Journal articles on the topic 'Virgil Thomson'

On 5 December 5 1941, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Virgil Thomson wrote to Gertrude Stein, his friend and the cocreator of their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The bulk of the letter concerned Thomson's most recent plan for publication of the opera, including details of dividing the royalties and expenses involved in the undertaking (a continual source of disagreement and haggling between them). At the end of the letter, referring to Stein's assurance at the end of her most recent letter to him that the European war would be over soon and that they would soon meet again in Paris, Thomson wrote, ‘… I miss you a great deal but do hope that you are right that we shall be seeing each other soon in Paris. I wouldn't know; I have no prophetic sense about wars … When the war is over we must write another opera. Only we must wait till then, because I don't think we could choose the subject very well by mail'. His next preserved letter to her was almost five years later. In that letter, dated 5 March 1946, Thomson wrote, ‘Carl [Van Vechten] says the opera is nearly finished. I hope so. I want to see it. I pine for it’.

This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at theNew YorkHeraldTribune, with that of music journalists based at theNew York Timesand other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from theTribunein 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.

Virgil Thomson's music is foolishness to some, a stumbling block to others, but those of us who love it love it with all our hearts, through thick and thin (which often as not means through bad and unknowing performances). Those who don't love it, don't see that there's anything there at all. They just don't get it. The music can also seem cryptic to players, since although it has few notes, it is nonetheless not at all easy to play. On any number of occasions I have had people tell me that the music seems to them to be just harmony exercises. I have never been able to explain it to them. If they don't see the great beauty of The Mother of Us All or Mostly About Love or the Cello Concerto, nothing I can say can make them see it. I simply sadly resign myself to the fact that between them and me is a great, unbridgeable gulf.

In 1945 Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein began working on The Mother of Us All, their second and final opera. If the pair’s chosen subject matter—the life and work of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)—was radical in and of itself, so too was the librettist’s approach to it. As Stein scholar Jane Palatini Bowers has carefully documented, Stein quoted heavily from political speeches as she crafted her libretto, using numerous “male-generated texts” but ultimately telling an “antipatriarchal” story. Bowers and others have argued that Stein’s revisions of these texts tell not only Anthony’s but also Stein’s story. I argue that in its final form, The Mother of Us All tells yet another story, for it was Thomson who revised Stein’s libretto after her untimely death in 1946, approximately one year before the opera’s premiere at Columbia University. Drawing extensively on both versions of the libretto text, as well as the musical score, I assert that Thomson sought to buy into Stein’s feminist project, and I read his revisions to The Mother of Us All as his attempt to refashion himself as her political and artistic partner. At the same time that The Mother of Us All represented a very personal project for Stein and Thomson, it was a more broadly political project as well, a critique of the status of women in the United States following World War II. As Stein and Thomson looked back on the significance of the women’s suffrage movement, they chose not to bring their story to an unequivocally rousing conclusion celebrating the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Instead, they suggested an unfinished struggle, one that so-called “second-wave” feminists would task themselves with furthering during the latter half of the twentieth century and one that would nourish productions of The Mother of Us All well into the twenty-first century.

AbstractAlthough literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied, music so inspired has received far less scholarly attention, and film music even less so. Musical ideologies of the 1930s, including the utopian thinking of many artists and intellectuals, emerge in some surprising ways when we consider two films of the era. Both The Spanish Earth (1937), an independent documentary, and Blockade (1938), produced in Hollywood, were intended to awaken Loyalist sympathies. The music for the former, consisting of recorded excerpts chosen by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson and widely understood as folkloric, embodies leftist composers' idealization of folk music. Werner Janssen's score for Blockade relies on many stock Hollywood gestures, granting it the status of a commodity. This article explores both films in light of Michael Denning's reflections of the relationship between the “cultural front” and the “culture industry,” along with Fredric Jameson's advocacy of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic tool. It argues that the music for The Spanish Earth unwittingly subverts the Loyalist cause, whereas the score of Blockade, with its manipulation of Hollywood codes, is far more persuasive than the political whitewashing of its plot would seem to suggest.

‘To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with,’ declares John Cage of his contradictory relationship with the older composer. If paradox summarizes this particular discourse between an interested pupil and his predecessor, however, it is both a compositional and musicological discourse exploring the juxtaposition of explicit historicism and aesthetic distance, or ‘disinterest’. The project, or rather the problem, of musical ‘neutrality’ is one that Cage inherited from his idol and subsequently adopted with enthusiasm, as his stubborn pre-occupation with Erik Satie's 1918 symphonic drama, Socrate, evinces. Cage's initial encounter with Satie's work seems quickly to have inspired a commitment to interrogating modernism's engagement with history. Having been introduced to Socrate by Virgil Thomson in a performance that, in Anthony Tommasini's words, ‘profoundly changed Cage, [who] grew to revere Satie’, Cage immediately set out to adapt the score for Merce Cunningham's ballet Idyllic Song in 1947. Denied copyright permission for his two-piano arrangement, Cage resourcefully set out to re-write the musical accompaniment for the ballet (and appease the disobliging publishers) more than two decades later in 1969, retaining Satie's original phrasing in order to preserve Cunningham's choreography and sardonically re-titling the piece Cheap Imitation.

