Queering Food Justice: Confronting White Heteropatriarchy in US Agriculture

LGBTQ+ farmers have always existed, dreaming of futures unbounded by heteropatriarchy.In the past decade, farmer-activists and researchers have documented heterosexism and cissexism in farming, LGBTQ+ food insecurity, and queer resistance strategies.Yet despite being leaders of liberation through food systems, the food justice movement has rarely meaningfully engaged with queer or trans thought or politics.Why might this be the case?In this chapter, we look at food justice with a queer theoretical lens to explore how the movement relates to heterosexism, cissexism, and queer resistance in US agriculture.What does it mean "to queer" food justice?"Queering" means questioning what gender, sexual, and intersecting relations have to do with vari ous aspects of life.In this case, we examine food justice with a queer lens to unpack how intersections of heteropatriarchy and racism may have hindered the movement from achieving its own goals.Queering further encourages us to highlight queer resistance and joy, so we spend the second half of this chapter learning from queer ways of reor ga niz ing farm life in the pursuit of justice.Food justice scholars and activists have long pointed out that food production and consumption go hand-in-hand in terms of justice, so while this chapter is focused on agriculture, it is impor tant to mention that LGBTQ+ people do not have equitable access to food.Whereas the overall food insufficiency rate (sometimes or often not enough to eat in the past seven days) in the US is 9.5 percent, the number jumps to 15.6 percent for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people and to 22.3 percent for transgender people (Leslie, Carson, and Bruce 2023).Breaking down these numbers by race reveals greater 2 Queering Food Justice: Confronting White Heteropatriarchy in US Agriculture