This is the 2026 Queer Food Conference schedule.
If you are looking for the archived schedule from the 20224 conference, see: https://www.queerfoodconference.com/p/schedule.html
Scroll down to see the version of the schedule that includes more detailed descriptions of the panels, workshops, and roundtables.
Please note that all in-person events, unless specifically noted otherwise, will be livestreamed for folks that have registered for the virtual conference. All registered conference participants will receive a list of the zoom links. The panels in which all the presenters are presenting in virtual form will be livecast into a physical room at the conference.
Friday May 1
2:45 PM: Check in Opens (Trottier Mezzanine, 2nd Floor)
3:00-5:00 PM: Opening Reception (Trottier Mezzanine, 2nd Floor)
This event will include words of welcome from the conference organizers. The event will be catered by queer caterer Sophie Christinel of Pansy Cafe, the creators of which will also say a few words. McGill Rare Books and Special Collections will display queer cookbooks from the collection.
Saturday May 2
8:15 AM Check-in Opens (Trottier Mezzanine, 2nd Floor)
8:45-9:15 AM: Breakfast & Welcome (Trottier 0100)
Conference organizers Alex D. Ketchum and Megan J. Elias will welcome by participants. Breakfast and coffee will be provided to all conference attendees. As we eat together, the founders of Royale Ginette, Geneviève Casaubon and Mathilde Rébillard, will talk about what making queer food means to them.
Morning Sessions A: 9:30- 11:00
Room # 1080
Panel: The Labour, Enterprise, and Business of Queer Food Panel with Andy de Groot, Anna Soloniuk, Rebecca Gorena, and Ulysses H. Swanson
Andy de Groot
This paper examines the ethical commercialisation of Queer Food in Australia, exploring how a social enterprise model can sustain a business while honouring untold LGBTQIA+ stories. Each catering dish and retail product is designed to narrate the life of an Australian queer person, group, or historical moment. As a social enterprise, Queer Food also creates affirming employment pathways and reinvests revenue into an Impact Fund to support access to gender-affirming care and other queer ventures. Examples of Australian LGBTQIA+ stories include the Andrew Barr Democracy Sausage Canapé celebrating Australia’s first openly gay Chief Minister, Rainbow Bow Tie Pasta inspired by Canberra’s drag kings, and a Tea launched at Qtopia, Sydney to honour the 1978 Mardi Gras protesters. On the catering side, menus highlight local histories, while the national retail product range includes products to represent every state and territory. Each item is paired with a story and digital reference, ensuring these narratives move from catering tables and retail shelves into homes and everyday kitchens. This paper interrogates how Queer Food as a social enterprise can ethically commercialise queer food, showing that food can be both a site of cultural preservation and a vehicle for material community support.
Anna Soloniuk and Rebecca Gorena
From covert resistance to police raids to contemporary solidarity events for Gaza, migrant justice, and trans rights, bartenders have served not only drinks, but safety, strategy, and care. At a moment of intensifying authoritarianism, rising rents, and shrinking public space for collectivism, the work of queer nightlife laborers remains a vital form of grassroots infrastructure. This paper surveys bartenders and servers in New York City’s lesbian bars of the present day as key agents of activist labor. It situates service work within a broader history of state regulation and capitalist exploitation of queer leisure, arguing that these workers build and maintain critical political infrastructure in a world increasingly hostile to dissent. In doing so, our work asks what forms of collective life remain possible under conditions of crisis, and what service labor makes them so. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with current and former workers, the project investigates how service labor has operated as a form of community defense, mutual aid, and political organizing.
Ulysses H. Swanson: "A Gem on the Prairie": District 31 Victoria's and Queer Fine Dining on the Minnesota-North Dakota Border, 1983–2005
Drinking and eating establishments that intentionally appealed to queer clientele began to emerge in urban areas of the American Upper Midwest in the 1970s and 1980s, typically in the form of bars, coffeehouses, and hotel restaurants. These establishments appeared in gay and lesbian travel guides and paid for advertisements in regional queer magazines published in urban cities, such as Equal Time (Minneapolis, Minnesota) and Gay Peoples Union (GPU) News (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). As the queer urban foodscape developed in areas like the Twin Cities, Duluth-Superior, and Fargo-Moorhead (FM), couple Mark Nelson and John Oliver established the fine dining restaurant District 31 Victoria's in an abandoned school in rural Wolverton, Minnesota, intent on creating a space for gay men to meet outside nearby FM. This paper further examines the relationships District 31 Victoria’s had with community and with expectations around dining, along the axes of queer and cisheterosexual, rural and urban, to highlight its unique position. This paper also compares District 31 Victoria’s approach to queer food to more modern approaches to queer community building and food that persist in rural Minnesota today.
Room #1090
Panel: Delicious Media and Storytelling with Khori Eubanks, Edward A. Chamberlain, and Laura Kitchings
Khori Eubanks: Queer Food in Manga as a Form of Political Activism
Manga, or Japanese comics, have used food as a form of resistance and liberation for LGBTQ+ communities in Japan, and globally, as a response to prejudiced legislation harmfully restrictive societal norms. In my analysis of ‘She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat' by Sakaomi Yuzaki, I work to translate the queer food patterns as well as the implication of such publications to expand upon how food is used in throughout the established, yet growing topics of queer food in manga. The research looks closely at how the medium works to portray the lives, values, and identities of queer communities using food cultures relevant to modern and historical Japanese food culture.
Edward A. Chamberlain: Humorous Eating: Comparing Queer Food Experiences in Comedic and Popular Storytelling
In recent decades, one of the ways that LGBTQ+ people have been incorporated into popular media is through incorporating queer and gender non-conforming people in humorous scenes involving food. Such humor resonates with varied contemporary audiences, however this televisual pattern also dates back in time, where minoritized groups were made to look quirky and humorous to a broader audience through placing them alongside food that could resonate as unusual. For instance, in the twentieth century some people of color were associated with ostensibly unusual foods in comedic television such as in the case of the Jeffersons (1976), where Louise unexpectedly makes a Possum Stew for George. On the show Six Feet Under, a gay character feels oddly isolated at a gay brunch, where various gay characters gather for a social connection (2003). To develop a critical perspective on the subject of queer food experiences in comedic storytelling, this project examines older scenes and recent ones such as those from the hit television show Schitt’s Creek and the online program Cooking with Drag Queens for the sake of explaining their sociopolitical significance and why they continue to resonate.
Laura Kitchings
Miss Jane Marple is first introduced in a short story by Agatha Christie, where she solves an unsolvable crime and uncovers related sexual harassment using her lifelong observations of human food behavior and sexual norms. In later Marple works, featuring an omnipresent narrator, Marple's inner monologues display her actual disinterest in both food and sex. As with many queer individuals, Marple uses food to create her found family. At her home, funded by her nephew, she trains orphaned girls for a career in home food service, remaining active in their lives after they leave her home. Her lack of interest in food and sensual and romantic companionship places Marple in contrast to Christie’s Poirot, who is obsessed with food, and Marple’s spiritual heir, widow Jessica Fletcher, engages in several short flirtations with men. This paper will discuss how the character of Marple carefully crafts her performance as an asexual older woman around food events to further her career as a sleuth. While consisting of original observations, this work is rooted in the work Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (2016) and relevant episodes of Christie-centric podcasts All About Agatha and The Swinging Christies.
