‘—

Assignment 6: If You Try to Eat Me, I’ll Kick Out Your Teeth: A Tirade on Cultural Commodification and Hegemonic White Patriarchy By Michael Marbela

When analyzing bell hooks’s “Eating the other,” at first, I thought the identity of the specter of the “other” was obvious: it was anyone who doesn’t conform to the ideals of straight white heteropatriarchy—from the unfortunate Native American girl who had to fend off the advances of those blond white jocks on Page 368 to the queer, brown English major writing this essay. However, as hooks advances her discourse on the “consumption” of the other, I felt as if I was slowly but surely gaining insight into her interpretation of “consumption.” In this case, the other is exotified and seen as something beautiful and glorious to behold, something to be appreciated and observed, something to be immersed into and commodified for the sake of its foreignness compared to the heteropatriarchal white norm—which is a vast difference from the colonialist structures that sought to subdue the other in the name of religious or racial domination. Rather than destroy us or change us into their image, the “non-other” (a.k.a. the white man) wishes to commodify and consume us for the following: 1) to cross an “imaginary boundary into an exotic land” by interacting with our non-whiteness to come out the other side “changed” by the experience 2) to, as hooks says on page 380, be offered up and consumed to add flavor to the mayonnaise-laden palate of white mediocrity and 3) to strip our cultural artifacts of their meanings, both ethnically and politically significant, in the name of perpetuating hegemonic white dominance.

That being said, why does hooks call this interaction of “non-other” to “other” productive? I believe it is because within this modern context of multiculturalism and openness to other identities, that otherness is no longer seen as a deviant identity but as something to be explored and connected with, which flies directly in the face of hegemonic white patriarchal dominance. That being said, those of the dominant group (a.k.a. yet again, white people) or anyone outside of a given group should tread carefully and realize that cultural exploration can easily be transformed into cultural appropriation without intentionality and a willingness to listen to others within the non-dominant group.