Queer Folx. Food. Rhetoric.
I'm interested in how people build communities, care for one another, and create spaces where they can belong. As a scholar of rhetoric and writing studies, I study the everyday practices through which these relationships take shape, particularly among queer communities. Food has become one of my favorite ways to explore these questions. After all, sharing a meal is rarely just about eating.
My research brings together rhetorical theory, queer studies, critical food studies, and cultural geography to examine how cooking, eating, and sharing food help people establish relationships and sustain communities. I'm especially interested in the material dimensions of rhetoric: the objects, spaces, bodies, and everyday activities through which people communicate, organize, and make meaning together.
Queer Food Communities and Rhetorics of Care
Much of my current research examines how queer people use food to create and sustain community. From potlucks and dinner parties to community kitchens, cookbooks, and food cooperatives, I'm interested in how ordinary food practices become opportunities for collective care, cultural expression, and political participation.
My work draws on Michael Warner's scholarship on publics and counterpublics, Jenny Edbauer Rice's rhetorical ecologies, and Sara Ahmed's work on affect and orientation, among other approaches. These perspectives help me investigate how communities form through shared practices and how those practices circulate beyond any particular gathering or location.
I'm particularly interested in commensality, or the practice of eating together. What happens when people gather around a table? How do they negotiate differences, share resources, establish traditions, and develop relationships? And what happens when access to that table is shaped by money, labor, race, gender, sexuality, or other social conditions?
These questions have taken me into queer food communities, archives, and cultural spaces, including fieldwork in New York City and Baltimore. My ongoing research with Baltimore's Clifton Pleasure Club explores how collective cooking, shared meals, and cooperative organizing contribute to queer community life.
I'm also interested in the ways food communities encounter contradictions. A shared meal can foster belonging, but it can also reproduce exclusions. Celebrating queer food culture means taking seriously both the possibilities of gathering and the material conditions that make gathering possible.
Cookbooks, Archives, and Everyday Rhetoric
Another part of my research examines cookbooks, recipes, zines, photographs, menus, and other everyday documents as rhetorical artifacts.
I'm particularly interested in historical queer cookbooks, including Honey Van Campe's The Drag Queen's Cookbook and Guide to Sensible Living (1969), and what these publications can tell us about the communication of care, practical knowledge, and queer cultural life.
These materials interest me because they do more than preserve recipes or document events. They offer instructions, establish relationships with readers, circulate community knowledge, and sometimes leave behind records of lives and experiences that might otherwise be difficult to recover.
This work connects my interests in rhetoric and writing studies with technical and professional communication, archival research, and material memory. I'm interested in how documents teach people to do things, how communities adapt familiar genres for their own purposes, and what we can learn from materials that were not necessarily created with the expectation that future scholars would study them.
Rat Rhetorics and the Nonhuman
My research also extends to the ways humans represent, categorize, and live alongside nonhuman animals, particularly rats.
I began studying rats through their appearances in nineteenth-century British literature and have since become interested in their circulation through urban imagery, political language, and popular culture. Rats are often associated with disease, poverty, disorder, and unwanted populations. These associations raise questions about how language and imagery shape our relationships with animals, places, and other people.
Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect studies, and critical animal studies, I examine how representations of rats participate in larger conversations about class, urban life, sanitation, and belonging. I'm also interested in what happens when people reclaim or reinterpret these representations, particularly in cities where the rat has become part of local cultural identity.
Although this project differs from my research on queer food communities, both reflect my broader curiosity about how rhetoric shapes our relationships with the living world and how people negotiate the boundaries of community, care, and exclusion.
Research as a Collaborative Practice
Across these projects, I approach research as an opportunity to learn from the people, places, and materials I study. I'm particularly drawn to ethnographic and archival approaches that allow me to follow questions as they develop, rather than assuming I already know what a community or artifact will reveal.
I also enjoy collaborating with scholars, artists, organizers, and community members whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries. Whether I'm studying a historical cookbook, spending time in a community food space, or examining the cultural life of a city, I'm interested in how rhetorical inquiry can help us better understand the relationships that shape everyday life.
Why Do We Brunch?
