Restaurant Culture, Failures, and Queer Time
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Lauren Shoemaker
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr. Lothian
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 ENGL 985
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 8 October 2013
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Restaurant Culture, Failures, and Queer Time
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 Plenty of memes and Buzzfeed articles circulate online claiming that everyone should work in the restaurant business for a short amount of time in order to make them a better person or appreciate a wait staff. I used to gleefully send these out to fellow servers and laugh knowingly, but recently I’ve come to think of the message that real life takes place after you’ve held one of these subservient less-than-minimum-wage jobs is bullshit. Serving and cooking at a restaurant are culturally valued as a teenage rite of passage rather than a career. You’re meant to move on to a real job, get married, and have children in the heteronormative life narrative. Judith Halberstam uses the term “extended adolescence” to discuss the cultural opinion of the participation of people in their forties and fifties in subcultures like punk rock in her book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives. What I took from this book was a suspicion about how certain activities and lifestyles are labeled immature or selfish. When the expectation is made clear to “grow up,” what it really means is to get on the reproductive track. The memes and Buzzfeed articles recently gave me pause for embodying these politics. I’ve worked several years at restaurants as hostess, server, and bartender, but only in the past year or two have I started viewing these jobs as intertwined in my academic pursuits.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 1 This isn’t the first time restaurant culture and the political space it occupies has been a part of my archive. This past summer I looked at kitchen space, or the back of the house, as a queer space where homoerotic behavior is expected in a project called “Sex at Work: Desire, Privacy, and the Color of the Collar.” As I become more familiar with the directions of queer theory in the past decade, my restaurant experience has become even more useful as a personal archive where the stakes have become more apparent. The politics behind the “be kind to your wait staff” message that frames these occupations as something all adolescents will grow out of and leave behind labels me (and anyone older) as a loser, a failure. I’ve overstayed my welcome in an adolescent phase. From Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and from my current position as a server I’ve found that “while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (3). By starting off with the prevalent Buzzfeed posts, I’m attempting to practice low theory that aptly conveys certain politics, though in this case, they promote hegemonic claims rather than the subversive ones Halberstam finds in animated films. Restaurant culture, however, filled with failures like myself, serves as a better text for practicing low theory.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 2 Sometimes when I arrive on campus with my apron in hand and someone puts me on the spot, I start rattling off the daily special and soup du jour. It isn’t confusion; it’s the response that my neurons are conditioned to give when I’m not really thinking. The response also demonstrates that even the drastic difference in location from a restaurant to a university classroom or lounge doesn’t allow me to entirely disengage one discourse from another. A line cook told me this weekend how difficult it was to be a part of his child’s life when he worked until 10 or 11 pm every night. Without using the term “queer time,” he explained to me how his job and the lifestyle that his work will always demand is not conducive to a family, but it never bothered him until the structure of “everyone else’s time” was thrust on him. In my head I had a conversation with him that explained Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity, which is the way time is used to organize bodies into their most productive routines (Time Binds 3). Associated with industrialization and the demands of a regulated workday ending at dinner time, chrononormativity is something people within restaurant culture would recognize as a concept that marginalizes them. While everyone else is eating a meal, they are working. Their day starts at 11 am and finishes around 11 pm; they live in a variation of queer time that is structured at odds with school and daycare hours. It was a great conversation in my head, but I’ve learned that not everyone wants to be given an academic term to describe their very real problems with their family and friends, so it often stays in my head.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 Maybe some people can listen to a coworker’s complaint about conflicting lifestyles without writing about them later. I don’t considerate it unfortunate that I often find examples of concepts from my academic interests in my side job. If anything, I’ve held on to these side jobs in restaurants in order to feel like I have a lifeline to people outside of academia who occupy a space that I feel comfortable in, yet realize sometimes I have only one thing in common with them—restaurant experience. No matter how good that sounds, it is a complete lie: I’ve worked these jobs because I’ve needed the money.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 What does it matter to include experiences that are read as nonacademic or even as “hobbies” in an archive? I guess my answer is similar to Halberstam’s reasoning for analyzing Chicken Run and Finding Nemo: “[they] have opened up new narrative doors and led to unexpected encounters between the childish and the transformative and the queer…they might offer strange and anticapitalist logics of being and acting and knowing, and they will harbor covert and overt queer worlds” (20-1). I can remember a time when the kitchen scared me because there was so much yelling, it was so hot, and sweaty bodies were constantly sliding around each other in a small space to avoid the scorching pans, burners, and dishes flying out of there. However, many “unexpected encounters” have made me see what the space and the lifestyle have to offer academically.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 Thinking about restaurant culture this way led me to deciphering the Buzzfeed restaurant articles. They are intended to be a part of a liberal agenda promoting kindness to struggling college students when in actuality they generally participate in perpetuating hegemonic ideology. Facebook is a battleground littered with images and messages whose politics are not what they seem, and so I’ve decided not to claim the message of those articles as part of my archive anymore. It’s hard not to take a message personally that frames you as immature and a failure for your age group, though I think I’m warming up to the label of failure after reading Halberstam.
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¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Works Cited
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¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 –. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
I think it’s great that you can make a connection between two seemingly polar opposite cultures, that of academia and that of the restaurant world. It’s true what you say about a serving job being a rite of passage, at least that’s how people view it my experience. How many times have you heard fellow workers say, this is just a temporary job so I can make money for school; I’m not a “life-timer.” I admit that I am guilty of saying this. But we marginalize those who are “life-timers” in the restaurant business, and this view especially applies to serving, I think.
What’s especially odd is that from what I’ve read recently, the “life-timers” are becoming more and more the norm. There are an increasing number of people that are in professions like this and attempting to keep their family afloat. The problem is then the cultural perspective that Lauren alludes to here: we still conceive of these jobs as part time work, the sort of trial of adolescence that we all go through. Maybe we’ll get over the label and inclination at some point in the future, but I’m just not sure that we as a society will until it starts getting addressed directly through our media. Even now, whenever an adult in an occupation like this is portrayed in the media, it is not in a pleasant light…