8
Sexing the Turkey
Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality at Thanksgiving
LUANNE ROTH
I love Thanksgiving turkey. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Norman Rockwell’s classic painting, Freedom from Want (March 6, 1943), depicts the iconographic American Thanksgiving (see figure 8.1). As an apron-wearing woman sets the turkey platter down, the patriarch stands beside her at the head of the table, carving knife close at hand. The family members around the table look on with giddy anticipation. One man turns back, peering at us from the corner of the painting. Is he inviting us to the meal? Or is he hinting at something amiss about this beloved holiday? Nearly sixty years later, Gurinder Chadha’s cinematic ode to American Thanksgiving, What’s Cooking? (2000), likewise hints that things are not as they appear to be. The opening credits roll over an object that gradually comes into focus, while a trumpet plays a somber rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The object resolves into a roast turkey, a man brandishing his carving knife over it. As the frame widens, the all-American nuclear family appears, smiling proudly around the patriarch, who is poised to carve the bird. As the last triumphant lines of the national anthem fade out, the image slides out of frame, revealing an advertisement for turkeys on the side of a Los Angeles Metro bus that is driving away.
Figure 8.1 “Freedom from Want” painting by Norman Rockwell (1943). Oil on canvas. 116.2 x 90 cm. Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Originally published in the March 6, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
Although “cultural institutions are visible,” says Homi Bhabha, “the ideology behind them . . . is concealed” (1994, 172). Both Freedom from Want and What’s Cooking? play with viewers’ expectations. Despite the Thanksgiving meal’s infamous soporific effect, these images suggest citizens should be alert to and expose the ideological implications of even the most beloved holidays.1 In this vein, I examine contemporary examples of gender performativity around the Thanksgiving holiday in order to make visible the patriarchal ideology that operates. Here, I focus on Thanksgiving moments found, by and large, within some sort of visual frame in the media of everyday life (Balsamo 1995), including key scenes from television, film, YouTube, and commercial advertisements as well as literary works.2
Thanksgiving represents “a day of intensified patriarchy” in the majority of American households, that is, when the division of labor between males and females becomes more pronounced than usual (Pleck 2000, 42). As women wash the dishes in the kitchen, and men listen to the football game in the living room, it becomes clear that women have (often willingly) given up their leisure and that both men and children benefit from this sacrifice.3 This arrangement has not been entirely disadvantageous for women, argues historian Elizabeth Pleck (2000). As women cook together to prepare for Thanksgiving, they can prove their womanly skills and gain companionship in the realm of the kitchen. Moreover, at the end of the meal, women are appreciated once again for their culinary skills. Melanie Wallendorf and Eric Arnould write: “Grateful aunts asked for a hostess’s recipes; stuffed diners called out their compliments. In the recipes they chose, women remembered and honored a dead mother or other female relative. The act of using a mother’s or grandmother’s recipes was a way for women to make a powerful, loving connection with the dead” (1991, 25).
Notwithstanding any sense of empowerment the gendered division of labor affords, women often report feeling exhausted at the end of the day. In their study of American families, Wallendorf and Arnould found: “Although regarded as a day of rest by men, in most households Thanksgiving Day is a day of . . . physical labor for women.” One-third of women in the study considered Thanksgiving to be a hurried day, while only one-sixth of men saw it this way. In the majority of families they observed, men were positioned to be served. In contrast, women begin preparations days before the feast—with such backstage work as coordinating with guests, procuring ingredients, cleaning the house, and preparing the food—and on Thanksgiving Day itself they busily attend to last-minute details. Nearly half of women reported that their major Thanksgiving Day activity involves cooking for others. One interviewee, Paula Lefkowitz, recalls of her Polish grandmother: “My grandma would always try to serve the food while everyone else was eating. We would always tell her to sit down, but she never seemed to listen” (1991, 25).
By the 1970s, during the “postsentimental era” (Pleck 2000, 39), more women held paying jobs and could devote less time to the feast. Therefore, men began to do more housework and cooking. If men helped at Thanksgiving, researchers emphasize that women continued to retain control over the feast. Fieldwork reports in 1989, for example, note that “men were not doing much of the cooking, but they were helping with the clean-up” (Pleck 2000, 39). Even in the households in which men assist, women still assume primary responsibility for the planning and preparation.
In many households, men offer symbolic labor, for example, taking the cooked turkey out of the oven, carrying it to the table, and carving it. In contrast to the “days of hidden labor that women put into ironing tablecloths, polishing silver, and molding gelatin salads,” men’s labor receives publicity and is recorded in photographs (Arlie Hochchiel, quoted in Wallendorf and Arnould 1991, 25–26; see also Freund 1991). In the iconographic Thanksgiving scene, the matriarch steps aside at the moment of high ritual drama, leaving room for the patriarch to present and carve the turkey. “For thousands of years,” observes Margaret Visser, the roast beast “was placed before the family as a result of male enterprise and triumph; and men, with their knives, have insisted on carving it up . . . before the expectant and admiring crowd” (1991, 231; 1992). Borrowed from British Christmas traditions, the turkey-carving ritual emerged as the American holiday’s symbolic core. As the “cult of domesticity” spread throughout the United States during the nineteenth century, turkeys and turkey carving became compulsory at American Thanksgivings (Pleck 1999).
