On the Visceral

In this issue of GLQ, the first of a paired set (20.4 and 21.1), the logics of desire and consumption in (post)colonial circuits reveal the carnal processes through which our bodies are materialized as queer, through which they are racialized. The theoretical pressure that the visceral conjures as the line between subject and object becomes increasingly obfuscated in the neoliberal, postcolonial, and neocolonial, environmentally apocalyptic world. Our goal in calling for this work was to map that abject and erotic territory — the blood and guts, the cum and shit — and in doing so push at the cartographic and historiographical edges of food studies, critical race theory, and sexuality studies. As scholars engaged in thinking about consumption in and through these frameworks, we and the authors in these two issues see many points of convergence between sexuality and eating, food, and food labor. These “systems” have tremendous impact on the construction of the human and the nonhuman in the context of a transcolonial, transnational, and hemispheric modernity.