The Rhetoric of Food by Frye Joshua;Bruner Michael;

Author:Frye, Joshua;Bruner, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1039373
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Habitus Unfixed: Spaces of Becoming

The People's Freeway Community is not the suburbs. Looking at the neighborhood surrounding the People's Portable Garden you will find a mix of businesses, single-family homes, and apartment buildings. The population is relatively diverse given Salt Lake City's reputation for homogeneity. This area is also a neighborhood that the RDA refers to as “blighted,” and “low income,” not exactly the kind of neighborhood with a great deal of visibility or political currency. The empty lot on 900 S. and 200 W. not only became a space for creativity and imagination to take root and grow, but also created a political space for unheard voices to emerge. There is Jonnie Mae, the “mayor” of the People's Portable Garden, who is black. Jonnie Mae is black: race is made visible. There is the household of transvestites who were previously looked at with a sense of fear, but who now garden in skirts at the garden. Their sexuality is made visible. There is another woman who slowly gained a voice, and a support system, when her son committed suicide. Her pain and potential healing are made visible. The garden space itself begs the body to pause, look, and listen. Taking time to engage makes present not just the stories of the gardeners, but also the songs of birds, the scent of flowers, as well as the rush of traffic and the clang of light rail. The latter are sounds that we frequently naturalize in our urban setting but become acutely aware of when they are juxtaposed with sounds associated with the pastoral.

The garden defies our political expectation of the urban habitus. By challenging Bourdieu's notion of the habitus,22 we dispute both the role of the “urban” and of the “natural.” Spirn sees this new approach as a way of challenging myths of purity, and moving to a space of hybridity: “To call some landscapes natural and others artificial or cultural misses the truth that landscapes are never wholly one or the other.”23 The presence of urban agriculture challenges both the identities of urbanism and of the agrarian. Both terms experience a queering and come to resignify something new. It is important to note that this process is not simply a reconceptualization, but a transformation. In terms of Derrida's notion of iterability, both the urban and the garden are still connected to their historical meanings and understandings, but they now deviate from traditional meanings in a space of unfixed possibility and change. Following Rancière, this unfixed possibility is significant because a change in how language is circulated impacts the “social distribution of bodies” and thus of what is seen and heard within the realm of politics.24 When the garden is considered in relation to other bodies, the political text stands out in multiple realms. There are the politics of whose voices are heard, both of human and non-human. There are the politics of what spaces are seen, and the politics of how we cannot simply reconceptualize these spaces but must instead actively transform them.

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