Victorian author Isabella Beeton reflects on the significance of the bird, writing in her 1861 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management : “A noble dish is the turkey, roast or boiled . . . and we can hardly imagine an object of greater envy than is presented by a respected portly paterfamilias carving, at the season devoted to good cheer and genial charity, his own fat turkey, and carving it well” (quoted in Hughes 2006, 148). The art of carving turkey, says Mrs. Beeton, involves “getting from the breast as many fine slices as possible; and all must have remarked the very great difference in the large number of people whom a good carver will find slices for, and the comparatively few that a bad carver will succeed in serving.” Carving the roast turkey, therefore, becomes a lesson in managing resources.4 “You could always tell a gentleman,” concludes Beeton, “by the grace and style with which he apportioned a roast” (149).
Pleck notes that in the twentieth century, “men still carved the turkey, but increasingly in the kitchen rather than at the table . . . Since so few fathers taught their sons to carve, men had to learn from reading instructions in a cookbook.” American magazines in the 1980s celebrated men skilled in “making turkey dressing and gravy, simmering giblets, peeling and mashing potatoes, and taking instruction from svelte grandmothers as to how to trim the edges of pie pastry” (2000, 149). “The man presents the ‘hunted’ bird (actually purchased in a supermarket after being raised in a feed pen),” Wallendorf and Arnould observe, “while the woman presents the gathered berries (from a can) and cultivated vegetables (also purchased in the supermarket)” (1991, 25).
In the majority of American families at the turn of the twenty-first century, the paterfamilias still holds the role of turkey carver. How that position is assigned within the family unit has yet to be adequately explored by scholars of the holiday. When successful, the ritual operates to reconstitute patriarchal ideology and a sense of communitas; the turkey becomes the flesh that unites. At other times, the ritual fails. For example, Avalon (directed by Barry Levinson, 1990) depicts one example of this contested ground. Set in Baltimore in the 1940s, the film follows the Krichinsky family’s immigration and assimilation into American culture, including the extended family gathering annually to celebrate Thanksgiving. In the first Krichinsky Thanksgiving, the Polish-Jewish matriarch Eva (Joan Plowright) wonders about the origins of the holiday, saying to her female kin, “I don’t understand this holiday, Thanksgiving. We’re giving thanks to whom? All I’m saying is we had to get the turkey, and we had to kill it to say thanks. If it wasn’t for this holiday we wouldn’t have turkey. I don’t eat turkey the rest of the year; why do I have to eat it now?” Several years later, one of the brothers, Gabriel (Lou Jacobi), arrives later than usual. Responding to the pleas of hungry children, the family starts eating without him. “The seemingly innocuous act of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey without waiting for Gabriel has dire consequences,” writes Eric Goldman of this scene. When Gabriel arrives to find the carving already under way, he starts ranting, “You cut the turkey without me? You cut the turkey without me?” Storming out of the house, he starts a long-standing family feud. The once unfamiliar American holiday, adopted with some reluctance by the immigrants, becomes so engrained in one generation that deviation from the new tradition threatens to destroy family cohesion (2003, 115; see also By the Light of the Silvery Moon [directed by David Butler, 1953]).
In Home for the Holidays (directed by Jodi Foster, 1995), the turkey-carving ritual likewise fails to unite, as the Larsons compete ruthlessly about whose turkey will be more popular—Joanne’s (Cynthia Stevenson) lean “nutri-turkey” or her mother’s (Anne Bancroft) “traditional turkey.” When the portly Mr. Larson (Charles Durning) cannot carve the traditional turkey because he is holding the knife upside down, his openly gay son Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) takes over. Amid chaotic conversation, the camera focuses repeatedly on the knife and turkey to highlight Tommy’s difficulty even using the sharp edge. Embarrassed, he blames his mother, asking if she has “welded it together.” When the knife slips, the traditional turkey is flung onto the lap of Joanne, bearer of the nutri-turkey, covering her body with the fatty juices she abhors. With references to consumerism and “human cholesterol,” the patriarch’s bungled attempt to carve the turkey signifies unchecked American consumerism. Moreover, in a holiday legendary for causing closeted gay people discomfort (Pleck 2000, 19), Tommy’s carving fiasco marks his nonheteronormative sexual orientation.5 Evidently, the prerogative to carve the Thanksgiving turkey remains the patriarchal right of only heterosexual males.
The patriarchal prerogative is similarly negotiated vis-à-vis the turkey-carving ritual in Brokeback Mountain (directed by Ang Lee, 2005). The film follows modern-day cowboys Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), who meet during the summer of 1963 when hired to protect a flock of sheep on the titular mountain. Even while proclaiming themselves straight, the men fall in love and have a sexual encounter that sets into crisis their assumptions about sexual desire and masculinity (see also Boone 2003, 461). Fearful of their fiercely homophobic communities, the men go their separate ways, marry women, and have children. The camera cuts to two juxtaposed meals occuring fourteen years later, illustrating how the threat of homosexuality hovers over the Thanksgiving meal.