AbstractIn 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned new musical settings of poems by Frank O'Hara for a concert honoring the late poet. Among pieces by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, the program featured a new work by Charles Mingus: his String Quartet No. 1. Mingus's piece was performed only once, at that concert, and was never recorded. It survives only in manuscript form.String Quartet No. 1 thwarts nearly all expectations of a piece by Mingus. Scored for strings and voice, the work's modernist approach to rhythm and pitch is unprecedented for the composer. Mingus chafed at being categorized as a “jazz” composer, and String Quartet No. 1's style is both a bid for and an undermining of the prestige of the high art world. Faced with primitivist discourses that characterized jazz musicians as unschooled and nonverbal, Mingus deployed poetry as a mode of resistance. He worked with poetic texts throughout his life, often writing the poetry himself. Mingus's sensitive setting of O'Hara's text in String Quartet No. 1 points to the centrality of poetry to Mingus's artistic and political project, and suggests that the piece's anomalous style can be partially understood as his response to O'Hara's text.

De sa création en 1913 à sa fusion avec Vogue en 1936, le magazine américain Vanity Fair a pour vocation de parler de l’art contemporain européen et américain par de courts articles de vulgarisation, des photographies et des caricatures. Plusieurs domaines artistiques sont couverts : musique, danse, opéra, littérature, peinture, sculpture, arts graphiques, cinéma, photographie et mode. La France constitue tout à la fois le rêve, l’attraction et le modèle des Américains : elle reste omniprésente jusqu’au milieu des années 1920, puis cède la place aux artistes américains. Vanity Fair reflète plus particulièrement la vie culturelle à New York et à Paris, même si ses ambitions sont plus largement ouvertes sur l’Europe et les États-Unis. Dans la rubrique intitulée « Hall of Fame », il n’est pas rare de trouver un Français parmi les cinq ou six personnalités du mois. La France est présente davantage pour ses arts plastiques et sa littérature. Le domaine musical, plus réduit, illustre cependant plusieurs facettes : les Ballets russes de Diaghilev, les ballets de Serge Lifar, les ballets de Monte-Carlo, les nouvelles danses populaires (tango, matchiche), l’introduction du jazz, la chanson populaire, les lieux de divertissements. Quant à la musique savante, le Groupe des Six, Erik Satie et Jean Cocteau occupent une place de choix au début des années 1920, avec plusieurs de leurs articles publiés en français. Dans les pages de Vanity Fair, des critiques musicaux américains comme Virgil Thomson et Carl Van Vechten incitent les compositeurs à se débarrasser de l’influence européenne. John Alden Carpenter ouvre la voie avec The Birthday of the Infanta (1917) et Krazy Kat (1922), mais c’est Rhapsody in Blue de Gershwin (1924) qui donne le coup d’envoi à une musique américaine qui ne copie plus la musique européenne. À partir de là, la firme de piano Steinway livre une publicité différente dans chaque numéro qui illustre, par un peintre américain, une oeuvre musicale américaine.

Mamoru Tobisu received his PhD from Osaka University under the direction of Prof. Shinji Murai (2001). During his PhD studies, he was a visiting scientist (1999) with Prof. Gregory C. Fu at MIT. Following a period as a scientist at the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company (2001–2005), he started his academic career at Osaka University in 2005 as an assistant professor with Prof. Naoto Chatani. He was then appointed as an associate professor at the Center for Atomic and Molecular Technologies at Osaka University (2011) and was promoted to full professor at the Department of Applied Chemistry of Osaka University (2017). He received the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award (2008), the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Young Chemists (2009), the Young Scientists’ Award, a Commendation for Science and Technology from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2012), the Merck-Banyu Lectureship Award (2012), Thomson Reuters Research Front Award (2016), and the Mukaiyama Award (2018). Naoto Chatani received his PhD in 1984 under Professors Noboru Sonoda and Shinji Murai. In 1984, he joined the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University as an Assistant Professor in the laboratory of Professor Terukiyo Hanafusa. After postdoctoral studies (1988–1989 under Professor Scott E. Denmark at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), he moved back to Osaka University and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor (1992) and to Full Professor (2003). He is a recipient of The Chemical Society of Japan Award for Young Chemists (1990), The Green & Sustainable Chemistry Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2005), the Nagoya Silver Medal (2013), The Chemical Society of Japan Award (2017), a Humboldt Research Award (2017), a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher (2017) and will be a recipient of an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2018). Victor Snieckus was born in Kaunas, Lithuania and spent his childhood in Germany during World War II. He received training at U. Alberta, Canada, (B.Sc.), U. California, Berkeley (M.Sc. D.S. Noyce), and U. Oregon (Ph.D. Virgil Boekelheide). He returned to his adopted country for postdoctoral studies (National Research Council, Ottawa, Ted Edwards). Appointments: U. of Waterloo, Assistant (1966) to Professor (1979); Monsanto/NRC Industrial Research Chair, 1992–1998; Queen’s University, Inaugural Bader Chair in Organic Chemistry (1998–2009); Bader Chair Emeritus and Director, Snieckus Innovations, 2009-. Selective awards: A.C. Cope Scholar (2001, one of 5 Canadians), Order of the Grand Duke Gediminas (2002, from the President of Lithuania), Arvedson-Schlenk (2003, Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker), Bernard Belleau (2005, Canadian Society for Chemistry), Givaudan-Karrer Medal (2008, U. Zurich), Honoris causa (2009, Technical U. Tallinn, Estonia), Global Lithuanian Award (2012), Yoshida Lectureship (2017). He hopes that he has only temporarily discontinued playing hockey and wishes also to return to the clarinet.