More Than a Meal: Brunch as a Cultural Ritual of Recuperation, Performance, and Belonging
Brunch, that hybrid of breakfast and lunch typically consumed between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on weekends, is often dismissed as little more than a hangover cure or a social indulgence. Avocado toast, bottomless mimosas, and eggs Benedict populate the table, accompanied by laughter, gossip, and perhaps the subtle hum of regret from the night before. But to reduce brunch to the domain of mere recovery or pleasure is to miss its richer, more complex role in contemporary life. Brunch is a cultural performance, a social ritual, and a form of soft resistance to the rhythms of capitalist time. It’s not just about food—it’s about identity, labor, and the negotiation of leisure in a world increasingly hostile to downtime.
A Weekly Reclamation of Time
Brunch’s popularity exploded in late capitalist societies alongside the rise of service-oriented labor and the gig economy. As the traditional Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 work week has eroded for many, brunch represents one of the few stable temporal rituals still available to younger generations. The Saturday night out and the Sunday morning brunch go hand-in-hand, but their pairing isn’t just about hedonism—it’s about carving out a weekly rhythm amid the chaos of irregular schedules, overwork, and economic precarity.
Time scholars have pointed out that neoliberalism compresses time, pushing individuals to optimize every moment—workouts must be productive, evenings must be networking opportunities, even sleep must be tracked for efficiency. In this context, brunch offers an almost defiant pause. It’s slow. It’s social. It lingers. One doesn’t “grab brunch”; one does brunch, often over hours. In this way, brunch functions as temporal resistance: a socially sanctioned moment to refuse the ticking clock and live, briefly, without urgency.
Brunch as Performance and Curation
To brunch is also to perform—of taste, class, queerness, whiteness, or urbanity, depending on the context. For many, brunch is a curated aesthetic experience. The space is often Instagrammable, the food carefully plated, and the vibe somewhere between cozy and cosmopolitan. Participation in brunch is not merely about consumption, but about being seen consuming the right thing, in the right place, with the right people.
For marginalized communities—particularly queer folks—brunch has historically served as a safer and softer public space for congregation, flirtation, and kinship-building. Drag brunches, for example, transform the event into a queer performance of joy, protest, and camp. The performative layers of brunch—what one wears, orders, documents, and shares—become ways of crafting and asserting identity, both individually and collectively.
A Space Between Work and Rest
Brunch occupies a liminal space between rest and labor. While it is typically associated with leisure, it often conceals layers of emotional and affective labor. The hosting, the storytelling, the planning, even the anticipation all involve a kind of low-stakes performance that requires social energy. For some, particularly women and queer people, brunch provides an outlet for emotional connection and processing—what Sara Ahmed might call the labor of “making room” for others in both affective and literal senses.
And let’s not forget those who make brunch possible: the restaurant workers who must labor during peak weekend hours to meet the demand of those seeking temporary reprieve. Brunch, then, is also a site of contradiction—leisure for some is labor for others. In recognizing this, one can begin to see brunch not only as a ritual of consumption but as a node in larger systems of labor, class, and visibility.
More Than a Mimosa
Ultimately, the question “Why do we brunch?” is less about what we eat and more about what we seek. Connection. Pause. Identity. Community. To brunch is to briefly reorient the social world toward pleasure, toward chosen family, toward slowness, toward self-presentation. While it may indeed help nurse the effects of the night before, its function is more restorative than recuperative. Brunch is a cultural salve—a moment in which we try, through ritual and aesthetics, to rebalance the tensions of contemporary life.
So yes, we brunch for the pancakes and the poached eggs—but also for the fleeting sense of togetherness and the illusion, however temporary, of a life lived on our own terms..
The Community-building Connection, or Why Don’t We Brunch (Together)?
Brunch, Class, and the Illusion of Queer Community Through Consumption
While brunch has often been romanticized as a site of joy, connection, and identity performance—particularly within liberal and queer social spheres—this celebratory narrative obscures a deeper and more unsettling truth: food rituals like brunch can just as easily become mechanisms of exclusion as they are of inclusion. For all its aspirational aesthetics and surface-level sense of belonging, brunch, as practiced in many urban spaces, often reproduces the very class distinctions and economic hierarchies it pretends to transcend. Far from being a unifying communal experience, brunch can function as a soft barrier, one that alienates rather than connects, particularly within queer communities that are themselves fractured along lines of race, class, and access.
Queerness, Class, and the Myth of the Table
There is a longstanding impulse to center food in community-building work, especially within queer spaces: the potluck, the dinner party, the drag brunch. Food is love, food is culture, food is resistance. But food is also deeply structured by material access. When we say “let’s do brunch,” who do we mean by “we”? The $19 eggs Florentine and $12 bottomless add-on aren’t neutral indulgences—they are markers of class performance, signaling who belongs in the space and who can afford not just the food, but the time, dress, and comportment it demands.