Room #1100
Panel: Embodied Relationships with Kate Bursey, Suisui Wang, and Isabel Barbosa
Kate Bursey: Tempeh and Acar: On Queer and Diasporic Relationships to Fermentation
This research creation project considers Indonesian fermentation practices through a diasporic and queer lens. It argues that fermented recipes passed through diasporic families offer a unique opportunity to locate the queer and diasporic self by working with time and distance to create both nourishment and a new site to locate one’s identity. This project draws parallels between fermentation’s use of time to transform ingredients from one state to another, to how queer identities find themselves while bridging gaps in time created through operating as a marginalized and varied culture and moments of rupture and collective trauma, such as the AIDS pandemic. Further, considering the diasporic identity’s relationship to distance and working through similar sites of rupture and lack of a predetermined path results in a similar need to craft one’s own understanding of identity. Thus, this project looks to adaptations of Indonesian fermentation recipes that draw from the author’s Chinese-Indonesian background and include non-traditional ingredients. In using local North American ingredients to adapt Indonesian fermented recipes this work illustrates specific intersectional experience of queer and diasporic identity making within North America. Here the recreation of recipes passed through a diasporic family and, furthermore queered, offers a unique site to generate nourishing understandings of selfhood and identity.
Suisui Wang: Feeding the Gaze: Nymphia Wind's Food Drag and the Gendered Consumption of Asian Femininity
This paper examines drag queen Nymphia Wind's strategic deployment of food imagery to understand how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in queer food performance. As the first East Asian winner from Taiwan on RuPaul's Drag Race, Nymphia Wind navigates between mainstream white audiences and the historically Black and Latinx origins of ballroom culture. Through her "food drag"—impersonating bananas, boba tea, and employing yellow aesthetics—Nymphia Wind transforms racial signifiers into consumable content. Her performances exemplify "alimentary ornamentalism," whereby Asian femininity becomes decorative garnish that renders racial difference digestible for mainstream consumption. Yet this framework also reveals productive possibilities: Nymphia Wind strategically exploits Taiwan's geopolitical ambiguity between U.S. and Chinese empires to perform both Asian American stereotypes and regional authenticity. This case study contributes to critical food studies by examining how food functions as both constraint and agency in racialized queer performance. Nymphia Wind's success depends on making Asian femininity literally digestible while exploiting geopolitical positioning for performative flexibility. Her work illuminates how marginalized identities are packaged for consumption in queer media spaces, revealing food as a site of intersectional negotiation where race, gender, and sexuality create possibilities for both exploitation and resistance in contemporary queer food cultures.
Isabel Marie Barbosa: Crumbs of Eros
Crumbs of Eros is an ongoing project exploring themes of queer embodiment, eroticism, and temporality through the lens of food. The project, whose form is still in process, builds upon a foundation of cooking as inquiry, arts-based research, and phenomenology to eke out the transformative potential for queer eroticism. The erotic experience is a mode of perception—an opening up, an unfolding—which reveals new potentialities to the Lover. This embodied experience takes place in the world, rather than in an isolated consciousness—just as our food experiences do—and decreases the interpretive distance between ourselves and others. In doing so, the erotic experience offers a different type of comprehension—one that links body to body without interpretative mediation. Through Eros, much like eating, we are confronted with the boundaries of bodies—our own and those of others—and leave changed. In exploring queer Eros through the lens of food, we can begin to shed light on the expansive ways food and sex can be used to complicate our understanding of the world, Self, and Other. This paper puts language to the process, form, and content of a project otherwise focused on non-linguistic experience.
Morning Sessions B: 11:15-12:45
Room #1080
Workshop: Creating an Edible Queer Commons with Becky Ellis
Edible gardens can be spaces in which queerness is celebrated and queer communities are created due to the diversity, vibrancy, and reciprocity that are central to flourishing edible gardens. The process of commoning, collectively sharing and governing land and resources, can occur in these spaces strengthening systems of mutual aid and solidarity that already exist in many queer communities. This workshop will explore the possibilities of edible gardens as spaces of queer urban commoning, drawing on academic literature and on the facilitator’s personal experience creating queer community in her backyard garden in Hamilton, Ontario. In this workshop, participants will be guided in designing edible queer communal gardens, including in spaces that are not typically regarded as commons, such as private yards. The opportunities and challenges of these spaces will be explored, as well as the logistics of securing a location, designing a collective garden, nurturing multispecies garden communities, and facilitating planting, harvesting, and food preparation as shared activities. This workshop will involve hands-on garden design and planning.
Room #1090
Workshop: Resilience Medicine with Queer Plant Kin with Ericka Mabrie
This workshop will dive into dandelion, a much misunderstood herbal ally that offers so much support for both the body and spirit while we move through the pressure cooker of societal transformation. Considered bisexual and perfect from a botanical standpoint, this plant has so much medicine to share about gender expansiveness, resilience, righteous anger and the power of our voices. This can be a cooking demo (sautéed dandelion greens) or herbalism workshop (dandelion vinegar) or combination of the two.
Room #1100
Panel: Theorizing Queer Food with Catalina Tinoco Ruiz, Stefan Wahlen, Tobias Diewald, Juliane Yildiz, and Jackson Tucker
Catalina Tinoco Ruiz: I Love It When You Glut: Apple Metaphors in a Lesbian Poem
In her essay “Woman as Fruit: The Language of Eating and Female Sexuality”, Katherine Jordan points out that the subversive nature of lesbian relationships in literature can be seen in the metaphorical eating of another woman. In the same vein, for this paper I would like to present an analysis of the homoerotic poem “I Watch Her Eat the Apple” by award-winning mojave poet Natalie Diaz. In these verses, the poetic voice reconstructs the century old literary tradition of associating love, sex, desire and women to food. She presents a lover that eats an apple rather than being eaten, and so, the poem shows sexual desire can be about lusting for someone who consumes rather than about consuming. My purpose is to divulge one of the endless forms that sapphic desire can take. Particularly, this one is subversive even beyond the power structures of eater and eaten because it is between equals and not about relinquishing power.
