“Our understanding of how sexuality operates is culturally specific and prescribed.”

Blake spent a decade researching the intersection of queer theory,
modernist studies, and food studies after finding inspiration in Toklas’ recipes and stories. Her book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, is the
first scholarly monograph to combine the three fields.

“I think about the way structures of nutrition and structures of heteronormativity mimic each other—we’re taught that we’re supposed to eat certain things at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all of which are culturally specific,” Blake says. “Similarly,” she adds, “our understanding of how sexuality operates is culturally specific and prescribed. I’m interested in the way modernist writers think about transgression in terms of eating, which invites us to think about transgression in terms of sexuality.”

In Edible Arrangements, Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres.

Each chapter presents a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes—such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield—in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself. While Toklas’ cookbook isn’t discussed within Edible Arrangements, Blake’s book turns a scholarly gaze on its preoccupations in order to reveal new ways of thinking about queer life, literature, and the pleasure of eating.