Dieting As A Racial & Colonial Technology Of Forgetting
When we celebrate food restriction, we celebrate the colonial ideology from which it's derived, thereby attempting to avoid responsibility for the devastating damage that ideology has caused.
Welcome to the fourth installment of my new Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI. This vertical is a monthly series of experimental audiotextual (audio + text) essays. The full essay is available for paid subscribers. You can listen to this month’s edition by scrolling down to the bottom of the article and hitting play.
“Eating threaten(s) the foundational fantasy of a contained self - the ‘free’ liberal self — because, as a function of its basic mechanics, eating transcend(s) the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject and object, as food turn(s) into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then provide(s) the energy that drives them all.”
- Kyla Wazana Tompkins
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
- William Faulkner
In her 2012 book Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, Kyla Wazana Tompkins writes, “It is exactly as a site of racial anxiety that eating is most productively read.”
She points out that we in the United States understand race primarily through skin, and of course, skin color (she refers to this as the “epidermal ontology of race”). She encourages us to look at another site to help us understand the history of race.
Not skin - but the mouth.
Likewise, we primarily understand the technologies through which race/racism is reproduced as the police, redlining, prisons, mainstream media, and racial profiling.
I’d like to encourage us to look at another technology — a specific type of eating (or non-eating). Dieting is a technology that coopts the body via the mouth as a