Mimicry at the ‘Compton Cookout’: Black women and the racial-gendered culinary fantasy

In this paper, I develop a concept that I call the racial-gendered culinary fantasy, which I define as an imaginary site in which race, gender and food are mutually constitutive categories that construct ideas about difference, personhood, and worthiness. In a racial-gendered culinary fantasy, food is the vehicle through which racial-gendered myths and fantasies are deployed to reinforce a racial order that promotes white supremacy and misogyny. This study analyzes the ways in which a particular cultural artifact, a Facebook post, produces a racial-gendered culinary fantasy. The Facebook post invited students to the Compton Cookout, a racially themed party organized by students from the University of California, San Diego in 2010, deploying demeaning discourses. I argue that a racial-gendered culinary fantasy is produced through this artifact, by shaming “Black foods,” obscuring Black women’s food insecurity, and fuzing the tropes of the Jezebel and Sapphire into the “ghetto chick.” Engaging discourse analysis and cultural studies as my methods, I find that cultural artifacts are crucial in the production of racial-gendered difference and obfuscating food inequities for Black women. This study engages the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, critical food studies, Black food studies, and Black feminism.