Stefan Wahlen, Tobias Diewald, and Juliane Yildiz: Analyzing Food Inequalities: Queer Food as a Kaleidoscopic Framework
Food is a site where social order is enacted on and through bodies. This paper proposes “Queer Food” as a kaleidoscopic framework for analyzing food inequalities from trans* standpoints. Rather than an identity label, our Queer Food Kaleidoscope reads eating as embodied knowledge: practices (e.g. shopping, cooking, sharing) that sediment technique and render norms tangible. The framework uses three lenses: (1) angle (inside perspective: embodied orientations and situated knowledges), (2) light (outside perspective: regimes of legibility, including healthism, animacy, and debility), and (3) arrangement (structures: care infrastructures across households, markets, and institutions). The three lenses allow us to track how multiple versions of the body are enacted and coordinated. Drawing on biographical interviews with transgender and non-binary persons in Germany, the analysis shows how intersectional inequalities and marginalization shape everyday eating. Our contribution is twofold: conceptually, the Queer Food Kaleidoscope consolidates queer-feminist and praxeological insights into a portable analytic; empirically, the kaleidoscope identifies leverage points where care arrangements and institutional settings can be reconfigured to reduce exclusion without moralizing diets. In conclusion, we emphasize the importance of recognizing trans* embodied expertise to alleviate food inequalities.
Jackson Tucker
This ethnographic study examines the Clifton Pleasure Club, a queer food community in Baltimore, Maryland, that positions the shared meal as a site of identity, belonging, and resistance. Described by participants as “a space for people to gather and celebrate their true selves, nourish their bodies, and build community around the dinner table,” the Club offers more than convivial potlucks: it reimagines how queer people cultivate relationality through food. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this project traces how practices of cooking, eating, and hosting become rhetorical acts that forge kinship networks outside of normative family and market structures. Attention is given to how the Pleasure Club’s gatherings mobilize affect—pleasure, care, joy, and hunger—as resources for sustaining community, while simultaneously negotiating histories of exclusion from both mainstream food spaces and heteronormative cultural scripts. By situating the Club within broader conversations in rhetoric, queer studies, and food studies, the project demonstrates how queer food communities generate alternative modes of sustenance and survival. Ultimately, this study argues that the Clifton Pleasure Club illuminates food’s central role in queer worldmaking, showing how shared meals can become infrastructures for belonging, critical memory, and the ongoing labor of imagining otherwise.
Lunch 12:45-1:45
Lunch, which is included with conference registration, will be catered by queer-women-owned Morena Mía Montreal.
Afternoon Sessions A: 1:45-3:15
Room #1080
Workshop: How to Survive the Professional Kitchen: A Practical Guide for Women and Gender-Diverse People with Olive Zeynep Kartal and Ariane Beaulieu-Gendron
The professional kitchen is often a male-centric space that is built upon the principles of French cooking which derive from a military brigade. Recent media like The Bear demonstrated just how far the Chef’s military deployment can go in terms of toxic and dangerous environments. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential does not have a section on how to survive the kitchen when you’re a woman, trans, or non-binary folk. In these re-enactments and artistic renditions of possible scenarios and prejudices, tangible advice and tried-and-true techniques are offered to stand up for oneself and make change in one's kitchen environments. The workshop leaders reveal cathartic and useful solutions to most common problems women and gender-diverse folk might experience in kitchens: sexism, undermining, sabotage, violence, arrogance, burns, cuts, failures–and the feminist and queer resistances that are born through it all. Note: Depictions of violent behaviour in kitchens will only be referenced and not depicted. This workshop is committed to creating a safe space and being conscious of any traumas.
Room #1090
Panel: Queer Food Pasts with Simon Thibault, Annelise Heinz, and Joshua Lopez
Simon Thibault: Outside and In: A Queer Acadian Historiography
In 2017, I wrote Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food. It was the first english-language Acadian cookbook published in nearly twenty years. I found myself talking about foodways and folkways, what it means to be an Acadian historically and today. It was embraced by readers who wanted to understand where they and their foods fit. Years later, I made a flippant comment to a friend that, “who would’ve thought that I would be talking about anything Acadian.” Being an openly queer kid can be in a rural Acadian community in the 80’s and 90’s was synonymous with outsiderdom. But being an outsider -due to my queerness, my culture(s), my language(s)- is what gave me the tools to understand, investigate, expand, and expound on what it means to be both Acadian and Queer, and the intersections therein. In a country where French-language culture is viewed as a Monolith-Named-Quebec, the outsider Acadian understands what it is like to be derided just for being themselves, mocked and misunderstood due to what comes out of their mouths. I just had to learn how to express what goes in them to make room for me and other Acadians.
Annelise Heinze
Starflower Natural Food Distributors in Eugene, Oregon, was central to the 1970s–80s natural foods movement and lesbian community-building in the Pacific Northwest. Starflower introduced organic foods like brown rice, as well as raw milk, rennetless cheeses and “high quality herbs and spices” to much of the West Coast. They distributed food from San Francisco to Boise, delivering to food co-ops, buying clubs, and restaurants. The drivers trucked items to Seattle and San Francisco to be shipped to Alaska and Hawai’i. They supported the “feminist food” movement documented by Alex Ketchum. Starflower embodied a feminist, collective 'woman-centered economy,' aligned with Marxist feminist ideas of the commons—shared resources beyond private ownership. It modeled a lesbian commons with a feminist workplace, diverse community, and mutual investment between organization and workers." Unlike separatist spaces, Starflower aimed not to withdraw from society but to transform it, serving as a radical experiment rooted in and oriented toward wider social change. Founded in 1972, Starflower operated for 14 years, leaving a legacy in organic food and feminist collectives. It sought to escape the limitations of the capitalist heteropatriarchal model of work through specifically lesbian feminist practices. However, the business model could not be replicated by another generation, in part because its economic underpinnings had changed. Along with the mainstreaming of organic foods and rising costs, the transformation of radical economies challenged the sustainability of Starflower’s alternative vision and the centrality of lesbian-specific spaces.
Joshua Lopez
Scholarship in queer Chicanx/a/o studies has privileged embodied knowledge and lived experience as epistemic resources. As Michael Hames-Garcia observes, “our bodies and ours selves are lived legacies of colonialism, racism, xenophobia…and heterosexism…these processes cannot be adequately theorized without attending to our personal experiences.” Though embodied knowledge and lived experience is given priority, the thoughtful, embodied practices surrounding food and eating as it relates to queer Chicanx/a/o identity remains underexplored. Food stories cannot only attest to the visible and invisible scars left by the processes named above but they “provide the vehicle” to “the realm of revolution,” toward healing and social transformation. In this paper, then, I present a braided essay that weaves together literary analysis, historical narrative, and memoir to explore how foodways are a vehicle to healing and transformation within a queer Chicanx/a/o context. I place the food stories of writers such as Arturo Islas and Gloria Anzaldua, writers who told stories of their hungers and desires for healing, transformation, and fulfillment, in conversation with my own. The stories gathered together here bridge together queer Chicanx/a/o studies and food studies.