Figure 8.2. “Stud duck do the carving around here.” Brokeback Mountain.
In the first scene, which takes place in Childress, Texas, at the home of Jack and his wife, a close-up shot of the turkey expands to reveal Jack carrying the bird to the dining room. His father-in-law L.D. (Graham Beckel) stands as the turkey arrives, grabs the carving utensils out of Jack’s hands, puffs out his substantial belly, and declares, “Stud duck do the carving ’round here.” Jack responds submissively, “You bet, L.D. I was just saving you the trouble” (see figure 8.2). The camera cuts to Lureen (Anne Hathaway), who notices their son, Bobby (Jake Church), watching football instead of eating his soup. She threatens to turn off the television if he does not start eating, at which the boy makes a belligerent retort. “You heard your mama,” Jack says firmly, backing up his wife. “You finish your meal, and then you can watch the game.” Jack turns off the television and returns to the table. In response, L.D. sets down the carving knife. “Hell . . . we don’t eat with our eyes,” he growls. “Want your boy to grow up to be a man, don’t you, darling? Boys should watch football.” Turning the television back on, L.D. returns to the turkey. Annoyed, Jack responds: “Not until he finishes a meal that his mama took three hours fixing!” Turning off the TV set, Jack slaps it to punctuate his point. As he returns to the table, L.D. sets down the carving knife and heads for the television again. Exploding, Jack points aggressively and yells, “You sit down, you old son-of-a-bitch! This is my house, this is my child, and you are my guest. Now you sit down before I knock your ignorant ass into next week.” The threat of violence causes L.D. to sit back down. Pleased, Lureen turns to Bobby and gestures at his food. Exasperated, Jack sighs, wipes his brow, and begins carving the turkey.
Gender is performed here in several ways: through the division of labor, through the turkey-carving ritual, and through the ritual of football. Significantly, all of these cultural forms involve narratives of territorial expansion and belief in American exceptionalism.6 Like football and the western genre, both reactions to the industrial revolution, the turkey-carving ritual emerged during the height of the “ideology of domesticity” to counteract the feminizing influence of the domestic realm and to assert symbolically that men were in charge (Pleck 1999, 775–776). As such, theories about the western may be mapped onto the landscapes of both football and Thanksgiving’s turkey-carving ritual. For example, Richard Slotkin’s theory of “regeneration through violence” (1973, 5), a common narrative pattern in which the hero moves to the western frontier and enacts societal regeneration by use of violence, parallels the typical American Thanksgiving. Pleck describes the holiday in the 1920s: “Encamping in the living room, men seemed to find solace in an all-male group, after having participated in an event so female in ambience. One function of football, even enjoyed vicariously, was to reaffirm men’s bonds with other men and their masculinity, to inject some manliness into the sentimentality. Sons, listening to the game with their fathers, were learning the rules of male sociability—and being weaned away from their mothers. Listening to football was an additional masculine element that followed the ritual of carving the turkey, man the gladiator side by side with man the hunter” (1999, 782–783). Regeneration through violence occurs in Brokeback Mountain. By becoming menacing (slapping the television, pointing aggressively, and threatening violence), Jack regains the turkey-carver role. His violent outburst temporarily establishes him as contender for “stud duck.”7
The noise of a motor intrudes through a sound bridge, followed by a close-up of another turkey being carved at a Thanksgiving attended by Ennis. The meal takes place at the home of his ex-wife, Alma (Michelle Williams), and her new husband, Monroe (Scott Michael Campbell), in Riverton, Wyoming. Now the official patriarch of the family unit, Monroe sits at the head of the table and carves with an electric knife. Demoted from his former status as patriarch, Ennis sits on the side of the table, between the children, Alma Jr. and Jenny (Sarah Hyslop and Cayla Wolever). The conversation is awkward and strained. Alma Jr. asks her father to tell a story about his bronco-riding days. Throughout the next series of shots, the turkey is consistently framed in the foreground, and when Ennis concludes his short story the camera cuts again to Monroe, who switches on the knife to carve again. The camera zooms to a close-up of the knife cutting the turkey flesh, which closes the scene.8
Significantly, both of these Thanksgiving scenes open and close with the camera’s focus on the turkey, foreshadowing that gendered power will be negotiated over its body. While there is no explicit contest over the patriarchal prerogative to carve the turkey in the second Thanksgiving scene, masculinity is still negotiated in other ways, for example, by juxtaposing the sport of bronco riding with that of figure skating, the televised sport watched by Monroe and the girls, and when the camera lingers (twice) on Monroe’s use of an electric knife. Despite his possession of this phallic implement, these images suggest that his masculinity is compromised by his reliance on a power tool instead of his own strength.
