EAT, DWELL, ORIENT

Abstract

Through a comparative analysis of Julie and Julia and Ginger and Ganesh, this paper examines a pair of culinary texts, similarly organized, that turn to digital media in order to build a narrative about a year-long experiment with food. Through this juxtaposition of two very similar texts, the essay sets in motion a debate about how Asian Americanist critique can open an important window into understanding this sub-genre of Internet-based writing. Though my analysis remains critical of the latent racial implications of each text, I am not denigrating the value of either text or dismissing the potential that either text has to articulate female subjectivity through the lens of the culinary. Rather, my interest in these particular texts derives from wanting to make sense of how texts by avowed feminists who make use of the Internet in order to construct a form of gendered solidarity that ostensibly crosses lines of age, race and class, might also produce familiar Orientalist orthodoxies that continue to marginalize communities of colour, particularly women of colour, in ways that mark a deep anxiety about the position of the middle-class white feminist in the contemporary racial moment.