Room #1100
Panel: Cooking to Connect with Justin Burke, Cindy Mojica, Anna Salzman, and Joni Cheung
Justin Burke: The Queer History I Was Missing: Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookie Bars
What can a pan of butterscotch oatmeal cookie bars teach us about queer history? For me, they became the missing link between a past I had never been taught and the community I was finally beginning to understand. In this talk, I’ll share the story of Peter, a man in his late 80s who survived the Stonewall riots, lost his chosen family to AIDS, and passed along his late partner’s recipe for butterscotch oatmeal cookies. Over coffee and those cookies, I began to see queer history not as something erased, but as something safeguarded—in the recipes, traditions, and stories we share. As I prepare a batch of butterscotch oatmeal cookie bars, I’ll discuss how food has long been a vehicle for acceptance and belonging in queer communities. These bars aren’t just dessert; they’re an edible archive, carrying resilience, loss, joy, and survival from one generation to the next. Participants will leave with more than a recipe—they’ll carry with them the understanding that every bite of food we share is part of our living history.
Cindy Mojica: Cooking with Our Elders
Chef Cindy Mojica will discuss her experience engaging with LGBTQ+ seniors at the Center on Halsted/Addison in Chicago, IL. In her time working as a culinary instructor at COH, she was given many opportunities to cook for the seniors participating and living in the Center on Addison. Once on break from teaching the workforce development program, she was able to start a cooking class series with a group of seniors called Cooking with Pride. From this engagement, she will share her findings on how to better serve our aging queer elders - focusing on the ideas of nostalgia, community building, nutritional needs & restrictions, and the practicalities of aging.
Anna Salzman: Sugar Coded: An Introductory Guide to Self-Expression Through Pastry Experimentation
Cooking is a unique medium for queer expression through subversion of culinary and social convention by means of experimentation, adaptation, and sensory exploration. Chefs and food writers wax poetic about flouting established gastronomic order and embracing hedonic impulse in the kitchen. Baking, though a subset of cooking, does not often conjure similar accolades. Its reputation as formidable and technical portrays the pastry domain as too rigid for such liberating creativity. Baking abides by a degree of precision; however, an understanding of ingredients and their interactions reveals opportunities to defy perceived limitations. Both processes allow us to blur boundaries in the same manner that queer individuals negotiate authentic self-expression while operating within a heteronormative society. The liminal space between universal laws of baking and recipe convention holds potential for queer identity expression, the exploration of desire, and communication of the sometimes-inarticulable aspects of the queer experience. This talk will introduce participants to the principles of baking science and ingredient interactions, focusing on cookies and methods of recipe alteration with tasty examples included. Participants will be guided through ways to alter a standard cookie recipe using baker’s percentages, empowering them to explore their own unique tastes and preferences beyond a recipe.
Snack Witch Joni Cheung: DTD: Down to Dumpling?
Snack Witch Joni Cheung will be discussing how they have been exploring queerness in their research and artistic practice via their ongoing project, DTD: Down to Dumpling? A call and response project sustained through exchanging hand folded, edible goodies, DTD it started during the global pandemic as a desire for Cheung to enact their family’s Sunday morning ritual of going to 飲茶 yum cha and ordering mountains of 點心 dim sum. Inspired by a memory of her folding 燒賣 siu mai and 雲吞 wonton with their dad, this lonely activity became a way for them to reach out to and care for loved ones and strangers from afar. Isolation provided room to percolate on thoughts around home(making), diasporic experiences, and familial relations in material+intangible realms. Continuing on through this collective time, the artist hopes to nurture acts of sharing space, stories, energy, and food—together.
Afternoon Sessions B: 3:30-5:00
Room #1080
Workshop: Queer Food, Queer Comics, Queer Food Comics! A Drawing Workshop with Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho
Participants will learn hands-on how the medium of sequential art can be used to communicate experiences with food, both as instructional guides and as evocations of personal memory. This workshop is ideal for those who are interested in graphic storytelling but are inexperienced or anxious about their drawing skills. The facilitator will frame the creation of food comics as a complimentary practice to food writing, communicating sensory details in ways that are unique to the medium but already intuitive to inhabitants of modern visual storytelling culture. After introducing the framework of food comics through a slideshow, Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho will lead the group through a series of drawing activities in which participants are invited to free-draw and recall a meal or dish that has special meaning to them as a queer person. Each participant will receive a sheet of paper printed with a comic panel template, with space for a drawing of the dish and a series of panels for drawing the ingredients/steps and reflecting on who or what circumstances make the dish so memorable. After 60 minutes, participants will pass their pages to Blue, who will collate everyone’s contribution into a digital pdf that will be emailed to participants.
Room #1090
Panel: The Health of Queer Food with Phillip Joy, Jessica Ordaz, and Kate Frick
Phillip Joy: Queer Compassion and Connection through a Comic Lens
This presentation shares 'Need', a comic co-created by researcher and artist David Winters as part of a qualitative study exploring the meaning of compassion in 2SLGBTQ+ communities. Based on participants' experiences, the comic follows a queer individual within a food delivery service to support others in their community. Through handwritten notes, check-ins, and emotional presence, the comic shows how food becomes a medium for connection, mentorship, and relational care. 'Need' illustrates how food sharing can counter isolation and foster queer belonging. The comic was developed through a collaborative process that translated research data into visual storytelling, where the emotional and political dimensions of compassion are made tangible. This presentation reflects on the power of comics to mobilize queer research in accessible and emotionally resonant ways, and invites reflection on how food functions as both material and metaphor in acts of queer care.
Jessica Ordaz
"Queering Veganism" discusses the importance of making veganism intersectional by examining the collective, Veggie Mijas, a “women of color/trans folks of color/gender non-confirming collective for folks that are plant-based or are interested in a plant-based lifestyle that have marginalized identities and/or experiences with food insecurity/food apartheids.” Grounded in participant observation, I center my experiences working with Veggie Mijas members across the United States, and focus on their efforts to queer or decenter whiteness in veganism. I also highlight the art of Veggie Mijas member Susy González to analyze how queer artists center their relationships with plants as a form of creative expression and to advocate for food sovereignty. González writes that “through Xicanx Veganism, [she] find[s] interest in the decolonization of one’s diet or a desire to reclaim the pre-colonial plant-based nourishment of [her] ancestors through food and herbal medicine.
Kate Frick: Should I buy the kitchen a six-pack?
I am fascinated by the conceptualization of the food & beverage industry's relationship with drugs and alcohol. As a lesbian, 20 year veteran of the hospitality industry, I am perpetually looking for the boundaries of problematic substance use and ways to increase wellness for the food & beverage community. As people who have very few resources when compared to traditional career track employees, hospitality workers don't often have access to mental health services, substance-use treatment options, harm reductions techniques or stress/ coping skills as part of their vocational resources. Queers make up a larger percentage of the F&B workforce over any other singular demographic, and also suffer at greater percentages from Substance Use Disorder, Alcohol Use Disorder and Co-occurring disorders. Partnering with my local restaurant association, I have build a grassroots movement in my community called "Take Good Care" to support the hospitality industry workforce with mindfulness techniques, harm reduction strategies and education about substance use. This information is for pre-contemplative clients who may not identify their relationship to alcohol or stimulants as a problem. The goal is to increase care and reduce shame.
