Maya Nitis (Morgan State University)
Food and love are vectors by which we express dependency. Although humans are born into unwilled relations of dependence, Western cultures maintain the incentives not to develop beyond developmental dependency. Social isolation prevents structures of interdependence from thriving that would enable individuals to move past developmental dependence. Two central vectors channel the double unsatisfied need for independence in constellations of interdependence: food and so-called love. Both food and love (code for sex until death do us part) promise primordial, ever-maintained satisfaction. Yet neither delivers on the empty promise of sustenance. Instead, for most Americans at least, both lead to toxic addictions of over-eating and emotional contracts that fail to deliver anything but slow death.
The difference between addictions and habits is that addictions are destructive, whereas habits are life sustaining and provide the architecture of our daily lives. Habits are developed and can be substituted with a different set of goals. Addictions, on the other hand, require extreme sacrifice. In order to quit something you have to substitute it with something else that becomes habitual. Habits can be channeled, but addictions call for interventions.
This roundtable invites contributions from critical theorists, interdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners to address the divergences between habits and addictions from theoretical as well as practical perspectives. We particularly welcome feminist, queer, race critical, and non-Western perspectives to contribute to our practical-theoretical dialogue that will examine the differences between habits and addictions, focusing two central yet under-theorized vectors of food and so-called love. The roundtable will include transdisciplinary approaches that incorporate practical as well as critical theoretical discourses, taking languages, movements, experience, wellness cultures and other disciplinary perspectives into account.
The difference between addictions and habits is that addictions are destructive, whereas habits are life sustaining. Two central vectors -- food and love -- shape the architecture of our daily lives as habits or addictions. This roundtable invites contributions from critical theorists, interdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners to address the divergences between habits and addictions from theoretical as well as practical perspectives focusing on two central yet under-theorized vectors of food and so-called love.