AbstractNo correlation was found between the size of male spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana [Clem.]) moths and the duration of their flight in a sustained-flight wind tunnel. The numbers of male moths caught in traps baited with virgin female spruce budworm moths increased as the size of the females increased, but the relationship was significant in only one of eight experiments. Infection with the microsporidium Nosema fumiferanae (Thomson) resulted in smaller insects, but there were no significant relationships between the incidence of infection and male flight duration or female attractiveness.

Challenging notions of the composer as solitary genius and of twentieth-century homophobia as a simple destructive force, I trace a new genealogy of Coplandian tonal modernism–“America's sound” as heard in works like “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” – and glean new sociosexual meanings in “cryptic” modernist abstraction like that of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.” I consider gay white male tonalists collectively to highlight how shared social identities shaped production and style in musical modernism, and I recast gay composers' close-knit social/sexual/creative/professional alliances as, not sexually nepotistic cabals, but an adaptive and richly productive response to the constraints of an intensely homophobic moment. The essay underscores the pivotal role of the new hetero/homo concept in twentieth-century American culture, and of queer impetuses in American artistic modernism.

Fecha de recepción: 15 de agosto de 2006.Fecha de aceptación: 7 de septiembre de 2007.Este trabajo es un estudio de la novela Palinuro de México, de Fernando del Paso, desde la estética del grotesco. Se parte de un breve examen de dos intertextos fundamentales de dicha novela: la Eneida, de Virgilio, y La tumba sin sosiego, de Cyril Connolly y se revisan, posteriormente, algunos elementos del grotesco según Kayser, Thomson y Bajtín. Se analizan las características de dicha estética que fundamentan la novela: deformaciones, movimiento, mezcla de dominios, anulación de la categoría de cosa y aniquilación del orden histórico. Se resaltan en el trabajo dos características del grotesco que fundamentan la visión de mundo de Del Paso: la pérdida de la identidad y su posterior reconstrucción, y el carácter ambivalente de la novela: a medio camino entre la esperanza y la desolación, el mito y la historia, y la risa y el horror.

The “classical” chaos of deterministic systems is characteristic for the motion of dynamical systems. Recently, some attempts were made to find static analogies of chaos [Thompson & Virgin, 1988; Naschie & Athel, 1989; Naschie, 1989]. However, this was considered for structures in specific artificial conditions (for example, infinitely long bars with sinusoidal geometric imperfections) transferring de facto the boundary value problem (which always describes static deformation of structures) into an initial value problem characteristic for problems of motion. In this article, chaotic (unpredictable) behavior is described for a usual (not special) nonlinear structure in statics, which is governed, naturally, by a boundary value problem in a finite interval of the argument. The behavior of this structure (geometrically nonlinear plate), which is an example of the class of static chaotic structures, is investigated by a new geometrical approach called the “deformation map.” The presented results are one of the first steps in the chapter of chaos in statics, and therefore the link between “classical” and static chaos needs further investigations.

Autor de la reseña: César García Álvarez, Universidad de León Obra de: Ignacio GÓMEZ DE LIAÑO El Reino de las Luces. Carlos III entre el viejo y el nuevo mundo Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 2016. 440 pp. Autora de la reseña: Irene Belmonte Martín, Universidad Miguel Hernández. Elche Obra de: Marta MÉNDEZ JUEZ La economía de los datos públicos en democracia: una visión neoinstitucional Navarra: Thomson Reuters Aranzadi. 2016. 324 pp. Autor de la reseña: Carlos Jiménez Pérez, ACMS Obra de: Álvaro MORCILLO LAIZ y Eduardo WEISZ (Eds.) Max Weber en Iberoamérica. Nuevas interpretaciones, estudios empíricos y recepción México, D.F.: FCE. 2015. 704 pp. Autor de la reseña: Alfonso Ortega Giménez, Universidad Miguel Hernández. Elche, Alicante Obra de: Fernando GÓMEZ DE LIAÑO GONZÁLEZ Casos y cosas del derecho. Crónicas de un tiempo Oviedo: Editorial Fórum. 2015. 210 pp. Autor de la reseña: Eulogio Sánchez Navarro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid Obra de: Giuliano TARDIVO Los socialismos de Bettino Craxi y Felipe González. ¿Convergencia o divergencia? Madrid: Fragua. 2016. 514 pp. Autor de la reseña: Santiago Donoso García, ACMS Obra de: Francisco ALÍA MIRANDA y Jerónimo ANAYA FLORES (Dirs.) I Congreso Ciudad Real y su provincia Ciudad Real: Instituto de Estudios Manchegos (CSIC). 2015. 574 pp. (Vol I), 544 pp. (Vol II) y 543 pp. (Volumen III). Autora de la reseña: Carla Aguilar-Cunill, Universidad Rovira i Virgili Obra de: Ignasi BRUNET, Alejandro PIZZI y David MORAL. Sistemas laborales comparados. Las transformaciones de las relaciones de empleo en la era neoliberal Madrid: Anthropos. 2016. 381 pp.