Room #1100
Panel: Sharing, Communality, and Community with Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, Celeste Orr, Amelia Thorpe, Abi Hodson, Skylar Huebmer, and Julieta Flores Jurado
Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, Celeste Orr, and Amelia Thorpe: “Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing Fighting, Fucking, Crying, Drinking, Writing, Winning, Losing, Cheating, Kissing, Thinking, Dreaming” and EATING: On the Queer Joy of an L Word Rewatch Potluck in Atlantic Canada
We explore the intersection of queer joy, nostalgia, friendship, and communal eating through the lens of a recurring L Word rewatch potluck. Titled after the show's theme song—with the crucial addition of "EATING"—we examine how queer communities re/claim space, identity, and pleasure through shared rituals. Set against the often isolating backdrop of small-town Atlantic Canada (whose queer community is more intimately interconnected than Alice’s CHART), the rewatch potluck was struck as a gift to Author 1 who was simultaneously turning 40 and moving away. As we look back on our weekly gatherings, we foreground the ways that these L Word potlucks functioned as a critical site of (sometimes cringe!) media engagement and a joyful affirmation of queerness. Through gathering, watching, and eating together, we resisted normative isolation, forged connections through humour, critique, memory, embodiment, and gossip! Drawing on theories of affect, queer temporality, queer joy, and feminist food studies, we consider how food, friendship, and television converge to nurture body and spirit. The events’ informal, cyclical nature mirrors the rhythms of queer life: nonlinear, relational, and grounded in chosen kinship. Ultimately, we assert that the rewatch potluck was not merely nostalgic or escapist, but a deeply political, pleasurable, and sustaining act—one that feeds queer life in all its messy, joyful abundance.
Abi Hodson: Holding Flavour: Recipes to take you outside of time and place
In 2024 I facilitated a collaborative zine-making project with the RRANS (Rainbow Refugee Association of Nova Scotia ) Art Group. Through this project I investigate how flavour ephemera facilitates travel to non-linear timescapes. I define flavour ephemera as materials that reference or indicate flavours, this can include menus, recipe cards, grocery lists, photos, poetry, or zines. Flavour ephemera, like recipes, are not only rooted in the memories of the individual or lineage of individuals through whom they are passed down, they are also generous portals for other people to enter different time-space continuums. When I read a recipe that someone shares with me, I am traveling to their past while also constructing a future for myself in the mundanities of planning the groceries I need, who I’ll share it with, fantasizing on what it might taste like, etc. This creates lines of connection between the recipe sharer’s past to my present and future, extending a sensory web of sharing.
I ask: How does flavour ephemera facilitate non-linear time travel? How does flavour ephemera offer intimate portals into the past/present/future of another? What can we learn from these intimate webs of connection that we build through sharing flavours?
Skylar Huebmer: A Place at the Table: Queered Arrangements of Cookbooks, Restaurants, and Home-Cooked Meals
Food is a basic human need, yet it also serves as a powerful social and cultural force. This thesis investigates how food practices, specifically cookbooks, restaurants, and home-cooked meals, can be queered to create belonging, visibility, and material change for LGBTQ+ communities. Drawing on queer theory and the “Ideas, Arrangements, Effects” (IAE) framework developed by the Design Studio for Social Intervention, I define queered arrangements as altered social and physical structures designed in service of queer people. These arrangements challenge heteronormativity, combat intersecting systems of oppression, and foster collective forms of care and legacy outside of traditional family structures. Through a mixed-methods approach, I analyze queer cookbooks as texts that subvert the conventions of the genre to center queer lives and histories; examine restaurants that implement inclusive, anti-normative practices in their design, pricing, and community engagement; and document collaborative meals that enacted queered belonging. Across these sites, queering food practices emerges as a strategy for reimagining everyday life, reshaping spaces of nourishment into spaces of resistance, connection, and joy. This research demonstrates how reconfiguring the social and material arrangements of food can cultivate queer community, challenge norms, and sustain alternative forms of kinship and care.
Julieta Flores Jurado: Queer Uses of the Kitchen: Counter-Domesticity as Radical Commensality
With this paper, I will discuss queer counter-domesticity as an instance of what I call “radical commensality”—the strategies that marginalized groups devise around the table to contest intersecting systems of oppression, push for justice, and forge solidarity among other vulnerable communities. My earlier work has traced how food and hospitality practices intersect with abolitionist traditions and movements for racial and labor justice. Building on that foundation, I now turn to private spaces, asking how food labor in queer households enacts counter-domesticity. Inspired by John Birdsall’s assertion that “queer co-opting of straight domestic rituals” can operate as an “act of vandalism against the heavily riveted architecture of the patriarchal family unit,” I propose to theorize this vandalism as a form of radical commensality—“illegitimate” gatherings around food that exploit its relational properties to affirm themselves in rebellious opposition to norms that constrain what bodies and lives can mean or do. As for the theoretical framework, I will draw on Sara Ahmed’s notion of “queer use,” a useful concept for accounting for the unapologetic appropriation of spaces of heteronormative reproduction such as the home kitchen.
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Sunday May 3
8:15 AM Check-in Opens (Trottier Mezzanine, 2nd Floor)
8:45-9:15 AM: Breakfast & Welcome (Trottier 0100)
Conference organizers Megan J. Elias and Alex D. Ketchum will welcome by participants. Breakfast will be provided. As we eat together, Chrissy Durcak of Dispatch Coffee will talk about the intersections of coffee and queer food.
Morning Sessions A: 9:30- 11:00
Room # 1080
Panel: Remembering Queer Foods with Josh Hollands, Gwendolyn Elverson, Sara Clugage, and Emily Craig
Josh Hollands: Queering Cracker Barrel: Work, Food, and Culture Wars
In January 1991, Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores initiated a national policy of firing employees “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.” Lesbians and gay men were promptly fired from their jobs in numerous stores and restaurants across the South, however, a movement to have them reinstated also emerged. Further firings at Cracker Barrel and the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) chain contributed to claims for federal protections against discrimination on the basis of sexuality. In focusing attention on cases in Georgia and North Carolina this paper will examine the ways in which queer activists, notably Queer Nation Atlanta, drew attention to incidents of homophobic discrimination in southern fast food outlets and sought to build alliances with organized labor and Black activist groups. The paper will also examine how southern fast food workplaces both upheld and troubled notions of “queer labor.” Drawing on extensive archival research at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Stonewall National Museum & Archives, Duke University, Emory University, University of Georgia, and Atlanta History Center, this paper will examine activist strategies to overturn the policy, win back jobs for those fired, and influence national debate on need for workplace anti-discrimination laws.
Gwendolyn Elverson's Tomatoes: the Lesbian Fruit that Cares
This paper examines the construction of queer cafes in Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes and in its 1991 film adaptation. Set in the American South, this sentimental text is a prime example of how queer cafés exist as constant physical spaces that undermine the authoritarian rule of white heteronormative commitment. In the novel and film, queer spaces of food production and consumption are doomed to be destroyed because they do not subscribe to institutions that regulate sexuality, love, and material food production. Flagg’s novel instead accepts the grotesque, and freaks of the social order. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and bell hooks, I examine Fried Green Tomatoes and its film adaptation for their illustrations of a queer food space that accepts those that reject the social order. The closing of the cafe is, disappointingly, inevitable because queer food is inherently rebellious to white heteropatriarchy. I argue that while the Whistlestop cafe and the food it serves undermine imposed understandings of the stomach and sexuality, it struggles to move beyond a racialized conception of consumption.
