ TO DESCRIBE AND RESPECT AND LOVE,” the
narrator engages in a fat crip future orientation that directly opposes the eugenics and euthenics
principles of hygiene for the future. Rather, the future exists, as well, for those who escape the
relentless curation of the healthy-normative-citizen body and by learning to describe those who
are unfathomable today, pushes back on the relentless desire to know and manufacture the bodies
present in the future.
--
While we were growing up, my dad was never too keen on music. If we kids pressed him,
begging for the latest Backstreet Boys CD, he’d mumble something about music being haram.
But there were always exceptions for those extra-long car rides: a small selection of Bollywood
songs, Cher’s entire discography, and the ’74 disco bop “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.” We
listened to Carl Douglas’s guttural crooning as a hype anthem for most of my major childhood

188
milestones; I can still remember every hit of the chimes and arpeggio in my small, fat fists and
legs, in the pulse, in the exhale.
Even during my teen years, when the song came under fire for its racial undertones, I
continued to have some peculiar attachment to it and would find myself examining its sonic and
affective resonances as I began research for this project. Entering the world of nutrition literature
as a fat femme of color has been both deeply disorienting and strangely familiar—a feeling of
being both excluded but always present, where my body doesn’t fit within normative archetypes
of health, but where bodies like mine loom large as signposts for a future we should not want. As
I’ve described in my previous chapter the how state programing around food and eating informed
most of my childhood as a poor, fat kid of color, my relationship to fitness culture formed long
before my collusion with public health and welfare policies that attempted to treat my risky body.
It instead begins with my dad’s history of migration and racialization, one that manifested on our
bodies in particular ways.
I learned to turn my shoulders when throwing a punch by the time I was six. Never stick
your thumbs out. Firm thighs. Lead with your left leg. My dad started practicing martial arts
when he first immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970’s; my mom would cart me and my brother to his
tournaments and later to Karate lessons of our own. At first, I had understood his investment in
our training as a cultural fad, a byproduct of the Chopsocky craze that popularized the strip mall
dojos of the 80’s and 90’s married with the assimilationist fantasy of a middle-class American
dream.
350
It is only when I look to the muscles of the body, in the widening gap of its tension and
the exhale of its release that I realize there was something much deeper in his desire to discipline
and prepare our bodies.

350
The term Chopsocky was coined by Variety magazine to describe the explosion of martial arts films in
1970’s.

189
It was the summer of ’79, where—as my dad tells it— everybody really was Kung Fu
fighting. “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting,” a single meant as a quickly recorded b-side track,
managed to distill something quite powerful about the cultural moment--where the aesthetic
force of cultural production from Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Southern California martial arts
cinema pierced through a tumultuous period of identity-body-negotiations, inciting racial
subjects to feel both united in the face of white supremacy and powerful enough to fight it. For a
newly arrived, skinny Bangladeshi kid in New York City, “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting”
felt like a promise and possibility.
351
Being racialized for the first time in his life and looking for
avenues to process these new experiences and feelings, my dad found himself fist-first in a dojo
in Queens. He chose Jiu Jitsu, a practice centered on defeating an armed opponent without using
a weapon (or using only a small weapon)—a technique that turned the attacker’s own energy
against them, a push back at power and its imbalances, a release of muscular tension through
purified ritual.
Training the revolutionary gut begins with the spasms of the stomach, arms, legs—
tracing the racial tensions we hold in our bodies and mapping their release. I share this story to
reflect on the fragile attempts we make to protect our interiority by curating the body. Training
the revolutionary gut, for my dad, was an act of radical care that allowed him to defend himself
against a world that does not want his brown body. I live in a world that both desires and despise
my fat, brown femme body, and have also found ways to arm myself against a world not meant
for me—albeit in ways different from the protective practices of my father. While the
revolutionary gut evokes a sense of musculature, fitness, and masculinity in its capacity to fight

351
It’s worth noting that the song was written and produced by a Jamaican singer and British-Indian
producer, an interesting iteration of a transnational, cross-racial cultural production in a song that has seen
some controversy and disavowal over the years.

190
empire, there is another way in which can look at its supposed opposite—the fat, femme, and fat
hunger striker—as also a curation of a will to live fleshy and fully, in-between refusal and
recognition.
Former First Nation’s Attawipaskit Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike asks us how to
make sense of the fat body and the hunger-striking body as supposed opposite poles of
embodiment and consider these femme fugitives as world-makers. How do our bodies respond to
the body as extracted, as starvation aesthetics confront regional histories and misalignments? To
be fat is to be misaligned. Kim Chernin argues that thinness is not assumed as a natural state of
being, but rather, as an ideal we move toward by conditioning the body, regulating consumption,
working to tuck and tone.
352
Thinness becomes an ethical promise, a gendered and racialized
moral exercise upon which to act out the good citizen, good consumer, and good woman by,
literally, fitting in. To be fat is to let yourself go in the wrong direction. This dissertation has
been a map of what it means to go in that wrong direction by asking us to consider how bodies
craft a horizon of possibility and how appetites and sensations shape and shade the directions we
move towards.

352
Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Tyranny of Slenderness, page 13

191
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Creator Choudhury, Athia Nahar (author)

Core Title Gut cultures: fat matter(s) in genealogies of health, nation, and empire

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/25/2024

Defense Date 06/21/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian American and diasporic cultural production,Asian American studies,calories,critical nutrition studies,critical race theory,Dairy,disability studies,eating cultures,eating performances,fat studies,food studies,Gender Studies,metabolic personhood,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonialism,Public health,transnational feminisms,women of color feminisms

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Advisor Khanna, Neetu (committee chair), Kondo, Dorinne K. (committee chair), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Tompkins, Kyla Wazana (committee member)

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