EBTL.050817

On Nigella Lawson, Impossible Witnessing,

and the Reification of Analysis

I have long had a lazy appreciation for Nigella Lawson. It has its roots in the one time I stumbled upon her show whilst channel-surfing in some location where there were channels to surf; I assume either a hotel room or my parents’ house. I was surprised by how engaging and articulate she was (had I been aware at the time of her prior history as a book and restaurant columnist who read Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, I would have been less surprised), and the casual way that the camera moved around the space of her very real-seeming (possibly really real?) kitchen. I have it in my head that the segment was predicated on her coming home after a night of drinking, and eating an entire pan of sticky toffee pudding she whips up on the fly, but that is probably a figment.

If her warmth, eloquence, and wit are not absent from the popular discourse around Lawson, they are certainly eclipsed by commentary on her beauty, her sexuality, and the perceived flirtatiousness of her aesthetic. Lawson herself has taken issue with the sexualization of her image. Even or especially where is concerned her notorious “salted caramel facial” photo shoot for the 2010 issue of Stylist magazine she guest-edited, Lawson remains insistent that she has no interest in being, as she has in the past been dubbed, the “queen of food porn.” The cover frames her face in close-up, eyes closed, lips parted slightly in a smile; there is an abundance of glistening caramel. It does not necessarily strike one as unsexual.

I know it is said but my honest opinion is that I have quite an intense and honest rapport with the camera. I don’t think I’m flirtatious. That makes me cringe. However, I can see that I am not a skinny woman and the male gaze is such that whatever is there is seen to be there for their benefit.”1

What I find (intellectually) provocative about this statement is her dual insistence that sensualized and sexualized are not mutually reducible phenomena, and that male spectatorship is not the ne plus ultra of representation. While Lawson’s use of the phrase “the male gaze” here seems more generalized than Laura Mulvey’s original formulation of the term in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” I have no reason to believe that Lawson would not be familiar with the concept. The male gaze for Mulvey described the formal and narrative conventions (in Hollywood film specifically, although the concept has been widely influential and now generalized to literary, as well as visual, strategies of representation) through which women are produced as implicitly sexually receptive, mere objects for men’s scopophilic pleasure. The concept has been heavily revised over time, but central to it is that under patriarchy, visual representation is ordered by the logic of a male looker, indeed a voyeur, and a female who exists to be looked at.2

When Lawson states that the Stylist photo is about representing an unapologetic, “rapturous joy in caramel,” one might roll one’s eyes at what one takes an affectation of naïveté, but I think that there is an important point about female pleasure embedded there. Effectively, she is insisting on not only the possibility, but the immanence of female sensual pleasure, represented in print/on television, that is neither constituted for nor defined by a hegemonic male spectator. I do not mean to suggest Nigella as a critical feminist icon, or that it is this easy to step outside the libidinal economy of patriarchy, but I think that taking such declarations of pleasure—arguably of agency—seriously is part of the critical work of interrogating phallocentrism. To deny the relevance of the subject’s own interpretation and experience is in a curious way to participate actively in their objectification, by foreclosing the possibility of a female pleasure that is not wholly defined and recuperated by the male spectator. By assuming the total hegemony of the male gaze as that which organizes all representation and all looking, we effectively render impossible the witnessing of female pleasure for itself.

I see this as representative of what we might call the reification of analysis, whereby a particular theory or analytic lens becomes so powerful as to begin to eclipse what it is meant to elucidate. Or, put another way, that it comes to be seen as so good at taking something apart in a particular way that we can no longer conceive of the thing (idea, phenomenon, et cetera) being made up of any other parts. In this case, I’m referring to a particular stream of feminist criticism, but it is commonplace across all academic disciplines, and perhaps becomes all the more common as concepts and theoretical tools move into other domains and enjoy more popular currency.

There is an analogy to be made here, if you will please forgive the incongruity of scale of importance, with the anti-sex-work rationale of some second-wave feminism that defines sex work as inherently exploitative and thus non-consensual, since one cannot “rationally” consent to one’s own exploitation. We see the institutionalization of this analysis in Bill C-36, which, in the wake of the landmark Bedford case that found Canada’s prostitution laws unconstitutional, effectively continues the marginalization and stigmatization of sex workers.3 The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act presents a set of laws that intertwine the benevolent paternalism of the (patriarchal) state with the radical critique of sexual relations of second-wave feminism, appealing to both social conservatives and anti-sex-work liberal feminists. Ostensibly designed to protect exploited individuals, Bill C-36 essentially defines all sex workers as sui generis exploited. Thus, the analytically and historically useful concept of all heterosexual sex under patriarchal capitalism being a form of violence, and sex work merely the least adorned version thereof, no longer serves to denormalize asymmetrical gender relations, but instead comes to enjoy the status of evidence itself, a form of evidence that precludes actually listening to or taking seriously the accounts of many sex workers, as was demonstrated by the justice committee hearings on the bill.4 By virtue of the theory, we may take the structure for granted, the analysis becomes the object itself, and the lived realities and analyses of those most directly concerned are occluded, incidental. (The sex workers and those who work with them become another kind of impossible witness.) This can be described as a reification of analysis to the extent that the analytic apparatus no longer helps us to engage with the world beyond its face value, but stands in, as something more real than the people, the voices, the pleasures, that are being disclosed, but which it cannot accommodate.

This may seem very far removed from the image of a British celebrity cook with a bunch of caramel on her face, but although the stakes are different, I see a formal continuity between the two. The concept of the male gaze is extremely valuable insofar as it offers a tool for thinking about the politics of representation, and to the extent that it describes how in the day-to-day male privilege conceives its right to look, to comment, to catcall, as sacrosanct (one only needs to be a woman and have walked down a street, had a job, taken a drink of water, ever done basically anything, et cetera), but it should not define the limits of analysis. I think there is something powerful in Nigella Lawson’s refusal to acquiesce to the reading of her presentation as sexual, and her insistence on its sensuality, for her, and on her terms. The male gaze of course sees “salted caramel bukkake” (I apologize for even writing that, but it had a lot of currency on comment threads, quel surprise) and reads it as an image that exists for the titillation of the presumed male audience, but Nigella denies the male gaze the privilege of defining the meaning of the image by asserting the existence, nay the ontological primacy, of another reality, the reality of her own gastronomic pleasure.

“I wanted to make food and my slavering passion for it the starting point,” Lawson writes, “indeed, for me it was the starting point. I have nothing to declare but my greed.”