Within queer spaces, especially urban queer enclaves often idealized as havens of diversity, food rituals like brunch frequently reinforce homonormative class boundaries. Those with salaried incomes, flexible schedules, and social capital gather at curated venues, consuming both food and each other in public performances of ease. But what of the working-class queers? The unhoused or housing-insecure? The servers and kitchen staff who make the experience possible? Their absence from the table isn’t accidental—it’s designed into the ritual.
The Performance of Solidarity
Brunch, as a food ritual, offers a fantasy of community: we gather, we toast, we laugh, we post a photo with the caption “chosen family.” But such performances of queer kinship often flatten difference and avoid the hard labor of actual solidarity. The brunch table is a stage, not a meeting hall. It asks us to show up styled and curated, not vulnerable and agitating.
This is particularly problematic in a time when queer communities are under growing economic and political pressure. Rent continues to climb, mutual aid networks are stretched thin, and the pandemic has laid bare the class divides within the LGBTQ+ world. Yet the image of the carefree queer brunch-goer persists, masking the material precarity of many in the community. The ritual tells us we are connected, but what it often does is paper over deep class divisions with hollandaise and hashtags.
The Politics of Space and Visibility
The spaces in which brunch happens are themselves implicated in gentrification and displacement. Trendy brunch spots often open in neighborhoods undergoing rapid transformation, where working-class people—often people of color—are pushed out while their cultural signifiers are absorbed into “new” culinary experiences for wealthier patrons. A mural of queer icons may adorn the wall, a rainbow flag may fly above the door, but the pricing and ambiance speak clearly: this is not a space for all queers.
The queer community has long understood the importance of space—who has it, who makes it, and who is welcome in it. Brunch, despite its benign image, becomes yet another spatial ritual that organizes and polices belonging. It is a velvet rope masquerading as a picnic blanket.
Food Rituals Without Reconciliation
If we are to think critically about food rituals as community-building practices, we must ask: who gets fed, and who gets seen? The liberal celebration of brunch as a symbol of queer joy and connection too often ignores how those rituals are structured by capitalism, class, and disposability. Brunch cannot be both a $60 indulgence and a genuine act of solidarity. It cannot be both spectacle and sanctuary.
Queer kinship built on consumer rituals is not kinship at all—it’s branding. Real community requires shared labor, shared struggle, and practices that resist commodification. It looks more like a volunteer-run food pantry, a pay-what-you-can café, a porch potluck with mismatched chairs. It sounds more like hard conversations about classism within queer friend groups than coordinated Yelp reviews.
Toward Food Rituals that Matter
To brunch is easy. To build a table where everyone can eat, where no one feels surveilled or priced out—that is difficult, radical work. It demands a turn away from the curated performance of liberal inclusivity and toward a messier, more materially grounded solidarity. Not all food rituals build community. Some reinforce its impossibility.
If we are serious about queer liberation, we must look beyond the mimosa glass and into the kitchen—who’s working, who’s eating, and who’s not invited at all. Only then can we begin to craft rituals that nourish not only our bodies, but our collective future.
Why Do We Have Friendsgiving? (AKA Friendsgayving)
I've been promising to write more about Friendsgayving for quite some time. If you've been waiting for me to follow through, thank you for your patience! With Thanksgiving approaching, it seems like an especially good moment to return to a question that has stayed with me throughout my research on queer food communities: Why do we gather around a table with the people we've chosen to call family?
I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about brunch, particularly the ways it creates opportunities for friendship, pleasure, and community. Friendsgiving interests me for many of the same reasons, although the questions it raises can be a little less cheerful. That doesn't make the gathering any less important. In fact, it might help explain why these meals matter so much.
What Makes Friendsgiving Different?
Thanksgiving is often presented as a holiday centered on family, gratitude, and togetherness. In American popular culture, we're accustomed to images of relatives gathered around a table, sharing food, telling stories, and participating in traditions passed from one generation to the next.
Of course, those images don't describe everyone's experience.
For some people, returning home for Thanksgiving is complicated by distance, work, finances, or difficult family relationships. For others, particularly LGBTQ+ people who have experienced rejection or estrangement, the expectation that family gatherings should be joyful can make the holiday especially difficult.
Friendsgiving offers another possibility. It allows people to gather with friends, neighbors, partners, and others whose relationships may not fit conventional understandings of family. These gatherings aren't necessarily substitutes for biological families. Sometimes they exist alongside them. Sometimes they provide something different altogether.