Sara Clugage: Jello Wrestling and Queer Ambivalence
In a kiddie pool full of lime jello, people wrestle with the word “community.” Jello wrestling’s history as a sporting entertainment goes back at least to 1980, and for most of that history it has been compulsively heterosexual. In media coverage, it is almost always described with a sneer and a frown: as a gimmick for fraternity or backwoods parties, a low-class entertainment, or thinly veiled pornography. But in the early 2000s, many queer bars turned to jello wrestling as a fundraiser for HIV/AIDs causes. Taking as a case study the annual fundraising events at Charlie’s, a gay bar in Phoenix, AZ, I argue that jello wrestling coupled the “family-friendly” fun of jello with queer sexuality in an ambivalent alliance. Wrestlers and organizers disidentify with jello, working with its connotations of housewives and American industrial foodways and working against its straight cultural logic. Jello wrestling solidifies the ambivalence of aesthetic pleasure in foods with low cultural value. By making a camp performance out of wholesome nostalgia, gay bars reclaim jello to foster a queer counterpublic: a mutually-supporting queer community that identifies with the fruit flavors of a mainstream culture not culturally coded for them, without eliding that code's harm and contradictions.
Emily Craig: Tomato: Caring for the Lesbian Fruit
Native to the Americas, the tomato was once treated by European colonizers as a dangerous, poisonous fruit; in the twenty-first century, the tomato is beloved around the globe, and is a crucial ingredient in countless recipes. While the tomato’s former reputation is known by contemporary food historians and casual gourmands, it is the tomato’s distinctively lesbian, radically queer identity that deserves further analysis. In an interdisciplinary engagement with literary fiction, American agricultural history, lesbian culinary traditions, radical queer political theory, the AIDs epidemic, and the contemporary crisis of food sustainability, this cooking demonstration is split into two parts. It will begin with a discussion of the 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Published during the AIDs epidemic, I will analyze its depiction of radical queer community care. Next, inspired by a historical methodology that privileges making as embodied knowledge, I will pivot to culinary instruction as I prepare the titular dish of fried green tomatoes. As I prepare the dish, we will consider the tacit and sensual experience of cooking to interrogate community care, food, and queer relationality in an ongoing moment of escalating, global climate disaster.
Room #1090
Workshop: Queering the Crock: Fermentation as Radical Transformation with Mike Gill
This hands-on workshop explores sauerkraut as more than preserved cabbage—it's a queer methodology for transformation, collaboration, and resistance. Fermentation refuses binaries: raw/cooked, fresh/rotten, safe/dangerous, individual/collective. Like queer identities, kraut exists in productive in-between spaces, embracing what dominant food cultures reject as "spoiled" and transforming it into something nourishing and alive. We'll explore how fermentation practices challenge capitalist food systems that demand sterility, standardization, and predictability. Fermentation is inherently queer: it's messy, unpredictable, relies on invisible labor (bacteria!), and creates families of organisms living interdependently. The process requires trust in transformation, patience with uncertainty, and acceptance that control is an illusion—all deeply queer orientations to the world. Participants will make their own kraut while discussing fermentation's connections to queer world-making: How do we create sustaining cultures outside heteronormative structures? What does it mean to preserve and transform simultaneously? How can microbial interdependence model queer kinship and mutual aid? Leave with kraut, recipes, troubleshooting tips, and frameworks for understanding fermentation as queer praxis. No experience necessary—just curiosity and willingness to get your hands dirty.
Room #1100
Virtual Presentation: Eating to Live! A Docu-Play on Queer Food from the Kitchens of “Diseased Pariahs” with Jo Michael Rezes, Des Bennett, and Oliver Rizzo
As a creative team, we are developing a docuplay exploring the aesthetics, politics, and embodied histories of food and humor in HIV/AIDS culture through a contemporary, intergenerational trans lens. This hybrid performance / cooking demonstration project draws on archival material from the 1990s underground zine Diseased Pariah News (DPN), a zine publication “by, for, and about” people living with AIDS that circulated from 1990 to 1999. In particular, the project dramatizes recipes and articles from the zine’s beloved cooking column, “GET FAT, Don’t Die!” written under the persona Biffy Mae, a drag character created by co-founder Beowulf Thorne. Framed by a present-day, transgender protagonist researching DPN for their own recovery and community, the play fuses archival excerpts, embodied testimony, cooking show clips, all inspired queer food culture, disability justice, and racial critique. The character’s journey through the archive of "Diseased Pariah News" leads them to question how illness, taste, and desire continue to shape queer life. Through the frame of a “Julie & Julia”-style cooking narrative, the project weaves together a sensory meditation on chronic illness (including long-COVID), racialized nostalgia, and the uncanny eroticism of 1990s “white trash” aesthetics from NYC-based food collectives, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking, and beyond.
Morning Sessions B: 11:15-12:45
Room #1080
Roundtable: "Bad" at Business Roundtable with Bernadette Houde, Onya Hogan-Finlay Kim Kelly, Berlin Reed, Jess Lee, Chrissy Durcak, and Christale Terris
How can we thrive when we’re Bad at Business? This roundtable brings together queer food practitioners from the Montréal area to explore what it means to be bad at business — on purpose. In a world where “being good at business” often means exploitation or compromising values, how do we operate in queer food spaces without losing our tender queer souls? Many queer and feminist food businesses intentionally reject traditional notions of success in favour of models that prioritize other social justice values such as fair labour, environmental sustainability, or community collaboration over competition to name a few. These choices come with real costs — but also with deep rewards that can’t be measured in profit. Together, we will share experiences of what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what we’ve learned along the way. How can we build sustainability with minimal exploitation? How do we thrive when we choose to be bad at business? The discussion will be facilitated by Bernadette Houde, owner of Dépanneur Le Pick Up, who has been a restaurant owner and operator in Montréal for over 20 years.
Room #1090
A Recipe for the Erotic: The Queer Art of Tossed Salad with Diana Farin Molina and Sophie Ziner
This workshop builds on my previous work for the 2024 Queer Food Conference and for Queers at Table, where I wrote about the ways that food concretizes Audre Lorde’s theory of erotic power by emphasizing the embodied and communal nature of “queerly living and hoping in and against the violence of the normative world” (38). Working with printmaker Sophie Ziner, we will co-facilitate an exercise designed to unearth and catalyze the erotic within the participants as a collective through an interactive printing and cooking demonstration. Drawing from the tradition of gyotaku (Japanese fish printing), participants will use vegetables and handmade food-based ink to make a salad together, both relief-printed on paper and to share as a meal. This workshop integrates the experience of preparing and eating food with artistic expression and meaning-making to curate an aesthetic experience that queers the ideological and normative influences often bound to representational artworks. By utilizing food as an art germinator and as a constituent of the body, participants will approach art as an everyday queer food practice, cultivating a more immediate and haptic relationship to their creative labors and (re)productions.
