Leslie Feinberg says, “To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”
I was taught:    Lesbian
            That is what I called myself for over ten years—publicly for about half that time.
            Six years ago, I was introduced to another term—personal label if you will—that, to this point, seems better suited (so to speak) to describe how I see myself in relationship with the world: transgender
            Qualifiers: Non-operative, non hormone taking.
            Or, as I sometimes prefer, Genderqueer. 
            I am a person who my friends, based on my ability to withstand cold temperatures, call, if in jest, Viking grrl-boi.
            I am a warrior and my weapon, my power, cunning, creativity and resolve—each together, separately, is my cunt.

During the Spring Semester of 1996, for a course in folklore, I wrote an essay entitled, “Problems in Ethnographic Writing: We Can Lick ‘Em.”  In it, I examine food metaphors in lesbian sexuality in order to begin to explore the use and place of metaphor in ethnographic writing.  Specifically, I move from examples of the ways that lesbians equate food with sex and then suggest licking, rather than seeing, as a way of collecting ethnographic data.  I assert that lesbians, given a sometimes non-penetrative understanding of pleasure (surface rather than shaft), have a particular, highly evocative relationship with culture.

In this piece, I recount the myriad examples of food metaphors in lesbian fiction, the invocation of honey and ice cream, sweetness and licking—it’s always sweet, never salty or fishy.  I have, in fact, returned to this piece many times, trying to work it up, as it stood, for publication.  But now that seems sort of beside the point.  What matters to me is that this is the only piece of writing that I have kept from any graduate class.  What matters to me now is the kernel of an idea that remains, not within the pages of my essay, or in the pages of cookbooks, or in the pages of lesbian fiction, but in the lived experience of food and its connection with gender and sexuality.  Yes, I understand the irony in representing this experience on the page.  Hopefully, the representation itself is a bit more, shall we say, conscious of taste.

“Hey,” I ask my partner, “d’you know what I think this cake tastes like?”  I wait for a shrug and a smile.  “I think it tastes like sex.  You know,” I say as I smear some of the cream cheese frosting onto my fork and hold it in the air, “the frosting.”  I lick it off and reiterate, “I think it tastes like sex.”

When he was two, my son called me Daddy.  Then, on and off through being four, he called me Mama-Daddy.  Now, he mostly calls me Mom.  But, even as recently as last year, at the age of six, when my son was invited, “Trey, tell the class who you have with you today,” in a nonchalant, offhanded way he replied, “This is my, Dad.”  A couple of students giggled.  “Oh,” he stopped.  “I mean my Mom.”  

In shifting my own label, my own understanding of self from lesbian to transgender, I have become aware of the underlying assumptions regarding the ways that “being lesbian” made natural for me the relationship between language and identity.  Invisible to me was the notion that there could be a label, a subject-position that would not have specific narrative texts to help define and establish cultural boundaries and belonging.  As a lesbian, I felt a connection with lesbian culture through food metaphors.  I felt connected to the women’s culture of food, the kitchen and cookbooks.  I collected lesbian cookbooks and watched as many lesbian films as I could—noting the presence or absence of food.  In short, the materiality of my condition and connection with lesbian culture depended upon my own relationship with certain texts, the ways that language made me connected with a specific subculture.

“What do you want for dinner?” I ask my sixteen and twelve year old girls. 

"Scotch broth!”  Mikki shouts. 

"Well,” I say, “I don’t have any lamb on hand.  If you really want that, I have to plan to make it.” 

"What do we already have in the freezer,” the pragmatic older child asks.

"Lasagna, Shepherd’s Pie, and Boboti, I think.”
One wants lasagna and one wants shepherd’s pie, so they work it out between them which they will get which night. 

“Oh, God,” I hear them say as they walk away, “I love Amy’s food.”

“Yeah, it’s so much better than Dad’s.”

The Lesbian Erotic Cookbook was my first queer cookbook purchase.  Purple (an ink substitute for black) and white photos, most of which capture two mouths in proximity, or breasts in all manner of exposure (from covered, to bare, to obscured by flowers or food), make it less than likely that a lesbian who chooses to read the book will actually ever look at the recipes.  I know I never did.  Meant to.  Intended to.  But never did. 