The Sexual Turkey
“In the safer confines of the paterfamilias’ house,” writes Kathryn Hughes, “it is the breast—plump, sweet, maternal—that gets devoured” (2006, 150) (see figure 8.3). As a full character in the drama of Thanksgiving, the bird is anthropomorphized and gendered in American culture, and negotiations occurring over its body may prove to have implications for both turkeys and humans. Consider how the bird has become a fetish, a point made evident in “the elaboration of attention to live turkeys destined for the table” and representations of full-feathered toms that began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century (Siskind 2002, 48; Tuleja 1987). In fact, the turkey featured so prominently throughout the United States in November is the image of a male gobbler during the spring mating season, the tom in full display. Like a peacock, the tom erects his tail feathers, spreading them like a fan. In addition, his wattles swell, becoming more brightly colored. The tom also puffs out his feathers, drags his wings, and gobbles, in a visual and auditory display intended to lure the hens (Davis 2001, 29–30; Raisch 1990; A. F. Smith 2006, 127; Wolf Howl Animal Preserve 2009).9 The adoption of the gobbler’s sexual display as the national symbol of the holiday corresponds with a societal fascination with turkey sexuality (see “Weird Experiment #4: The Sexual Turkey” 2008).
Figure 8.3 Sexy Bikini Tanned Turkey gendered female. “How to Recipe for a Bikini Tanned Turkey by Dear Miss Mermaid.” http://dearmissmermaid.com/turkey%20recipe.html, accessed 7/10/10
Figure 8.4 Mating turkey decoys: “Breeding Tom” and “Hot Hen,” by Delta Industries. Photo courtesy of http://TurkeyHuntingSecrets.com and Roger W. Raisch, Copyright 1998-2012. http://www.turkeyhunting secrets.com/store/store-decoys-delta-wildwillard.htm, accessed 7/10/10
Despite this cultural absorption, when writer Barbara Kingsolver actually tries her hand at domestic turkey breeding she encounters a lack of information about turkey mating behavior from poultry husbandry manuals. She complains: “The whole birds-and-bees business has been bred out of turkeys completely, so this complex piece of former animal behavior is now of no concern to anyone. Large-scale turkey hatcheries artificially inseminate their breeding stock. They extract the eggs in a similarly sterile manner and roll them into incubators, where electric warmth and automatic egg-turning devices stand in for motherhood. For the farmers who acquire and raise these hatchlings, the story is even simpler: fatten them as quickly as possible to slaughter size, then off with their heads. That’s it” (2007, 320).
With this dearth of information, Kingsolver had to teach herself (and her turkeys) about turkey sexuality. “The first hen who’d come into season was getting no action from either of the two males,” she recounts of her awkward exploration. “These guys [Tom and Bud Tom] had been fanning their tails in urgent mating display since last summer, but they directed the brunt of their show off efforts toward me, each other, or any sexy thing I might leave sitting around, such as a watering can. They really tried hard with the watering can. Lolita kept plopping herself down where they’d have to trip over her, but they only had eyes for some shiny little item. She sulked and I didn’t blame her. Who hasn’t been there?” (2007, 325–326).
In the wild, hens are attracted by the sound of gobbling. “Hens come to gobblers when they’re ready,” explains Roger Raisch, who has studied wild turkey mating behavior for years. “Then he’ll stop gobbling and start strutting (the image we see at Thanksgiving). Sometimes they are together for days before she’ll let him mate with her” (personal communication; see also 1990) (see figure 8.4). Kingsolver discovered that domestic hens are evidently just as fussy. She arranges for the birds to have a “honeymoon suite” inside the main barn (the distracting watering can removed). Identifying with Lolita, the author writes:
She practically had to connect the dots for him—no bras to unhook, heaven be praised—but finally he started to get the picture. She crouched, he approached, and finally stopped quivering his tailfeathers to impress her. After all these many months, it took him a couple of beats to shift gears from “Get the babe! Get the babe!” to “Oh-oh yess!” Inch by inch he walked up onto her back. Then he turned around in circles several times, s-l-o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to decide on the correct orientation. I was ready to hear the case for artificial insemination. But it looked now like he was giving it a go.
After all of this foreplay, actual turkey intercourse involves an act called a “cloacal kiss,” during which the male bird touches his cloaca to the female’s. Whether the female’s eggs are fertilized depends on whether this cloacal kiss is successful. After a paragraph explaining the biology of turkey reproduction, Kingsolver continues her story about Lolita and Tom.
I watched, I don’t mind saying. Come on, wouldn’t you? Possibly you would not have stooped quite as low as I did for the better view, but geez, we don’t get cable out here. And this truly was an extraordinary event, something that’s nearly gone from our living world. For 99.9 percent of domestic turkeys, life begins in the syringe and remains sexless to the end. Few people alive have witnessed what I was about to see . . .
Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady’s erogenous wing zones for a long, long time with his feet, until she finally decides her suitor has worked himself up to the necessary fervor. Without warning, quick as an eyeblink, she flips up her tail feathers and reaches upward to meet him. Oh, my gosh! I gasped to see it. (2007, 326–327)
Even before this startling attention to and identification with turkey sexuality, Kingsolver had been waxing poetic about the Thanksgiving meal: “I’m partial to the traditional menu. I love carving up Tom on the table, and then revisiting him throughout the following weeks in sandwiches, soups, and casseroles” (2007, 281; emphasis added). Given Kingsolver’s obvious interest in the sex lives of turkeys, particularly Lolita’s, this reference to “revisiting him” may, in fact suggest more than just leftovers.
Figure 8.5. A gaggle of gazing women on the DVD cover of What’s Cooking?
Whereas Kingsolver focues on turkey sexuality, a different sort of sexualization of the turkey body manifests in What’s Cooking? From purchasing, thawing, and stuffing to presentation, the turkey becomes a full character, with numerous individuals who gaze at, wonder about, and lavish attention on the dead turkey that will become the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal. For example, the Avila family obsesses over whether the bird will be big enough to feed everyone, and the Williams women gather around the oven door, arguing over whether the flesh is too pink. Shots of women caressing, kissing, and patting turkeys further this reading of the turkey as fetish.10 One version of the film’s poster offers a gaggle of gazing women (see figure 8.5), with all major female characters framed by oven walls, as if the photo were taken from the stove’s interior. Presumably, the women are checking to see whether the turkey has finished cooking. They smile knowingly, for this is no ordinary turkey—a handful of dynamite has been inserted into its anus! Substituting explosives for stuffing, the image foreshadows family dramas to erupt, yet the image of dynamite being shoved into the hole that was the turkey’s anus/pelvis alludes to sexual encounters as well.
From Preparation to Penetration
On the one hand, as previously mentioned, cultural representations of Thanksgiving—from advertisements and greeting cards to children’s art—draw upon the symbol of the male turkey in full sexual display.11 On the other hand, the gendering of turkeys in other visual media forms leans toward the feminine and the feminized. Consider a scene in What’s Cooking? when Mrs. Seelig (Lainie Kazan) instructs her daughter’s lover on the proper method of stuffing the turkey. “Make sure it goes all the way in the back,” the matriarch says. Carla (Julianna Margulies) responds, “Hmm, that’s my favorite part,” with a wink and a smile at Rachel (Kyra Sedgwick). With these subtle gestures, the turkey is sexualized, and even coded as queer. The reference to Carla’s “favorite part” is echoed later with a turkey baster in front of the oven, her comic gesture foreshadowing an announcement that the lovers are pregnant. Referencing the so-called turkey-baster method of insemination (injecting donated sperm into the vagina), sexualization of the turkey body here signifies a loving lesbian reproductive act.
Figure 8.6a Scene from television’s “Friends”: Joey places a turkey carcass on his head. “The One With The Thanksgiving Flashbacks.” 1998.
Figure 8.6b. Scene from television’s “Friends”: Monica places a turkey carcass on her head. “The One With The Thanksgiving Flashbacks.” 1998.
Further examples of the turkey being associated with the female body appear in an episode of television’s Friends, “The One with the Thanksgiving Flashbacks” (directed by Kevin Bright, 1998). In a flashback to an earlier Thanksgiving, Joey (Matt LeBlanc) places the turkey over his head (in an attempt to scare Chandler [Matthew Perry]), but the ploy is foiled when Joey’s head gets stuck inside the bird.12 Trying to help Joey remove it, Monica (Courteney Cox) says to Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), “Okay, you pull, and I’ll open the legs as wide as possible.” When Joey giggles at the double entendre, Monica rolls her eyes in disgust. Later, in another flashback, Monica puts her own head inside a turkey’s pelvic cavity, then places a fez and large yellow glasses on the turkey head and mimics a striptease dance (in an effort to cheer up Chandler) (see figures 8.6a and b). If the turkey references a generalized female body in one scene, in the other it becomes an extension of Monica’s female body (see also Bronner 2004; Gallina Blanca 1960; Williams-Forson 2006).13
Figure 8.7 Currin’s painting draws a visual parallel between the turkey and the bodies of the women. “Thanksgiving” by John Currin (2011), oil on canvas, 1729 x 1323 mm. Image courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.
John Currin’s painting Thanksgiving likewise illustrates this conflation of turkey and female bodies (see figure 8.7). The painting features three blonde White women preparing a turkey (2003). Based on Currin’s wife at three different ages, the women appear very birdlike. The one on the right arranges a bouquet of flowers, an act resembling nest making, while the one on the left tries to feed another with an empty spoon. The center figure cranes her neck, her mouth gaping open like a baby bird, while holding a phallic-shaped yam in her hand, the vegetable pointed, conveniently, at her pelvis. The painting, however, is about more than just sex.
Some have noted “suggestions of a secret and disturbing disarray just under the surface” (Adrian 2010, 1), for example, the woman holding the empty spoon wears a smock matching the translucent flesh of the raw turkey. Her full breasts, thin neck, and birdlike arms parallel the plump and naked-looking raw turkey, an image simultaneously titillating and repelling. Moreover, she is positioned directly above the turkey, so that visually her body becomes one with the bird’s body.14 The third woman focuses on the pelvic cavity of the turkey, holding a grape in front of its hole.
