Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The gentrification of Northampton, Massachusetts has brought considerable cultural change to the community. As class dynamics shift in the city, the hierarchy of tastes is being re-ordered. Bourdieu (1984) argues that taste is a hidden function of the class hierarchy, but in Northampton the process of gentrification sometimes allows longtime residents to recognize the connection between taste and class, resulting in conflict and resentment toward “newcomers.” Using three issues of change in Northampton, I demonstrate Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of taste as a process. The economic and cultural changes of downtown Northampton, the proliferation of panhandlers on Main Street, and the growth and visibility of the lesbian community produce a range of responses and opinions of longtime residents. As economic, cultural, and political tastes change, Northampton residents contest the re-ordering of the taste hierarchy on various levels.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The idea of the cultural omnivore is increasingly popular in cultural sociology. Research in this vein argues that taste diversity has become the dominant signifier of high status, as opposed to the traditional notion of marking high status through elitist, “snobbish” exclusion. However, many quantitative researchers studying cultural omnivorousness have not recognized the methodological problem that multiple genres in a survey may not equally represent significantly different cultural sectors. Using data from the 1993 General Social Survey, I replicate the methods used by van Eijck (2001) to group genres into significantly similar “taste audiences,” in order to standardize inter-related genres into a representative number of categories. By analyzing the crossing of taste audiences by respondents, instead of simply counting the number of genres they liked, I find that the musical taste diversity found by past researchers was spurious: higher income and higher education tend to increase respondents’ liking of high-status genres, while discouraging them from liking lower status genres. Thus, following the arguments of Bourdieu (1984), I find that consumption of cultural goods remains primarily stratified by elitist exclusion, with those most marginalized from legitimate culture having the greatest breadth of taste diversity. I speculate that the cultural omnivorousness found by previous research may be a new taste pattern in societies influenced by Europe, however, that these “omnivores” do not, as the name suggests, actually like more types of art. I further argue that my evidence supports class theories arguing for segmented, as opposed to gradational, cultural boundaries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using the notion of “taste” to understand organizations in the field of cultural production, this paper introduces the notion of “taste performances” to denote strategies in this type of organizations. A taste performance is the organizational member’s talk and practices relating to “taste”. At the economic pole, the dominating taste performance “the professional approach to taste” by and large implies repudiating any influence of taste on organizational members’ work practices. At the cultural pole, the prevailing taste performance “balancing taste and market potential” underscores that all judgments are subjective, and thus, judgments must be made in light of the experience of having seen vast numbers of films. Still, some judgments are considered better than others. The paper proceeds to highlight the “taste management” called for by the mounting influence of the economic logic and the taste performance “the professional approach to taste”. Taste management is here defined as an attempt to control the taste of organizational members, either by the organizational member him or herself or by the organization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Bourdieu (1979/1984) argued that people demarcate societal boundaries through a lifestyle that exhibits their cultural taste. Peterson and Simkus (1992) amended Bourdieu's theory using the concepts of cultural omnivores and univores. Research on omnivorousness and univorousness has typically focused on musical tastes. Our research extends this field to tastes for television programs using data from a survey among a stratified probability sample of the adult Dutch population (n=825). Through correspondence analysis, we showed that people from higher status groups and with larger amounts of cultural capital watch less program types than implied by Peterson and Simkus' (1992) amendment. Preferences with respect to television program types are compliant with Bourdieu's (1979/1984) original theory on the distinctive force of taste expressions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Monique Truong’s 2003 novel The Book of Salt takes its inspiration from a historical fragment, a brief reference in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to two Indochinese cooks who worked for Gertrude Stein and Toklas in their Paris apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, home of the famous salon at the center of both high modernist culture and a developing public culture of homosexuality. Truong turns to fiction in an effort to imagine who these anonymous servants might have been, inventing a rich history and affective life for her central character Binh, whose migration from Indochina to Paris is also bound up with his homosexuality. Binh’s story gives us another vantage point on queer transnationalisms also embedded in Gertrude and Alice’s expatriate lives.

One of the key languages of the novel is that of food, the form of communication that is available to Binh when French and English fail him, and the meals that he painstakingly prepares for Stein and Toklas, form the basis for Truong’s contemporary version of high modernist prose. The salt of the book’s title refers variously to sweat, sea, food, and tears and Truong’s interest in the sensuous world of taste signals her affective approach to history.

In its concern with food as language and exchange, the novel trafficks in familiar associations of ethnicity with food but does so in order to disrupt a comfortable multiculturalism and to point ultimately to the oblique incorporation of traumatic histories and their accompanying affects into foodways. Truong uses the language of food to convey the complexity of Binh’s story, which cannot be reduced to stock narratives about servants or gay men or immigrants. I take Truong’s work as a model for both the importance of a language of affect to a fuller account of sexual and racialized subjects in a transnational frame and as a model for how little that language often fits the customary idioms of legal, ethnographic, or documentary representation.

Indeed, the novel might he understood as an oblique response to other more contemporary questions that Truong herself grapples with about her own identity as a Vietnamese American who is part of the generation who came as children after the fall of Saigon. Monique Truong’s attention to salt as the form of appearance of pain and trauma, her attention to cooks and homosexuals in Paris rather than U.S. military involvement as part of the history of contemporary Vietnam and a post-war Vietnamese diaspora, provides an important model for forms of public feeling that provide new models of transnational experience.