Now, with a different purpose, I scan the recipes, noting the names, “Pulsating Potato Salad,” “Between Your Legs Creamy Undressing,” “Suck Me Spinach Enchiladas,” and, one of my favorites, “Kootchie Kugel.”  My ideas about surface and licking, the power of the tongue appear confirmed by this text.  But, ingredient for ingredient, I’d rather just look at the pictures, images that don’t make me all that interested in eating.  This is, as the title suggest, a cookbook by, for and all about lesbians.

For the drag queen there is also a culinary guide of sorts, The Drag Queen Cookbook &Guide to Sensible Living.  I ordered this on Amazon and never got it.  I was pissed, but am over it and figure I really wouldn’t have used it anyway.  Once, I was invited to submit a recipe for a Drag King Cookbook.  I did that, but never got a response and I can’t find it in publication anywhere.        

For the transgendered person who might actually cook?  Well, of course you could use absolutely any cookbook you choose.  One of my most favorites is the All-American stand-by, The Joy of Cooking.  I don’t think there isn’t one recipe I have used that I haven’t altered, or doctored, or otherwise spiced up in some way.  This book really does present you with the basics, food-frameworks within which to experiment and test your own culinary boundaries.     

A decade after beginning to collect cookbooks, I actually cook.  I complete all the grocery shopping and meal planning for a household that fluctuates from three, to four, to six, to ten members, depending upon the day of the week.  Though I could not and would not argue for a causal relationship, I do know that as my subject position shifted from lesbian to transgender, my relationship with food moved from a position of metaphor to actual experience.  I am no longer the lesbian scholar interested in food/sex metaphor.   I am now the transgender partner feeding a family, entertaining guests and providing for the functionality of a cooperative household. 

During these past ten years, lesbian culture has become more and more visible and accessible; it has moved to the center of popular film, network and cable television.  Lesbians are, indeed visible, at least in the sense that they “matter” to culture even if that connection of matter takes the form of opposition to their culture rather than support for.   Transgender culture, on the other hand, is anything but visible.  It is wholly and almost completely imperceptible in culture at large.

Every day, I am called sir.  Well, almost everyday.  I can’t be certain since I no longer really keep track.  But at one point a couple years ago I counted 35 straight days where I was addressed and recognized as a male.  These people are not wrong.  Not exactly.  I have never been mistaken as a man.  But am I ever actually seen as genderqueer?

What do you see?  A butch lesbian?  Dyke?  Am I all those too?

In her volume, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, Viviane K. Namaste defines the idea of transgender as I do, “an umbrella term used to refer to all individuals who love outside normative sex/gender relations—that is individuals whose gendered self-presentation (evidenced through dress mannerisms and even physiology) does not correspond to the behaviors habitually associated with the members of their biological sex” (1).  Transsexuals are, for the record, those individuals who are crossing genders in a more permanent way—operatively or not—and seek to maintain a more permanent connection with the biological gender to which they were not born.  Transgender folks occupy a place somewhere more in between.  They may or may not take hormones, change their names or be all that concerned with the pronouns used to address them.  It is this lack of specificity, this complication that makes these folks so invisible—especially in any kind of academic research that depends upon a discourse of male/female and masculine/feminine in order to provide understanding and definitions. 

My partner and I currently live in Oak Park, IL, the first suburb west of Chicago.  For the past eight years, I have been the one responsible for all the shopping and cooking of the food in our house.  My brother and Corrine’s sister both used to live with us; each has, in the past two years, gotten married.  My father, George, who has advanced AIDS, moved into our house December 2006 and then out into his own studio apartment May 2008.  Our eldest daughter Connie lives with us and while going to college.  The younger daughter lives in Ann Arbor, MI with her father—not by choice.  Corrine’s brother Dan says he will be living with us in six months if the real estate market in California doesn’t pick up by then.  People in and out, in and out of our house Corrine says they come for help, help “with transition.”  Presently, daily, we feed and nurture a core of four: me Corrine, Connie and our son, Trey, who is ten.  He is the product of my loins.