[First paragraph]The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life. ALVIN O. THOMPSON. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997. xvi + 283 pp. (Cloth US$ 70.95, Paper US$ 27.95)Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. STEFANO HARNEY. Kingston: University of the West Indies; London: Zed Books, 1996. 216 pp. (Paper J$ 350.00, US$ 10.00, £6.00)Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands. BILL MAURER. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xvii + 301 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.50)Building on views espoused by the American Enterprise Institute, columnist George Will solves the dilemma of unequal development among contemporary nation-states in one fell swoop: Western Europe and North America outstripped Latin America and its environs, among other places, for one reason - culture. Much meaning must be unpacked from that word, but the conclusion is: The spread of democracy, free markets, technology, and information is not enough to rescue ... nations, from the consequences of their cultural deficits. Such deficits, although not incurable, are intractable. (Will 1999:64)Another "lesson to be drawn," he says, is that "Government cannot revise culture, wholesale, but government has - it cannot help but have - cultural consequences" (Will 1999:64). Even as we embark on the twenty-first century, we cling to hoary, Age of Imperialism presumptions about the character and role of culture - signaled implicitly with a capital C. Such presumptions fuel statements like the above; governments convey material and moral improvements but these do not take hold in culturally inadequate environments.

Nadia Boulanger is the French performer/teacher who changed the landscape of American music. Under the mentorship of her father, Ernest Boulanger, and the tutelage of musical genius, Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, Nadia Boulanger had an excellent education and earned high honors as a student of organ and composition. However, early in her life Boulanger decided to turn her full focus to teaching. Among her most outstanding American composition students are Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Philip Glass, and Virgil Thomson. Student testimonials and class notebooks shed light on her teaching. Nadia Boulanger taught with a combination of rigor and passion, successfully mentoring a generation of aspiring composers and performers. Her profound imprint on American music is recognizable in the fact that almost all American composers of note in the 20th century studied with Nadia Boulanger either in Paris or during her residency in Boston. It is possible to trace parallels between her education and compositional style, and her teaching of composition. This paper investigates how Nadia Boulanger taught, why she was successful, and how her early education affected her future as a composition teacher.

The life history and exploitation parameters of Rhizoprionodon oligolinx Springer, 1964 were assessed using commercial landing data of 2012-2015 from Mumbai waters of India to understand the population dynamics and stock status of the species. The average annual landing of the species was estimated to be 383 t, which formed about 9.1% of the total shark landings of Maharashtra. L∞, K and t0 estimated were 97.1 cm, 0.47 yr-1 and -0.79 yr respectively. Total mortality (Z), fishing mortality (F) and natural mortality (M) rates were estimated as 2.16 yr-1, 1.48 yr-1 and 0.69 yr-1 respectively. The length at capture (L50), length at female maturity (Lm50) and male maturity (Lm50) were estimated as 49.7, 62.3 and 59.5 cm respectively, which indicated that most of the sharks entered peak phase of exploitation before attaining sexual maturity. Length-weight relationship indicated allometric growth (b>3) for the species. The species was found to be a continuous breeder and showed peak recruitment during April. The current exploitation rate (Ecur) was found to be 0.68, which is lower than Emax estimated for the species using Beverton and Holt yield per recruit analysis. Thompson and Bell prediction model showed that at current exploitation level, the biomass (B) has reduced to 32% of virgin biomass (B0) where as, the spawning stock biomass (SSB) has reduced to 16% of the virgin spawning stock biomass (SSB0). Hence the exploitation level for the species should be reduced by 40% that will ensure the availability of SSB at a relatively safer 30% level to rebuild the stock for long term sustainability of the resource.

Virgin externae of the parasitic barnacle Sacculina carcini Thompson were exposed to settlement of male cyprids. The events from settlement around the mantle aperture to arrival of the male cypris cells into the receptacle of the externa were studied by transmission and scanning electron microscopy. A small, hitherto unknown larva, the trichogon, escapes from the cyprid within ca. 20 min after settlement. A thin cuticle armed with long spines is preformed beneath the carapace of the male cyprid, and after metamorphosis this cuticle encloses the free trichogon. The trichogon is up to 220 μm long, unsegmented, has a variable amoeboid shape and a very simple structure. It includes parts of the cypris epidermis and two other types of cypris cells, but it has no appendages, muscles, sense organs or nervous tissue. The trichogon migrates through the mantle cavity of the externa and arrives at the entrance to the receptacle duct within 2 h after settlement. During the ensuing migration through the receptacle duct, the trichogon loses its spine-armed cuticle. Once inside the receptacle, the trichogon cells and the female cells of the receptacle are in direct contact, with no intervening cuticle. The implanted trichogon is regarded as a very specialized dwarf male. The formation of the trichogon from male cyprids, and of the kentrogon from female cyprids has many similarities, and the trichogon and the kentrogon are regarded as homologous instars. A trichogon is present in the Sacculinidae, the Lernaeodiscidae and most probably also in the Peltogastridae; i.e. in the same families where a kentrogon has been demonstrated to accomplish invasion of the decapod host.

