Lisa Heldke

This essay explores some well-traveled territory—the area in which eating and suffering come together. I undertake two projects. First, I scrutinize some foods that are often portrayed as unambiguously either good (homegrown organic vegetables) or bad (foie gras), in an effort to complicate the stories we tell about them. What violence has been heretofore invisible in them? What compassion has been occluded? This project informs a second: an answer to the question “how should we eat?” My answer takes up Kelly Oliver’s call for an ethics of “sustaining relationships.” I ground it in an alternative ontology of food, one that views foods not as substances, but as loci of relations.

George Yancy writes that he edited White on White/Black on Black in order “to get white and Black philosophers to name and theorize their own raciated identities within the same philosophical text. … My aim was to create a teachable text, that is, to create a text whereby readers will be able to compare and engage critically the similarities and differences found within and between the critical cadre of both white philosophers and Black philosophers” (7-8). White on White/Black on Black collects together essays by fourteen philosophers—seven identified as white, seven Black—who explore, by turns, their identities, the natures of whiteness and Blackness, and conceptualizations of race more generally.

I think that restaurant authenticity and personal authenticity are deeply intertwined. More specifically, I think that the ways in which we define – and seek – authenticity in things, be they table setting styles, or cooking vessels or ingredients, directly shape, and are shaped by, the ways in which we understand – and cultivate – authenticity in ourselves. To the extent to which we define culinary authenticity as slavish adherence to the methods, ingredients and utensils of the source culture, we not only freeze those cultures in time and ignoring their temporality, but also reinforce in ourselves a sense that we, too, must be unambiguous and unchanging in our identity, clear and complete. On the other hand, if we wish to cultivate an authentic self that is willing to be laughed at by our friends because we believe in a being they do not, well, then we should consider cultivating an understanding of restaurant authenticity that is likewise flexible, spacious and undogmatic.

In this brief paper, I want to begin to explore the possibility that bi-trans dialogue can challenge those forms of oppression that are grounded in sex, gender, and sexuality. I am particularly interested in pursuing the possibility that bi-trans dialogue might result in additional critiques of the sex-gender-sexuality triad. Despite multiple challenges, and myriad historical transmogri-fications (including, it must be noted, the very late addition of gender), that triad maintains its foundationality and posits deep causal links among its three parts. The effect of this causal chain is to render untenable or incomprehensi-ble the lives of all sorts of actual, living persons—lives that are anything but incomprehensible to those living them, but that are made to be so on a system in which there is still a strong tendency to hold that sex causes gender and sexuality. The resilience of this presumed causal connection contributes to ensuring the continued dominance of a two-sex, two-gender, two-sexuality system.

This paper explores two apparently-unrelated forms of authenticity. One, “restaurant authenticity,” is a subcategory of the larger category of authentic objects, focused specifically on food and especially on ethnic cuisines. “Personal authenticity” refers to a set of traits or qualities in oneself. Contrary to appearances, I argue that the two forms of authenticity intertwine in ways that merit thoughtful attentiveness. I suggest that approaching the question of the authenticity of a cuisine with an attitude of flexibility and responsiveness can, in turn, constitute an activity that cultivates personal authenticity, understood as “wholehearted living.” As Diana Meyers might put it, it is itself a practice of authenticity

In this paper, I undertake an exploration of the similarities I find between the epistemological projects of John Dewey and Evelyn Fox Keller. These similarities, I suggest, warrant considering Dewey and Keller to share membership in an epistemological tradition, a tradition I label the "Coresponsible Option." In my examination, I focus on Dewey's and Keller's ontological assertion that we live in a world that is an inextricable mixture of certainty and chance, and on their resultant conception of inquiry as a communal relationship.

Bisexuality challenges familiar assumptions about love, family, and sexual desire that are shared by both heterosexual and homosexual communities. In particular, it challenges the assumption that a person's desire can and should run in only one direction. Furthermore, bisexuality questions the legitimacy, rigidity, and presumed ontological priority of the categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Bisexuals are often assumed to be dishonest and unreliable. I suggest that dishonesty and unreliability can be resources for undermining normative sexualities