I love, love, love to go grocery shopping.  I go from store to store, not only shopping for the best value, but for variety.  Currently, I divide my time and resources among a range of stores for different products: Dominick’s, the regional, typical American grocery store for staples like milk, cream, sugar, flour and an occasional box of frozen waffles for my son; Caputo’s, a local Italian shop for their wide selection of cheese, including every conceivable size of fresh mozzarella, as well as homemade sausages in no less than six different flavors; Whole Foods, the over-priced, upscale market for coffee—French Roast or Pleasant Morning Buzz—and their truffles, which are definitely a good deal; Matsuya, a gigantic Japanese super-store in the suburbs for edamame, udon, snack food for my Asia-phile son and this thick-sliced bread from the bakery in the back; Headon’s Meats, a butcher way out by my brother, 65 miles west of my house where I can get non-certified organic meats that are absolutely fabulous.  I buy from Headon’s only once or twice a year, in bulk.  Sometimes I split a half a cow or a pig with my brother.  Other times, I just buy what I choose and fill my freezer with anti-biotic free, chicken, beef and double-smoked pork products.  And, if I can get actual game, all the better.  Just yesterday, my teaching assistant brought me venison from his dad’s freezer.   

And, of course, all this food requires equally lovely drink, so I have purchased a kegerator and make monthly treks to Marshall, MI—to the Dark Horse Brewery—to get some of the best microbrew I have tasted.  Right now, we have Amber on tap.   

If Corrine is home when I return from the shopping I will say, “Come and see what I got!”  She looks and laughs and nods.  “And guess, guess how much I spent?”  She never actually guesses.  I announce the amount.  I mount each can, piece of fruit, quart of cream on shelves, every one a trophy in my game room.

In my grad-school essay, I argue that, “the lesbian body, as a site for sexual pleasure, becomes a metaphor for a culture as it reifies itself in ‘membraneous moments.’” (15).   The “membraneous moments” exist because of the drive for lesbians to create another language for sex in order to break from the dominant sexual language which speaks to and through a heterosexual paradigm.  In this instance, the site of cultural resonation is not the penis, but the tongue.  Furthermore, I claim that, “In using the tongue in ethnographic research, the ethnographer will find it easier to examine every crack and crevice of a culture to feel and taste all the culture may have to offer” (16).  Rather than penetrating a culture, you might want to simply lick it, and in considering it’s taste, work to evoke for a reader the multiplicity of meaning within any particular culture through prose that concentrates on “membranous moments.”  The ethnographer should seek language that invites a reader to “resonate” and “vibrate” with a culture in “such a way that she/he licks her/himself as he/she licks the Other.”

Literary lesbians like licking liquid language.

Genderqueer guys get their groove on generative groceries

Culinary cunts craft cuisine for collective consideration.

L words.  They loll around on my tongue as would a nipple—sensually and seductively, in pure pleasure.  The G—g-g-g--and the C—c-c-c, with them I don’t merely lick but, chew and nearly swallow.  In which words is there the most taste? 

I was not, in a particularly gendered way, invited into the space of woman’s culture through my mother, through the sharing of family recipes, and the making of food.  Certainly, my mother did most of the cooking in our household, but she always seemed far too bothered and oppressed by her domestic duties to demand this work of me.  Perhaps, this was her own kind of feminist resistance.  And, to be honest, I would have been less than interested in acquiring such girly skills.  Yeah, I could make food, OK.  My brother and I would make bagels after school, heat up a frozen pizza, or make macaroni and cheese.  But I really didn’t have much interest in food or cooking.

But this doesn’t mean that the kitchen is not at all relevant to my own relationship with and understanding of gender.  To the contrary.  The kitchen is the place where I have and continue to find material, experiential connection with being transgender.  

Sherrie Inness tells us that, “Kitchen culture is a critical way that women are instructed about how to behave like “correctly” gendered beings.  If we are to understand women’s gender roles in the United States, we need to study food” (4).  But, then Alice B. Toklas tells us, in her cookbook that, in addition to women, “men in France play a very active part in everything that pertains to the kitchen.”  It is the man, she argues, and his criticism that will, “keep her culinary taste up to an almost solitary peak.”  Sexist, your American sensibility might argue?  Perhaps, so.  I am not French, but my transgendered self is comforted by a perspective that redoubles my place and power in the kitchen.
 
