Sexe, alimentation et histoire

Sex, Food, and History: A Notches Roundtable

Call for Papers


Guest-editor: Rachel Hope Cleves

In the age of food porn, few question the connection between food and sexuality. Advertisements depicting Paris Hilton biting into a Carl’s Junior burger, or Nigella Lawson tonguing an ice cream cone, conflate desirable women and caloric food as like objects to be consumed. But food and sexuality share histories that lay far outside today’s commodity fetishism. From Ayurvedic medical theories linking diet and sexual health, through ancient Greek recipes for aphrodisiacs, to Christian theologies equating hunger and lust as carnal appetites, and finally to the emergence of foodie culture during the era of sexual liberation, a long history lies behind today’s marketing imagery.

Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality <notchesblog.com> is seeking short essays (1000 - 1500 words) exploring any aspect of the interconnections between the histories of sexuality and the histories of food, for a special roundtable to be guest-edited by Rachel Hope Cleves, Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. We encourage submissions from outside North America, and from prior to the twentieth century, as well as submissions exploring recent shifts that explain how we arrived at the present.

Possible topics for exploration include:

• religious concepts of appetite, desire and carnality
• queer and straight domesticities
• restaurants and sexual commerce
• gendered hunger and sexual subjectivity
• sexual and dietary health
• body / sexual images and food

Style and image guidelines:

• Submissions should be written for a non-specialist and international audience. Therefore, avoid jargon and use hyperlinks – not footnotes –to clarify terms or concepts that may be unfamiliar to a general readership. 
• Include at least one relevant image for which you have obtained permission and caption your image with clear attribution information. We welcome your use of a range of sources such as movies or sound files.
• Include a short hyperlinked author bio with your submission.

Essay submissions due by July 1^st to rcleves@uvic.ca. All submissions to Notches will go through an internal peer review process prior to publication.

Notches is an international, collaborative, open-access, peer-reviewed history of sexuality blog. With more than 165,000 views and 4,500 subscribers, Notches is at the centre of international conversations about historical research and teaching of the history of sexuality.