Queering food in the 21st Century

The twenty-first century has witnessed a marked rise in public projects, events, and community-driven enterprises—such as the Queer Food Foundation—that foreground the intersections of queerness and food. Alongside these initiatives, there has also been a visible increase in home cooks, professional chefs, cookbook writers, and culinary artists who openly identify as LGBTQ. Mainstream culinary magazines, including Food & Wine, have begun to explore these interconnections, highlighting how food can serve as a site of identity, creative expression, and socio-political resistance. Yet it is important to recognize that queer relationships to food are not necessarily new or unique to the 21st Century. Rather, queer food spaces, practices, and foodways are gaining renewed prominence and visibility today because of decades of activism and community work.

This special issue invites scholars, academics, and creative practitioners to reflect on the ways food, foodways, and everyday culinary practices can be mobilized to dismantle heteronormative gender norms. It seeks to critically interrogate how queer studies can deepen and complicate our understandings of food, gender, and sexuality. The project of queering food studies encourages us to consider food’s capacity to unsettle, disrupt, and transform hegemonic constructions of gender, sexuality, and power, offering alternative frameworks for thinking about nourishment, care, and community.

By bringing queerness and food into conversation, this special issue aims to uphold non-linear, non-traditional, and community-rooted approaches to storytelling, oral histories, archival work, and collective care. It pushes the boundaries of conventional food studies by foregrounding alternative cultural values, kinship rituals, and familial bonds—particularly those forged outside normative structures. In doing so, it highlights the radical potential of queer foodways and food practices to cultivate belonging, challenge exclusion, and imagine diverse futures.

This special issue invites scholarly as well as creative work that explores the intersections of queerness. Some potential topics to consider:

• Queer appetites and gustatory experiences
• Food, queerness, and diasporas
• Food, queerness, and disability
• Queer sensations and sensory imagination
• Literary representations of food in 21st Century queer writings
• Queer food spaces
• Queer temporarility and food
• Queer food archives
• Food, queerness, and bodily autonomy
• Queer culinary aesthetics
• Food, community, and care
• Food, nostalgia, and queer memories
• Food, colonialism, and queer resistance
• Queer futures

The total word count for the final submission is 6000-8000 words (Chicago style), inclusive of notes and works cited.

Abstracts/Proposals (500 words max) along with a short bio (maximum 100 words) are due by 23rd January 2026.

 Selections will be made by 1st April, 2026. Those invited to participate in the issue will be asked to submit complete essays for editing and peer review by 30th September 2026. The Special Issue is planned for publication in the winter of 2026.

Please send your queries and submissions to Sohni Chakrabarti (sc324@st-andrews.ac.uk)