We have a six bedroom house and I like to cook for people.  So, yes, you can come over for dinner.  

When I think of the kitchen in the house I grew up in there is one overwhelmingly consistent memory for me:  the image of my father teaching me how to walk in heels.

“Like this, from the pelvis,” he would say, “gently, but deliberately, place one foot in front of the other.”

“Like this?” I would try, having chosen to begin in one inch heels.

“No, no trucky, you’re still walking with your shoulders and from the knee.  Like this.”      

I would watch Pops glide across the maroon brick linoleum in his loafers, on his toes.  Silently, I fumed, resenting his name calling.  Trucky was short for truck driver.  It embarrassed me and I hated it.  But I just kept going.

“That’s it, that’s it,” he would say.  “That’s it, Aim, feel your pelvis.”  In a few minutes, it would start to become fun.  I could feel the place and space of girl in my body, of woman walk, of feminine energy.  It wasn’t me, not exactly, but I could feel it and, if it meant I would fit in better like this, then I would do it.

“This is kinda fun,” I would say and for the next few minutes I would stroll back and forth across the floor pivoting and doing all I could to signify in the feminine.  If my brother was home, it is at this point that he would hop off the couch and the three of us together, the closeted gay man, the transgender girl/boy and the redneck hillbilly in training, would prance to and fro on the kitchen floor, a flourish of femme drag.  When the giggles erupted into laughter, my brother and I would begin to try to knock each other off balance.  My Dad would back out so as not to enter the fray.  “Oh worms,” he’d sigh.  And I would be released from the lesson until the next time. 

If I could, dear reader, I would now feed you food crafted from the cunt. 

Curry, Indian style curry, is the only thing I make without any textual recipe guidance.  The general idea of how to make curry was taught to me by a man, a young man who had spend a year in India.

He came over to my house one night and I just watched him cook.  First, a little olive oil in the pan, then about a teaspoon of brown mustard seeds.  You let them hop and pop for a couple minutes.  Then, onion.  Lots of onion.  Now, add a few cloves of minced garlic at this point and stir for just a bit longer, waiting for the onion to become translucent.  Lentils are added next.  And, I usually precook them so they are really ready to absorb the flavors around them.  I use red lentils most often because they are more delicate and end up becoming more like a very thick sauce.  How much lentils?  I don’t know.  I guess a cup or so.

Then, add a can or couple cups of a broth—vegetable is best since this will be a vegetarian meal.  Curry must always be vegetarian in my mind—if I cook it.  Meat is too tinny for this recipe.  If I were to cook you meat, I would talk about other things I learned from my Dad, like how to use fruit.  Whitefish in green grape sauce, or pork tenderloin brushed with an orange marmalade and brown mustard glaze.  Meat understood through the sweet strength of his own queer sensibilities.  He will refer to Martha Stewart at least once in each cooking lesson, and daydream about what would happen if this aging queen were to meet that butch bitch someday. 

But this is cunt curry, so spices come next: cumin, garam masala, and Indian—not that silly yellow, American curry.  Sea salt.  Sometimes I add a bit of red pepper, depending upon my desire for heat.  Now, more vegetables—carrots, a can of diced tomatoes, (if you don’t have any fresh from the garden), cauliflower, potatoes, green beans.  Sometimes a can of garbanzo beans.  Then, simmer.  Until all vegetables are soft, until the house smells like the very place you want to be on the coldest, wettest early spring night.  I taste it many times during the process, adding more spice after almost every taste. 

Cunt curry is served over jasmine or basmati rice cooked in a can of coconut milk.

This is my recipe.  Well, mostly.  I left something out.  I left out telling you about the butter.  Maybe this is my secret ingredient.  But it seems odd for me to keep it a secret, so I will tell you, only you.

When you add the lentils to the onion, you add a stick of butter.  Yes, a whole stick.  Don’t skimp here.  Don’t even think about fat or cholesterol because even thinking about those things ruins the whole dish.  Cooking isn’t about being healthy.  It is about being well.  Americans don’t understand the difference.

So, you let the butter melt, adding the spices to the lentils, before you add the broth and the vegetables.  See, this is the secret: The luxurious surface area and curves of that sweet creamy butter hold those strong penetrative spices better than they hold themselves.