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DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.2.| GERBER, KÜHNLENZ: DE-CONSTRUCTING FOOD_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 16 sively. 1 Binary categories such as man/woman, raw food/cooked food or housework/wage labour are all-important, especially in Western thinking. The purpose of deconstruction is to question and ex­plore this aspect. Hierarchies, which are part and parcel of such conceptual pairings, can be analysed and questioned as much as supposedly unambigu­ous gender attributions. If we also take deconstruc­tion to mean paying attention to structures and constructs that are questioned or dismantled at the same time, then it is possible to build bridges to queer-theoretical approaches.“To queer facts means to shake their supposed naturalness” 2 : by definition, the word“queer” – a wilful adoption and positive reassignment of a pejorative term for non­heteronormative lifestyles and sexualities – refuses to be clearly defined. As a practice, queering aims to unsettle, question, and draw attention to vaguely emergent intermediate stages, hidden or subordi­nate meanings and, more generally, their open-en­dedness and fluidity. 3 Queer-feminist perspectives on food and nutrition – whether in a museum or other context – re-examine practices and constel­lations that seem self-evident, unambiguous, clear­ly defined and natural when it comes to growing, preparing, serving, consuming, utilising and rating foodstuffs. In each of their thematic fields, the vari­ous contributions explore this potential for decons­tructing practices and(not least gendered) role at­tributions in the food sector that seem natural or ahistorical at first glance. On the one hand, what we eat is something that has been made: food is farmed, grown, cultivated, processed and cooked, among other things. Cultu­ral ideas influence what we eat just as much as the broad spectrum of technologies used, from an open fire to genetic engineering. Naomi Hammett uses the example of dairy cows as‘milk machines’ to de­monstrate to stunning effect how living creatures are turned into food, or“bio-facts” 4 , through agricultural technology and bioengineering. She discusses what sort of futures might be envisaged for“queer cows”, and how the boundaries between nature and culture are becoming blurred in modern dairy production, adopting a“multi-species” approach that highlights the precarious nature of supposedly unambiguous opposites. And it’s not just what we eat that’s crucial, but also the growing and rearing of the food, and its processing and marketing, as Sahar Tavakoli illustrates in her contribution, which looks at nation-building through food. Regional foods and foods with designations of origin or indications of geographical provenance are just as much a part of the construct of socio-tech­nological systems as nations are – and indeed the ideas associated with them. Tavakoli picks up the idea of“gastro-nationalism” on the one hand and, on the other, uses the concept of“socio-technological imaginaries” from the field of science and techno­logy studies to examine a“performance” by Italian butcher Dario Cecchini. She considers the imaginary scenarios of a desirable(food) future that play out in his performance as“camp”(as defined by Susan Sontag) insofar as they mirror the past:“Where we wish to be is where we have already been.” In her contribution, Psyche Williams-Forson high­lights the fact that a close look at material cultures 1 cf.“Gender”, in: Anna Babka, Gerald Posselt: Gender und Dekonstruktion. Begriffe und kommentierte Grundlagentexte der Gen­der- und Queer-Theorie . Vienna 2016, p. 56. 2 S ophie Gerber: “ Labelling Machines and Synthesizers: Collecting Queer Knowledge in Science and Technology Museums”, in: Museum International 72(2020), Issue 3–4, pp. 116–127, here p. 127, Note 1. 3 cf. Sophie Kühnlenz:“Eindeutig uneindeutig, beständig unbeständig. Museum queer-feministisch: Gedanken zum Weiterdenken”, in: Martina Griesser-Stermscheg, Christine Haupt-Stummer, Renate Höllwart et al(eds.): Widersprüche. Kuratorisch handeln zwischen Theorie und Praxis (= curating. ausstellungstheorie& praxis, Vol. 6). Berlin, Boston 2022, pp. 195–198. 4 Nicole C. Karafyllis(ed.): Biofakte. Versuch über den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen. Paderborn 2003, particularly “Das Wesen der Biofakte”, pp. 11–27.