And sometimes, they make it possible to celebrate a holiday that might otherwise be painful or inaccessible.
This is where I find the idea of Friendsgayving particularly interesting. The playful name does something rhetorically important: it takes a familiar holiday tradition and makes room for a different understanding of who belongs at the table.
Chosen Families and the Work of Belonging
Queer communities have long developed relationships of care and support that extend beyond biological or legally recognized families. Scholars such as Kath Weston, in Families We Choose (1991), have documented how LGBTQ+ people establish kinship through friendship, mutual support, and shared experience.
These relationships are often described as chosen families, although the term deserves some careful attention. Not every queer person is estranged from their family of origin, and not every chosen relationship is free from conflict or obligation. What interests me is how people establish and maintain these relationships through everyday practices.
Food is one of those practices.
Preparing a meal, inviting someone into your home, accommodating their needs, or making sure there's enough food for another person can communicate care in ways that extend beyond spoken declarations of friendship.
But these gestures also involve work. Someone has to organize the gathering, buy the groceries, cook the food, clean the space, and make sure everyone feels welcome. These responsibilities aren't always distributed equally, and the ability to host a gathering depends on resources that aren't available to everyone.
Thinking about Friendsgayving as a practice of care means attending to both the pleasures of gathering and the labor that makes gathering possible.
The Table as a Rhetorical Space
As a rhetorician, I'm interested in what these gatherings communicate.
A Friendsgayving invitation might appear to be a simple announcement about a dinner, but it also helps establish a particular kind of social relationship. It identifies a community, offers an opportunity to participate, and communicates something about the values of the people organizing the event.
The gathering itself continues that rhetorical work.
Who is invited? Who feels comfortable attending? Who prepares the food? What traditions are preserved, adapted, or abandoned? What happens when people bring different experiences of family, culture, and belonging into the same space?
These questions help us understand the table not simply as a symbol of community but as a material place where community is actively negotiated.
Michael Warner's work on publics and counterpublics is useful here because it encourages us to consider how communities form through shared discourse and participation. Jenny Edbauer Rice's rhetorical ecologies similarly help us understand these gatherings as part of larger networks of relationships, histories, objects, and social practices.
A Friendsgayving dinner doesn't automatically constitute a counterpublic. But the invitations, conversations, photographs, recipes, and traditions surrounding it may participate in broader queer networks through which people recognize one another and develop a sense of collective belonging.
What Are We Celebrating?
There's another question that I don't think we can ignore: What exactly are we celebrating when we celebrate Thanksgiving?
The familiar national story of Thanksgiving has often obscured histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism. For many Indigenous people, the holiday is also a time of mourning, remembrance, and political reflection.
Queer communities aren't somehow exempt from these histories simply because they reinterpret the holiday.
This creates an important tension. Friendsgayving can challenge conventional assumptions about family while continuing to participate in a national tradition whose history deserves critical examination.
I don't think that contradiction necessarily makes the gathering meaningless. But it does invite us to consider what we preserve when we adapt familiar traditions and what we might choose to change.
Perhaps a Friendsgayving gathering can become an opportunity not only to celebrate chosen relationships but also to reconsider the histories, obligations, and values associated with the holiday itself.
Beyond the Holiday
One of the things I find most interesting about Friendsgayving is that it makes visible forms of care that often exist throughout the year.
Queer communities don't suddenly begin creating chosen families in November. People organize meals, share resources, provide housing, offer emotional support, and care for one another in countless ways that rarely receive the attention given to a holiday celebration.
Friendsgayving offers an occasion to recognize some of those relationships, but it also raises questions about how they are sustained after the dishes are washed and everyone goes home.
Who continues to show up? Who needs support? Who has the time and resources to provide it? And how do we make sure that the communities we celebrate remain accessible to the people who need them?
These are the questions that connect Friendsgayving to my larger research on queer food communities and the rhetorics of care.
I began thinking about this gathering as an alternative holiday meal, but I've come to see it as something more interesting: an opportunity to examine how people make family through shared practices, how those relationships depend on material resources and collective labor, and how familiar traditions can be adapted to imagine different forms of belonging.
Perhaps that's what makes Friendsgayving worth studying. The meal doesn't resolve the difficulties of family, history, or community. But it gives people an occasion to gather, negotiate those relationships, and practice caring for one another.
And sometimes, that's a pretty good reason to set another place at the table.