Lee Miller’s Gut Modernism: Science, Materiality, and Food

Abstract: This article digs into the archival remains of renowned photographer Lee Miller’s late food art to uncover there a project with key relevance to corporeal feminism and modernist food studies. Drawing on the scientific underpinnings of Miller’s work, including her own long gut disease and treatment, the essay recognizes in her food art a “gut modernism” that stages the entanglements of culture, the viscera, biochemistry, technology, and ecology to offer new and open ways of thinking, living, and relating through gender, the body, food systems, and materiality writ large. Miller’s provisioning, cooking, and entertaining experiments adapt modern digestive science and medicine as well as food science and technology to promote an experiential reflection on gut materiality and the emergent nature of human and more-than-human being. At the same time, these experiments sidestep the values of efficiency, instrumentalization, and hidden labor that suffused the increasingly global and industrial food system and the domestic relations it supported. Miller’s gut modernism, in other words, made her audience ruminate on the full ecology of food and also actively resisted the gendered and, more subtly, the (neo)imperialist structures of modern domesticity and indeed art.