Figure 8.8 Miss Drumstickz pageant, 1953 (Miss Turkey Trot / Miss Drumsticks Pageant 2010).
Figure 8.9 “Pour Some Gravy on Me” parodies Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (Pour Some Gravy on Me 2007).
If this painting represents art imitating real life, then it is worth considering the real-life Miss Drumstickz pageant, which occurs at the annual Turkey Trot Festival in Yellville, Arkansas. For the competition, young women in swimsuits shave and oil their legs to a smooth and glossy splendor (see figure 8.8). Then, holding a cardboard cutout of a wild turkey male in full display over their torsos, they strut across the stage as the audience whistles and cheers at their high-heeled “drumsticks.”15 Similarly, in a YouTube video titled Pour Some Gravy on Me (2007) (see figure 8.9), which parodies Def Leppard’s sexually suggestive song “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” an animated turkey performs an exotic dance. She wears heart-shaped thong underwear and high-heeled stilettos. The lyrics of the song to which she dances are equally suggestive, including “Pour some gravy on me / And stuff me with stuff” and “C’mon, grease me up / Pour some gravy on me / I can’t get enough.”
The turkey stripper swings her ample buttocks to and fro while tassels jiggle from her pierced nipples. In parody of Jennifer Beals’s infamous shower dance scene from Flashdance (directed by Adrian Lyne, 1983), the turkey stripper leans back in a chair and pulls a chord, releasing a pot of hot gravy to fall between her legs as the lyrics conclude: “I’m hot, good to eat / I’m the Thanksgiving feast / Yeah!” Both images and lyrics in this performance draw parallels between preparing/eating food and sexual acts. The stuffing and gravy in this trajectory allude to sex and its resulting secretions.16 The turkey begging to be “eaten” here follows the patriarchal fantasy that women want to be “stuffed” have men ejaculate on them. Alternatively, the video suggests that the oppressed—whether objectified females or turkeys—want to be oppressed.
Another animated music video plays upon this fantasy of the sexually receptive turkey in I Want to Stuff You (2007) (a parody of the Exiles’ hit song, “I Wanna Kiss You All Over”). Here, though, a man sings a love song to his “Butterbird” turkey:
When I get home, babe,
Turn the oven on.
All day I’ve been thinking about you
and it won’t be long.
Massage your skin so gently
Don’t make me beg.
Gotta whip out my stuffing
and spread your legs. MMMMM.
I’m hungry.
I’m hungry, babe.
At this point the camera zooms out to reveal the man with his head inside the turkey’s pelvic cavity (as seen in the Friends episode). In case that isn’t creepy enough, a living turkey head appears inexplicably on the turkey carcass to join in singing the last refrain, “I want to stuff you all over and over again . . . ’Til the night closes in.” While the protagonist of this music video claims to massage the turkey’s skin “so gently,” the singer’s hunger (aka sexual rapaciousness) takes center stage.
Each of these scenes positions the turkey body as a female waiting to be stuffed, basted, and otherwise penetrated. The symbolic slippage between women and meat in Western culture allows for images to be interpreted from a stance of human-centered male identification. From breasts to thighs, “the association between attractive human female bodies and delectable, attractive ‘meat’ ” has been culturally constructed. An advertisement for a kitchen tool named “the turkey hooker” makes this point clear. Designed to move a hot cooked turkey from the roasting pan to the serving platter, the device hooks into the hole that was once the bird’s neck. An accompanying image shows an anthropomorphized version of the turkey hooker in use, “a turkey in high-heeled shoes, one wing placed seductively, invitingly, behind her head, hints of breasts showing” (see figure 8.10), while the advertising copy reads: “AN EASY PICK UP FROM PAN TO PLATTER” (Adams 1998, 67). Caricaturing a human prostitute, the “turkey hooker” dresses and poses seductively in order to be beheaded, defeathered, roasted, and eaten.17 When viewed through a feminist lens that attends to the cultural association between turkeys and women, such seemingly benign scenes are imbued with power dynamics that hint at sexual violence. In fact, these dynamics of power and domination play out similarly whether the turkey (or the human stuffing it) is envisioned as male or female.
Figure 8.10 Animated turkey from “The Turkey Hooker” advertisement (Adams [1990] 2003:32).
A blog about “The Turkey Man” demonstrates this point, referring to a sexual fetish in which “a man feels sexual pleasure when he is treated like the Thanksgiving turkey.”
