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Food, masculinities, and home. interdisciplinary perspectives

deepen their connection to their religious practice and their cultural heritage as a symbiotic relationship. This work has an intimacy in its ethnographic framing akin to that of Karen McCarthy Brown’s foundational Mama Lola (NYU Press (February 16, 2016) North American Religions Series). Like Brown, Pérez preferences the lives, religious practices, and discourses of the practitioners rather than welling in the cosmology or ritual frameworks that have been previously explicated in the existing literature on African Diasporic religions. Well versed in African Diaspora religious ideology and dogma, Perez’s consistent engagement with theoretical scaffolding of these religious traditions informs her applied ethnographic case references with nuance. The predominantly African-American members of the Ilé Laroye temple represent various class levels, genders, sexual orientations, and generations, as well as people who have formerly been incarcerated. Pérez highlights the role and power of gender and sexual orientation to organize and manage kitchens, and transform their lives. Within the organizational structure of kitchen management and meal planning, Pérez demonstrates that the culinary labors of the Lucumí initiates—along with their power and authority in these traditions—remain invisible only because most studies have highlighted those religious undertakings that exclude them. To more effectively study this community Pérez leans into Queer Theory. At Laroye, gendered roles are alternately enforced according to religious tradition, or discarded due to the necessity of the moment. By queering her analysis in Religion in the Kitchen, Pérez substantively and subtly illuminates the temple-house community’s cohesion across its various subject positions. Through her respondent’s kitchen-table conversations and culinary behaviors we are privileged to observe the cognitive acquisition of religiosity and fealty to their orixá/orisha. Within African Diaspora cosmology one’s head is figuratively and literally fed to nourish one’s deities, feed the host, or supplicant, as well as enlightening said supplicant. Thus cooking has a role as a corporeal, nutritive act whether for bodily and/or spiritual nutrition. The “cooking of words” via storytelling embeds social processes, practices, and cognitive knowledge in the supplicant’s sacred life-world. Therefore Pérez’s “micropractices” run parallel as affective interactions with the sacred, as Bakhtinian utterances do as individuated affective aspects of larger speech acts. In the Ilé Laroye temple, we learn that the practices and work are gendered, sexualized, and the personal is consummately political. The role and signification of who cooks, what they cook, for whom they are cooking, who gets to eat and why suddenly opens up new avenues for inquiry and analysis under Pérez’s gaze. As she states in her conclusion, “Everything else is gravy.”