L’expression « procréation médicalement assistée (PMA) » est utilisée pour désigner les techniques médicales permettant la manipulation des gamètes – ovules et sperme – hors du corps humain dans le but d’engendrer un nouvel être humain, et, par extension, le domaine de la médecine qui a pour but de traiter l’infertilité. Les techniques de base comprennent l’insémination de sperme, la fécondation in vitro (FIV), ainsi que la congélation de gamètes ou d’embryons. En ouvrant les processus biologiques de la procréation à l’intervention médicale et à la contribution biologique de tiers – par exemple dans le don de sperme, d’ovules ou la grossesse pour autrui (GPA) – elles ouvrent des possibilités inédites de division du travail reproductif. On parle également de Nouvelles Techniques de Reproduction (NTR) (Tain 2015) ou de Techniques de Reproduction Assistée (TRA) en référence au terme anglais Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) (Courduriès et Herbrand 2014) pour désigner ces techniques. Depuis la naissance du premier « bébé éprouvette » en 1978 en Grande-Bretagne, leur liste ne cesse de s’étendre, marquant ainsi une technologisation croissante des processus de création de la vie humaine, mais également sa normalisation et standardisation (Franklin 2013a), ainsi que son inscription dans un marché globalisé de la procréation en pleine expansion (Waldby et Mitchell 2006). Dès ses débuts, l’anthropologie s’est intéressée aux différentes représentations qui entourent la création de la vie, ainsi qu’à son organisation sociale et à sa régulation. Cet intérêt s’est manifesté dans l’étude de la parenté, domaine ayant occupé une place centrale dans la discipline au point qu’il en est devenu un emblème. Dès les travaux de Lewis Henry Morgan (1871) sur les systèmes de parenté et la distinction qu’il établit entre systèmes classificatoires et descriptifs, on trouve les traces d’un questionnement sur ce qui fonde les liens de parenté et la place des liens de sang. Comment comprendre, toutefois, que la contribution physiologique masculine à la procréation n’apparaisse pas comme nécessaire au fondement de la paternité chez les Trobriandais étudiés par Malinowski (2010) ? Cette question qui a généré un débat de plusieurs décennies sur l’« immaculée conception (virgin birth) » et la supposée ignorance des peuples dits « primitifs » quant aux « faits de la vie (facts of life) » (Delaney 1986 ; Franklin 1997) montre à quel point l’étude de la parenté s’est construite sur une distinction implicite entre les faits biologiques de la procréation et les catégories sociales et culturelles de la parenté. Cette distinction se retrouve également au cœur de la célèbre analyse de Levi-Strauss (1949) sur les interdits et prescriptions qui régulent le choix de partenaires reproductifs et qui marqueraient le passage même de la nature à la culture. L’anthropologue américain Schneider (1984) a critiqué la distinction implicite entre parenté sociale et biologique qui sous-tend l’étude classique de la parenté, en montrant à quel point elle est façonnée par le modèle de parenté prévalant aux États-Unis. Cependant, l’apport majeur des travaux anthropologiques plus anciens à l’étude de la procréation médicalement assistée est de montrer que le biologique n’est jamais suffisant à faire des enfants, ou en d’autres termes que la procréation est toujours assistée, et que les systèmes de parenté et l’institution du mariage figurent parmi les premières techniques de reproduction permettant de diriger la transmission de la substance reproductive (Franklin 2013a). En suivant la critique de Schneider et sous l’impulsion des études féministes qui se développent dans les années 1970, les études de la parenté prennent alors une nouvelle orientation plus critique, en se rapprochant des études sur le genre, et en mettant la reproduction au cœur de la recherche anthropologique. L’essor de la procréation médicalement assistée auquel on assiste dans les années 1980 contribue grandement à ce renouvellement en raison des questions qu’elle pose pour ces domaines d’études. On distingue généralement deux grandes phases dans l’orientation des recherches sur la PMA (Thompson 2005). Ces techniques ont, dans une première phase qui couvre grosso modo les années 1980 et le début des années 1990, suscité beaucoup de débats. Elles ont été fortement critiquées tant dans les milieux féministes français (Testard 1990 ; Lesterpt et Doat 1989), qu’anglo-saxons (Spallone et Steinberg 1987). La critique produite dans cette première phase peut se lire à la lumière des débats générés par le mouvement féministe des années 1970 sur les inégalités entre les hommes et les femmes, la problématique médicalisation du corps des femmes et plus généralement l’invisibilisation de leur travail reproductif (Tabet 1985). Elle met notamment en avant le risque d’exploitation et de contrôle du