“The Turkey Man” is an extreme form . . . We didn’t make this up. A Turkey Man usually has a dominatrix dressed as a classic mothering housewife come to his home, where he has constructed a large oven out of usually cardboard or plywood. The Turkey Man then strips, leaving only his socks (like the little paper booties on the turkey’s feet), and crawls into the oven. The woman then describes to the man how she will baste, cook and eat him. Lord only knows where the meat thermometer ends up! Gobble gobble! (Ebb 2007)
To further elaborate on this theme of sexual domination, I focus next on a close reading of the faux movie trailer Thanksgiving (directed by Eli Roth, 2007). Released for the intermission section of Grindhouse (directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007), the trailer exposes the deeper implications of the turkey-carving ritual in just three minutes of shocking visuals. The trailer begins quietly with Grandma (Liliya Malkina) whistling a tune to herself as she massages a raw turkey with a stick of butter. The subjective camera follows the killer’s movement as he reaches for a large kitchen knife and closes in on Grandma, who turns and screams in horror.18 Then the camera cuts away to the title shot, in which the stentorian voice-over (by director Roth) aligns the viewer with the turkey with such lines as, “This holiday season, prepare to have the stuffing scared out of you.” The screen dissolves to red and cuts to a close-up image of a knife stabbing a roast turkey. Blood oozes out of its body, and the letters in the word “Thanksgiving” drip blood (see figure 8.11).
Figure 8.11b Still from Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” trailer: the roast turkey/man.
Figure 8.11a Still from Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” trailer: the title sequence of a knife stabbing a turkey.
This sequence of shots draws attention to the violence inherent in Thanksgiving, a theme that persists throughout the rest of the trailer. For example, in the next scene, a cheerful Thanksgiving parade takes place in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where “the fourth Thursday in November is the most celebrated day of the year.” A man dressed as a pilgrim helps costume a man dressed as a turkey-pilgrim, while another dressed as an Indian chief places the finishing touch of a turkey mask on the turkey-pilgrim. “The table is set / the festivities have begun,” continues the narrator, “when an uninvited guest has arrived.” At this, the camera cuts to a shot of another pilgrim—an imposter—zipping his black leather combat boots. “This year, there will be no leftovers,” adds the voice-over. The killer pilgrim steps in front of the camera and swings his machete, chopping off the turkey’s head with one swipe. After a prolonged shot of the head rolling gruesomely on the street and the crowd’s frightened chaos, the camera cuts to the headless body of the turkey, which stumbles around and then falls to the street, as the title “Thanksgiving” drips blood once again. While these scenes challenge the myth of the first Thanksgiving by associating it with violence and death, what comes next shows us again the sexual side of this violence.19
The camera follows two teenagers stealing away for some hanky-panky in a school gymnasium. Giggling incessantly, the blond, pigtailed cheerleader does a striptease while jumping on the trampoline. Her boyfriend, wearing a letterman’s jacket, watches eagerly from the side. As the voice-over warns, “White meat, dark meat, all will be carved,” the cheerleader removes her shirt and bloomers, offering the camera several shots of her own “white meat” (see figure 8.11a). Suddenly the killer descends, muffling the boyfriend and yanking him out of the frame. Oblivious, the cheerleader continues her routine. She jumps up, spreading her legs into a straddle split. Viewers see the knife stabbed through the bottom of the trampoline. The camera dissolves from a close-up of the (erect) knife to a low-angle shot of the cheerleader’s crotch, editing that makes the phallic knife appear to stab the girl. The camera cuts away to the now-familiar title shot of the knife stabbing a roast turkey that bleeds.20
After decapitating several teenage boys on Lover’s Lane, the trailer finally returns to Grandma’s house. Still alive, she opens the door to welcome the guests, while the voice-over commands us to “arrive hungry” and “leave stuffed.” In the next shot, the family is gagged and bound. His face obscured by shadows, the killer unveils the huge platter on the table. Instead of a roast turkey, the “money shot” is a man’s supine body—knees spread, feet bound, flesh roasted, and unknown objects protruding from his anus, revealing the double entendre of the voice-over’s “leave stuffed.” Viewers can assume the victim’s head has been removed because they have already witnessed heads being removed in the previous scenes and because Thanksgiving turkeys tend to be served headless. Leaving no doubt, the camera tilts down to reveal a decapitated young man’s head stuffed into an actual turkey’s neck hole and an apple stuffed into his mouth. A reaction shot shows a guest vomiting, a scene followed by the narrator’s closing words: “You’ll come home for the holidays . . . in a body bag.” At this, the trailer offers one last shocking glimpse of the aproned killer standing at the head of the table and copulating with the turkey’s body (with the man’s head attached).
During an interview, Roth explains how the Motion Picture Association of America Ratings Board made him remove the full frontal nudity in the cheerleader scene with scratching and clever editing. Gratefully, Roth remarks, “And, you know, they even let me keep the turkey sex, even though it’s not really sex with a turkey. It’s a cooked turkey, although it’s not really a full turkey. I mean, someone having sex with a live turkey—that would be really gratuitous. I mean, it’s someone having sex with a cooked turkey with a decapitated head on top of it, so it’s more of a turkey/human hybrid, really” (quoted in Edwards 2007).