Room #1100
Virtual Panel: Worldviews, Pasts, and Presents with Alli Riechman-Bennett, Sarah Robbins, Eric Ng, Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa, and Magaly Ordonez
Alli Riechman-Bennett and Sarah Robbins
The history of zine-making is inherently queer, from the self-actualization intrinsic to independent publishing to the communal information systems necessitated by the AIDS crisis-era government inaction and misinformation. Similar administrative complicity and censorship amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza has again necessitated the variety of political activism and communal information systems found in zines. Our presentation will cover our ongoing project “Casserole Magazine”, an inheritor of those original traditions of queerness, self-actualization, and community-based information. Sarah Robbins and I first began this project to collect the faux “salads” and hearty casseroles that plagued and delighted us at church picnics. Cass Mag isn’t alone in its capacity as a zine, and our presentation captures the process behind production, acting as a roadmap for people interested in using zines as a form of mutual aid.
Eric Ng: Queering Food in Dietetic Education
As a health profession, dietetics is inherently linked with food and food systems. The discourse of food in our profession shapes our interactions with the lives of 2SLGBTQ people across food and health systems. Concepts of food are essential to the training of dietitians in Canada. As educators, how can we “Queer” food in dietetics education and training? In this paper, I will discuss my efforts to integrate 2SLGBTQ curriculum related to food within professional practice courses of a graduate dietetic training program. I will specifically explore “queering” education practices across the three main areas of dietetics: nutrition care, food provision, and population health promotion.
Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa: Food Crisis or Food Grief? Race, Hunger, and Time Under Late-Stage Settler Colonialism
This presentation combines qualitative interviews with critical race, political, and queer theories and Indigenous cosmologies to examine the current “food crisis” among racialized and Indigenous Ontarians. My analysis draws on data collected from my research project Exacerbated Hunger, in which I interviewed a total of 30 food justice activists, foodbank advocates, and racialized and Indigenous food provision users about their thoughts on racialized food insecurity in the era of COVID-19. An unexpected finding of the study was that many participants felt something akin to “food grief” and expressed a persistent yearning for a former way of eating. They specifically remarked how, in their youths and/or “homelands,” they had direct access to the land and, therefore, fresh produce,but now (living in Ontario) are dependent on overpriced grocery store chains. I identify these two eras as “Food Abundance” (the Historical Past) and “Food Alienation” (the Historical Present) “and combine the perspectives of “Queer Temporalities” and “Indigenous Place Thought” to reposition them as “food temporalities:” queer time-binds that form our evolving kinship with food within our “living present” of late-stage settler colonialism. With this, my goal is to reframe the current “food crisis” as an ongoing site of colonial “food grief” that is located at the nexus of colonial abjection and capitalist alienation.
Magaly Ordonez
Cannabis infused edibles and food as we know today trace back to survival mechanisms among queer communities during times of political stigmatization and state violence such as the HIV/AIDs epidemics. The historical connections between cannabis and queer communities grounds this presentation’s queer trans Chicanx reflections on the ways in which cannabis holds space for queer and trans people to find pleasure through food amid perpetual violence. I consider: What is the role of cannabis in queer and trans spaces? What are the relationalities sustaining queer and trans cannabis culture? Hosted by Josh Leyva and Ngaio Bealum, Cooking on High is the “first-ever competitive cannabis cooking show” streamed on Netflix. In the episode “Roll ‘Em Up,” for instance, a Black butch lesbian judge shares a “coming out” story that visibilizes queer Black cannabis communities. Research insights offer a bridge between the historical cannabis brownies made and distributed in San Francisco to combat AIDS to cannabis food shows whose visibility in mainstream media has helped shift narratives about cannabis itself. Taking a queer feminist relational race and ethnic studies approach, I position visual media as an example of queer cultural relationships to food in Chicanx/ Latinx, Black and other BIPOC communities.
Lunch 12:45-1:45
Lunch will be provided to all conference registrants. We will have some of Montréal's famous bagels from Fairmont Bagels (there will also be gluten free options). (Trottier Mezzanine 2nd floor)
During the lunch break, there will be the:
New books in Queer Food Celebration Event: Author Signing (Trottier Mezzanine 2nd floor, by the L'Euguélionne bookseller's table)
Come celebrate the publication of Queers at the Table with many of the books contributors. During this time there will also be authors and contributors to other books on queer food signing their books.
Afternoon Sessions A: 1:45-3:15
Room #1080
Workshop: East Coast Kitchen Party: A Ceilidh-Inspired Program to Reduce Social Isolation and Food Insecurity Among LGBTQIA+ Newcomers with Liane Khoury and Sam MacLellan
Food is never just food. For LGBTQIA+ and newcomer communities, it can be a medium of joy, trauma, survival, and resistance. Inspired by the warmth and communal spirit of a traditional east coast kitchen party, this workshop explores how food-centered gatherings can reduce social isolation and food insecurity among LGBTQIA+ newcomers. Grounded in the 2025 publication “East Coast Kitchen Party: A Ceilidh-Inspired Program to Reduce Social Isolation and Food Insecurity Among LGBTQIA+ Newcomers,” we will unpack how culturally resonant programming, rooted in storytelling and shared meals, can foster belonging and resilience. Through discussion, creative reflection, and sensory engagement, participants will explore the intersections of queerness, migration, and nourishment. Together, we will reflect on our own food stories, examine barriers to access and inclusion, and imagine queer food futures that are joyful, just, and deeply communal. Whether you are a researcher, community organizer, chef, or curious eater, come ready to share, listen, and celebrate the radical potential of the east coast queer newcomer kitchen. East Coast Kitchen Party was a program created by Nova Scotia Mental Health and Addictions - Health Promotion and YMCA Centre for Immigrant Programs in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Room #1090
What is Lesbian Food? A fiction and memoir workshop with Bonnie J. Morris
How do we incorporate LGBTQ food memories and meanings in fiction and memoir? This workshop (led by an author of 19 award-nominated books) invites participants to join in a dramatic reading from a book chapter on lesbian food memories. The chapter, which we will take turns voicing, recreates conversations from lesbian bars where relaxed friends and strangers answer the question, "What IS lesbian food?" The fun, poignant and diverse responses are best "heard" as a group reading making community come alive, instead of as a plain conference paper. I will bring enough photocopies for everyone in attendance to join as they wish. Then we'll workshop how it felt and sounded to recreate lesbian food memories and share what each of us, in our different approaches to fiction and memoir, strive to preserve as authentically queer food stories for the printed page.