corps des femmes soumises à l’injonction normative à la maternité (Rouch 2002). Elle vise également la fausse promesse faite par la PMA d’apporter une réponse médicale à l’infertilité, tout en dissimulant des taux de succès très bas et en parlant d’infertilité « de couple », alors que toutes les interventions ont lieu sur le corps des femmes (Van der Ploeg 1999). Si la critique féministe demeure présente, une attention croissante à la complexité de la PMA et de son vécu se développe dans une deuxième phase qui couvre grosso modo la deuxième moitié des années 1990 et les années 2000. En effet, alors que le recours à la PMA s’est de plus en plus normalisé, ces techniques ne cessent d’interroger les catégories de parenté et les représentations de la création de la vie qui semblent le plus tenues pour acquises. Ce qui est mis en avant c’est la dimension paradoxale de la PMA, notamment en raison de sa capacité à reproduire du même et imiter la nature, tout en produisant de l’entièrement nouveau (Franklin 2013b ; McKinnon 2015). Par exemple, ces techniques sont mises au service de la parenté génétique, et tendent à la naturaliser, mais la dénaturalisent également en mettant en lumière le travail nécessaire à sa réalisation (Thompson 2005). Ce faisant, elles déplacent et brouillent les frontières entre nature et culture, privé et public, local et global, passivité et agentivité, offrant ainsi un terrain fertile au développement de la réflexion anthropologique. Actuellement, deux grandes lignes de recherche se développent. La première – les New Kinship Studies ou Nouvelles Études de la Parenté – poursuit le questionnement de l’anthropologie de la parenté. Ces études cherchent, d’une part, à comprendre comment les techniques de procréation médicalement assistée troublent la distinction entre nature et culture et contribuent à transformer la notion même du biologique (Strathern 1992 ; Franklin 2013a). Elles investiguent, d’autre part, l’émergence de nouvelles configurations familiales rendues possibles par ces techniques. Elles s’interrogent notamment sur les transformations des conceptions de la maternité, de la paternité, et du modèle familial bilatéral, en se penchant sur les expériences vécues des couples ou sur les appareils juridiques qui les encadrent (Porqueres i Gené 2009). La division de la maternité entre ses dimensions éducative, gestationnelle et génétique, rendue possible par le don d’ovules et la GPA, est particulièrement discutée (Kirkmann 2008). La question de l’anonymat des donneurs de sperme et donneuses d’ovules (Konrad 2005) et de la ressemblance (Becker et al. 2005) font aussi l’objet d’analyses socio-anthropologiques, ainsi que, de manière émergente, les communautés de « frères » et « sœurs » qui peuvent se constituer autour d’un même donneur (Edwards 2015). De plus, tout un pan de la recherche s’intéresse aux manières de faire famille dans les couples gays, lesbiens, et trans, et à la manière dont le modèle de famille hétéronormatif est renforcé ou au contraire, contesté et transformé (Mamo 2007 ; Herbrand 2012). Une deuxième lignée de recherche – l’étude sociale de la reproduction – se focalise plutôt sur la médicalisation de l’expérience reproductive et de l’infertilité et sur ses conséquences pour les femmes. Elle s’interroge sur sa stratification (Ginsburg et Rapp 1991) et met en lumière l’imbrication de processus situés à différents niveaux allant du corporel – niveau cellulaire, génétique – au culturel, historique et structurel – comprenant par exemple l’État, le marché, et la religion (Almeling 2015). Adoptant une perspective globale et sortant du cadre national, tout un pan de recherche s’intéresse à la circulation des gamètes, des donneurs et donneuses, des couples en recherche d’enfants et à la constitution d’un marché et d’un « tourisme » de la reproduction (Waldby et Mitchell 2006 ; Kroløkke 2012). Cherchant à remédier à la focalisation générale des études sur les femmes, un nombre croissant de recherches se penche sur les expériences masculines de l’infertilité et de la PMA (Inhorn 2004). Finalement, suivant le développement récent de techniques permettant de congeler des ovules, d’anticiper la baisse de la réserve ovarienne et de préserver la possibilité d’avoir un enfant génétique dans le futur, on assiste à l’émergence d’études focalisant sur la biomédicalisation de l’infertilité liée à l’âge (Martin 2010 ; Baldwin et al. 2014 ; Bühler 2014 ; Waldby 2015). Alors que la technologisation de la procréation ne cesse de s’étendre, comme le montre la récente naissance d’un bébé conçu grâce à une technique de transfert mitochondrial, appelée couramment « FIV à trois parents » (génétiques) (Couzin-Frankel 2016), elle continue à aiguiser la réflexion anthropologique en offrant un « miroir au travers duquel nous pouvons nous regarder » (traduction de la citation en épigraphe, Franklin 2013a :1).

Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift the terms of current debates about identity. I want to signal that the study of identity may take on new insights when we look at how we are or want to be in terms of what, how, and with whom we eat. If the analysis of identity has by and large been conducted through the optic of sex, it may well be that in western societies we are witnessing a shift away from sex as the sovereign signifier, or to put it more finely, the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities. It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last several decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological do-gooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc? While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of 'writing about food' is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are by and large attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss's oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with1, or Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, 'tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' (13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be primarily grouped around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. Living with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a 'fundamental' issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives. To put it another way, and in the terms that guide me, eating is seen as immediate -- it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation, of joining us with others. What, how, and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the US, 50% of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food -- mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. Eating performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that some argue spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be as individually focussed as the knowledge that others are starving as we eat. This connection has long haunted children told 'to eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa', and in more evolved terms has served as a staple of forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, the spectre of hunger is now broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site where 'users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger'. Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action: each time a user clicks on the 'hunger' button one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, 'our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations'. Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in a basic way to other humans. That advertising companies know that it can also be a profitable form of meditation, transforming 'humans' into consumers is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called 'the altruistic mouse')2. Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities. Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses 'global food and local identity' as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far away, allowing us to routinely find in our supermarkets and eat products that previously would have been the food stuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections individuals have to their local, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, 'globalisation, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality' (123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting 'the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice'). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that 'the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened' (124). Defusing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not 'typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the "world out there" accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks' (128). For the sake of my own argument his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. To put it more strongly, I'd argue that eating is of interest for the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness, or distance from each other, from ourselves, and our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. To put it more clearly, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how the most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is again to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. The adjective 'visceral' comes to mind: 'of the viscera', the inner organs. Could something as ordinary as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins writes in her account of 'adventures in physical culture', what if we were to go 'into things tongue first. To see how they taste' (5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then broken down it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion allows us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of ourselves attach to different aspects of the social becomes clear, just as it scrambles preconceptions about alimentary identities. Of course, we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. 'Feed the man meat', the ads proclaim following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into 'Eat lean beef'. The body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their head. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body's workings. Consequently it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of, to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea, 'each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a "world" in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts -- leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other)' (101). I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that phrase sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights, I follow the injunction to 'look down, look way down', to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called 'Life') and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant (and as I eat it I wonder am I, should I be?3). Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phytoestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt 'enhanced' with acidophilius and bifidus to give me 'friendly' bacteria that will fight against nasty heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It's all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat. The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages. 'Smoking kills' versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal 'is a good source of soy phytoestrogenes (isolfavones) that are believed to be very beneficial'. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can't say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers is thin: that such and such is 'believed to be beneficial'? While what in fact they may benefit is nebulous, it gets scarier when they specify that 'a diet rich in folate may reduce the risk of birth defects such as spina bifida'. The conditional tense wavers as I ponder the way spina bifida is produced as a real possibility. There is of course a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was 'you are what you eat'. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, 'it became a time of "Don't eat" and "bad foods". Now, happily, 'we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food' (Promotional release by the Dairy Farmers, 1997). As the new battle ground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you 'are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth' (Thompson), is just too much. Gut level intimacy indeed. However, eating is intimate. But strangely enough except for the effusive health gurus, and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of not-eating, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as 'mouth machines' (to take Noëlle Châtelet's term). To be blunt about it, 'to eat, is to connect ... the mouth and the anus' (Châtelet 34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. For instance, in relationships the moment of broaching the subject of one's gut may mark the beginning of the end. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym4 for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: 'articulation'. Stuart Hall's now classic definition states that 'articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction' (qtd. in Grossberg, "History" 64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately -- theorists wildly 'articulate' this or that -- its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we 'articulate', bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and 'the real conditions' in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers 'a nonessentialist theory of agency ... a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both "subject-ed" by power and capable of acting against power' ("History" 65). Elsewhere Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that 'articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices' (We Gotta Get Out 54). We are then 'articulated' subjects, the product of being integrated into past practices and structures, but we are also always 'articulating' subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves. This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. In more down to earth terms, just because we are informed by practices not of our own making, 'that doesn't mean we swallow our lessons without protest' (Jenkins 5). The mouth machine takes in but it also spits out. In these actions the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting. Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical terms, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that instead of having tap roots spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap root logic of, say, the family tree which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome allows me to spread laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is antigenealogical, 'it always has multiple entryways' compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (35). For Grossberg the appeal of joining a theory of articulation with one inspired by rhizomes is that it combines the 'vertical complexity' of culture and context, with the 'wild realism' of the horizontal possibilities that connect us outward. To use another metaphor dear to Deleuze and Guattari, this is to think about the spread of rhizomatic roots, the 'lines of flight' that break open seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves: 'lines of flight disarticulate, open up the assemblage to its exterior, cutting across and dismantling unity, identity, centers and hierarchies' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 58). In this way, bodies can be seen as assemblages: bits of past and present practice, openings, attachments to parts of the social, closings and aversion to other parts. The tongue as it ventures out to taste something new may bring back fond memories, or it may cause us to recoil in disgust. As Jenkins writes, this produces a fascinating 'contradiction -- how the body is both a prison and a vehicle for adventure' (4). It highlights the fact that the 'body is not the same from day to day. Not even from minute to minute ... . Sometimes it seems like home, sometimes more like a cheap motel near Pittsburgh' (7). As we ingest we mutate, we expand and contract, we change, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. The openings and closings of our bodies constantly rearranges our dealings with others, as Jenkins writes, the body's 'distortions, anxieties, ecstasies and discomforts all influence a person's interaction with the people who service it'. In more theoretical terms, this produces the body as 'an articulated plane whose organisation defines its own relations of power and sites of struggle', which 'points to the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling' (Grossberg, "History" 72). These theoretical considerations illuminate the interest and the complexity of bodies that eat. The mouth machine registers experiences, and then articulates them -- utters them. In eating, we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations, just as we may disrupt them. For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage zapping from one part of the world to another, and then to me. Unsolicited, it sets out a statement from a Dr. Johannes Van Vugt in San Francisco who on October 11, 1999, National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for persons who are gay, lesbian and other sexual orientation minorities'. Yoking his fast with the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Dr. Van Vugt says he is fasting to 'call on you to choose love, not fear, and to do something about it'. The statement also reveals that he previously fasted 'to raise awareness and funds for African famine relief for which he received a Congressional commendation'. While personally I don't give much for his chances of getting a second commendation, this is an example of how the mouth machine closed still operates to articulate identities and politics to wildly diverging sites. While there is something of an arboreal logic to fasting for awareness of famine, the connection between not eating and anti-homophobic politics is decidedly rhizomatic. Whether or not it succeeds in its aim, and one of the tenets of a rhizomatic logic is that the points of connection cannot be guaranteed in advance, it does join the mouth with sex with the mouth with homophobic statements that it utters. There is then a sort of 'wild realism' at work here that endeavours to set up new assemblages of bodies, mouths and politics. From fasting to writing, what of the body that writes of the body that eats? In Grossberg's argument, the move to a rhizomatic field of analysis promises to return cultural theory to a consideration of 'the real'. He argues that such a theory must be 'concerned with particular configurations of practices, how they produce effects and how such effects are organized and deployed' (We Gotta Get Out 45). However, it is crucial to remember that these practices do not exist in a pure state in culture, divorced from their representations or those of the body that analyses them. The type of 'wild realism' that Grossberg calls for, as in Deleuze's 'new empiricism' is both a way of seeing the world, and offers it anew, illuminates otherly its structures and individuals' interaction with them. Following the line of the rhizome means that we must 'forcibly work both on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows', Guattari goes on to argue that 'there is no tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 48). In terms of the possibilities offered by eating, these theoretical and conceptual arguments direct us to other ways of thinking about identity as both digestion and as indigestible. Bodies eat into culture. The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders, but so too is the tongue that sticks out, that draws in food, objects and people. Analysed along multiple alimentary lines of flight, in eating we constantly take in, chew up and spit out identities. Footnotes 1. As Barbara Santich has recently pointed out, Lévi-Strauss's point was made in relation to taboos on eating totem animals in traditional societies and wasn't a general comment on the connection between eating and thinking (4). 2. The sponsors of the Hunger Site include 0-0.com, a search engine, Proflowers.com, and an assortment of other examples of this new form of altruism (such as GreaterGood.com which advertises itself as a 'shop to benefit your favorite cause'), and 'World-Wide Recipes', which features a 'virtual restaurant'. 3. The pregnant body is of course one of the most policed entities in our culture, and pregnant friends report on the anxieties that are produced about what will go into the future child's body. 4. While Châtelet writes that thinking about the eating body 'throws her into full metaphor ... joining, for example the nutritional mouth and the lover's mouth' (8), I have tried to avoid the tug of metaphor. Of course, the seduction of metaphor is great, and there are copious examples of the metaphorisation of eating in regards to consumption, ingestion, reading and writing. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Probyn, Outside Belongings), I prefer to focus on the 'work' (or as Le Doeuff would say, 'le faire des images') that Deleuze and Guattari's terms accomplish as ways of modelling the social. This is a particularly crucial (if here underdeveloped) point in terms of my present project, where I seek to analyse the ways in which eating may reproduce an awareness of the visceral nature of social relations. That said, and as my valued colleague Melissa Hardie has often pointed out, my text is littered with metaphor. References Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton. Penguin, 1974. Châtelet, Noëlle. Le Corps a Corps Culinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. "Rhizome versus Trees." The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 61-77. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge,1992. Le Doeuff, Michèle. L'Étude et le Rouet. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. London: Virago, 1999. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. ---. Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Santich, Barbara. "Research Notes." The Centre for the History of Food and Drink Newsletter. The University of Adelaide, September 1999. Thompson, Sue. Promotional pamphlet for the Dairy Farmers' Association. 1997. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Elspeth Probyn. "The Indigestion of Identities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php>. Chicago style: Elspeth Probyn, "The Indigestion of Identities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Elspeth Probyn. (1999) The indigestion of identities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]).