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Queering Culture, Fermenting Trouble by Kirsty Clarke

2 October 2018

6.30 - 8.30pm

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Recently Wiz Khalifa made headlines by saying that men who didn’t cut up bananas before eating them were ‘suspect’. Does the way you eat show your sexuality? If it’s meaningful to talk about ‘culinary sexuality’ can we go beyond this and use our collective kitchen to cook-up a queer revolution?

Fermentation is a process, both vital and contaminating, by which live agents transform food, altering it, perhaps even queering it, making it radically new and different. At the same time it is a process with its roots deep in tradition, cultures old and communal and stands apart from anything pasteurised or homogenised that contains no living culture.

We fermented both ideas and foodstuffs as we challenged both palettes and heteronormativity Grand Union was proud to host this informal workshop in the queer art of fermentation. Our discussion and pickling was accompanied by a soundtrack curated by Dr Luis-Manuel Garcia, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at The University of Birmingham.

This workshop consisted of two sessions, first a fermentation workshop on the evening of Tuesday 2nd October and then a dinner on the evening of Tuesday 6th November.

Organised by Kirsty Clarke, as part of Ways of Learning at Grand Union