Room #1100
Virtual Panel: Queer Food Media with Michela Siuni, Ursula Kania, and Philine Schiller
Michela Siuni:“Feeding Love: A new era for food in LGBTQ+ drama”
The act of cooking for someone else in non-professional settings is frequently used in film and media to showcase care and affection. This often spotlights either cross-generational love between family members or reinforces patriarchal views. Based on an analysis of two queer-centered tv shows, “She Loves to cook, and she loves to eat” (Japan) and “The Loyal Pin” (Thailand), this paper shows how food - and the preparation of food – can also be symbolically used to depict romantic love between women. These two dramas are a tender and feminist celebration of food, love, women, and friendship. They celebrate the artistry of homemade food as much as queer love, and actively promote regional culinary heritage. While the recent surge of tv shows featuring women’s same-sex romance in East and Southeast Asia - particularly Thailand and Japan - has attracted global attention, reviews have mostly focused on its positive impact for the LGBTQ+ community. I argue that food is an underrated medium. The symbolic usage of food as a narrative device is not only a testament to its ability to connect people and unlock cultural nuances, but also its ability to advance conversations around topics oftentimes deemed “tasteless” for the general public.
Ursula Kania: Twochubbycubs – sexual innuendos, Slimming World, and social media
In 2016, married gay couple James and Paul Anderson started a recipe blog called twochubbycubs, written in a humorous style which involves “putting a rimming reference into a gazpacho recipe” and featuring “diet food that doesn’t feel like a punishment”. Since then, they have gone on to publish five cookbooks - all of which follow Ketchum’s (2022) ‘Recipe for a Queer Cookbook’ - and have amassed over 500,000 followers across their social media channels. Initially following the UK-based weight-loss programme Slimming World (and providing ‘syn values’ with their recipes), they now promote weight loss through ‘calorie counting’ (with their newest publication called 'Twochubbycubs Air Fryer Cookbook: Speedy, slimming recipes under 500 calories'). Drawing on concepts and analytic tools from critical discourse analysis, culinary linguistics, and queer theory, this paper will explore the twochubbycubs franchise, focusing on the role of (gay) diet culture, representations of (homonormative) queer domestic bliss, and what happens when queer food culture goes mainstream.
Philine Schiller: "The Queer Oyster – A Sex Symbol Among Un/Appetizing Mollusks"
The flesh of an oyster is cold, wet and salty as it enters the mouth and slides down the throat. The mouth as non-reproductive sexual organ, as Kyla Tompkins recently pointed out in an online event on “New Books in Queer Food”, provides space for queer sensibilities regarding the interrelated pleasures of sex and eating. The oyster, too, shares in these pleasures as a complicated and charged symbol of the erotic. But it also defies categorization: from its metaphorical queerness to its biological sex(es), the oyster as an edible species is a body of water – in Astreida Neimanis’ sense – and an animal that is “fascinatingly and ‘naturally’ queer” (129). In my work, I consider oysters from an environmental and recipistolary point of view; for this presentation, I would like to center the queer food perspective and talk about this bivalve’s symbolism between pleasure and disgust. The oyster is dangerous – one wrong bite can kill – and its existence highly regulated for consumption. It is also endangered. In Consider the Oyster, M.F.K. Fisher referred to its existence as punctuated by “stress, passion, and danger.” As we eat their titillating flesh, much the same applies to us.
Afternoon Sessions B: 3:30-5:00
Room #1080
Workshop: The Intersection of Natural Wine and Queerness with Marie-Louise Friedland
In this workshop we will taste through four wines that defy easy categorization in the wine world. This tasting will provide a backdrop to talk about how the contemporary natural wine movement allowed for queerness to be more visible in the wine community. First, there will be a discussion about the contemporary natural wine movement, its definition, its criticism, and its significance in the younger generation’s consumption habits. Then to explain the intersection of queerness and natural wine, we will taste through wines such as orange wines, co-ferments, and non-vitis vinifera varieties produced by queer winemakers. At the end of this workshop the hope is to explain how important embracing queerness is to broaden the scope of not just the wines being made but the people who are consuming them.
Room #1090
Workshop: Duck, Cabbage, and Coffee: Food as Seduction and Solace in Queer Poetry (A Writing Workshop) with Terry Kirts
From the avocado salads, liver sausage sandwiches, and chocolate malteds that Frank O'Hara grabs on the go in Lunch Poems to the Technicolor hothouse vegetables that Whitman and Lorca poke at quizzically in Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," queer poets have long turned to food as normalizing human imagery that yet takes on elements of camp, performance, and taste in their poems. In this interactive poetry writing workshop, we will start with two poems, "Five Meals" by Marilyn Hacker and "Overweight" by James L. White, which demonstrate the range of emotion involved in cooking for a lover, from gluttonous, suggestive sensuality to a solace against the guilt of what could have been. Participants will read and discuss these poems and their distinctly queer application of gustatory imagery, then they will write their own poems about cooking and what it means for the queer relationship, as well as discussing ways that they have approached food in their own writing and lives.
Room #1100
Virtual Workshop: The Serving Archive with Sebastian Crissey
The Serving Archive is named for both the act of serving meals that nourish and the queer art of serving—presenting one’s most authentic self. It is a participatory digital archive that explores the connections between food, memory, and queer identity. This workshop invites attendees to engage in the community-driven documentation of LGBTQ+ food culture. The session will introduce workshop attendees to The Serving Archive by learning the background on who created it and its purpose. They will hear from individuals who have already contributed to the archive, through live storytelling. The workshop will then move into a guided discussion on how to contribute to the archive effectively, offering advice on how to reflect on personal food memories, how to document them creatively, and how to connect them to broader community and historical narratives. A hands-on component, will invite attendees to contribute their own stories, recipes, photographs, or audio/visual recordings via the interactive form. We will close the workshop with a live sharing session to showcase and celebrate the contributions created. By the end of the workshop, participants will have experienced the process of preserving and connecting queer culinary memory, while gaining insight into how digital platforms can foster community dialogue. This workshop emphasizes participation, creativity, and collective storytelling.
7 PM: Closing Party at Club DD's
Join us for the closing party at Club DD's (3958 St Laurent Boulevard). Entrance is included for all conference attendees. Accessibility note: Please note that there are 2 stairs (and no ramp) at the entrance of the club.
Offsite activities during the conference:
Visit the Archives gaies du Québec exhibition: A Taste of Queer Montréal. It's free! https://www.cafequeermontreal.com. The AGQ is located at: 1000, Atateken #201-A (please note that the archive is up 2 flights of stairs and is not wheelchair accessible during the weekends).
A Queer Night Out: At Dep Le Pick Up, catered by Your Tiny Catering: A separately ticketed event (details to come)
Check out our list of LGBTQ+ Restaurants, Cafes, Bars, Clubs, Bookstores, and more here: https://www.queerfoodconference.com/p/lgbtq-montreal-info.html
Also, the McCord Museum (across from McGill) has an exhibition about Montreal's Restaurants History: https://www.musee-mccord-stewart.ca/en/exhibitions/on-the-menu-montreal-restaurant-story/ It isn't queer but may be of interest.