Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

In the TV show Transparent, food and the family are intertwined with identity, the complexity and changing nature of relationships, Jewishness and queerness. For the protagonists, the Pfeffermans, the table is a place where food is shared but also where revelations are regularly aired, resentments surface and the emotional dimensions of the family are revealed (Alpert, 2017). Because of this, the family table is one of the affective cornerstones of the show and one that is a deliberate narrative device. This paper offers a queer reading of the family meal through key scenes from Transparent to illustrate the family meal as a site of failures. These failures should not, however, be read negatively but rather as a spaces through which to escape the “punishing norms” of heteronormativity (Halberstam, 2011). Such norms regularly present the family meal, situated at a table, as a declining pillar of society – and one whose resurgence could bring about an end to a myriad of social problems (Gray et al. 2017; Pike and Leahy, 2014; 2017). Conversely, a queer reading of the family meal allows us to fail, try again, fail again and find comfort in food, the familiar and, most importantly, in the strange. We reconfigure the shared table as a generative, affective space within which we acknowledge that there are no simple solutions to ‘social problems’ related to food, family and identity.