What does it mean to turn people into turkeys and then decapitate, dominate, stuff, and screw them? The spectacles of death in this trailer illuminate aspects of the Thanksgiving turkey and the rituals employed to kill it, “dress” it, and carve its body.21 From the title shot of a knife stabbing a turkey and the bleeding “Thanksgiving” the trailer reminds us that violence is core to the holiday. Whether reel life or real life, for Karen Davis, this sort of cultural moment requires a process of scapegoating: “Modern industrial society has become so alienated from the food production process that people can easily forget that an animal had to be killed in order for the turkey to get to the oven,” Davis argues. “Consequently, all kinds of articles, comics, jokes, and bizarre rituals crop up right before Thanksgiving, emphasizing the subjectivity of the bird. That way we can’t miss the fact that someone—a turkey, not a turnip—had to be sacrificed for the feast” (2001, 120). While Slotkin’s theory of “regeneration through violence” is useful in discussing how the turkey became the structuring metaphor of Thanksgiving (1973, 5), the theory falls short of addressing the apparent need for ritual reenactment. Freud’s “repetition compulsion” may be usefully applied here. As a result of this psychological condition, an individual is unconsciously compelled to keep repeating a traumatic event—a process that extends beyond individual psyches to social psyches as well. In this trajectory, Thanksgiving’s turkey-carving ritual operates as a sort of repetition compulsion to constitute familial and national subjectivity (Freud 1950; see also Sceats 2000, 40). This point is made in the “Pangs” episode of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Anya (a former vengeance demon) astutely remarks about the holiday: “To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It’s a ritual sacrifice—with pie.”
The shocking stabbings and decapitations in Roth’s Thanksgiving trailer and the decapitated stripper of Pour Some Gravy on Me go beyond sacrifice, reminding those brave enough to look about the violence associated with Thanksgiving (Davis 2001; Roth 2010; Siskind 2002). Moreover, these Thanksgiving scenes suggest a sexual process at play in the scapegoating ritual, highlighting America’s preoccupation with the phallus as a source of power. The repeated shots of decapitation and penetration reveal a profound anxiety about castration and sexual violation at play in the holiday. By identifying the symbolic parallels between the knife and the phallus, other seemingly innocent scenes—especially close-up shots of knives carving the flesh of Thanksgiving turkeys—begin to take on new significance.
Returning to Rockwell’s iconographic painting, perhaps this is what the man in the lower corner is trying to say—that things are not what they appear to be. On a basic level, patriarchy is a social system in which the family and society are ruled by men. Patriarchal ideology reinforces men as authority figures over women, children, and property (see de Beauvoir 1989; Bordo 1993; Friedan 1963). At Thanksgiving, gender is performed and reinforced as much through the division of labor as through football and the turkey-carving ritual. However, gender also comes into play as humans reflect on turkey sexuality. In the media examples described above, “sexing the turkey” involves a more general domination, whether chopping off its head, massaging it, stuffing it, cutting it, or eating it. If one of the central mechanisms of patriarchy is to disguise male domination as a natural phenomenon, then an interrogation of such Thanksgiving moments is crucial to expose the murky underbelly of the holiday. The turkey’s flesh feeds more than individuals and families; it also feeds ideology. Such bizarre cultural moments—when the turkey is gendered, sexualized, and dominated—point to a profound cultural anxiety about masculinity, subjectivity, and nationhood, creating fissures in the ideology of Thanksgiving and suggesting that ultimately, the act of consumption may prove to be an act of aggression and sexual domination.
Notes
1. Within decades, Rockwell’s iconographic painting was being parodied (see Darkow 2007; Pleck 2000, 36; “Rockwell Rolls over in His Grave” 2008). Return to text.
2. The title of this chapter, excerpted from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation (Roth 2010), plays upon the title of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000). Return to text.
3. Historically, while men and women occupied separate spaces on Thanksgiving, “it was easier for a woman to enter the living room where men were listening to the game than for a man to don an apron and help in the kitchen” (Pleck 1999, 782; see also Turner and Seriff 1993; B. Williams 1984). Return to text.
4. Mrs. Beeton offers other skills for the aspiring middle class to maintain a respectable household, for example, raising children, balancing the books, subduing “the natives,” and building bridges—“and she does it all with a turkey” (Hughes 2006, 231). The imperial “scope of domesticity” was also central to the mission of Sarah Josepha Hale, who opposed the women’s rights movement as “the attempt to take woman away from her empire of home” (quoted in A. Kaplan 1998, 585). Domestication paralleled westward expansion, in Hale’s worldview, so that “while Anglo-Saxon men marched outward to conquer new lands, women had a complementary outward reach from within the domestic sphere.” Women “could be more effective imperialists,” Hale argued, by “penetrating those interior feminine colonial spaces” (588). In this schema, the language of territorial expansion draws upon the language of sexual conquest (585). Similarly, as an allegory for territorial invasion, football ritually reenacts sexual conquest, “in which one male demonstrates his virility . . . at the expense of a male opponent” by feminizing him. As such, Alan Dundes argued that “victory entails some kind of penetration” (1997, 27). These processes of dominance and aggression shed light on the rituals of Thanksgiving. Return to text.
5. Disgusted and covered in grease, the homophobic Joanne blurts out that Tommy has secretly married his life partner, accusing him of bringing shame to the family by kissing his spouse in public. Return to text.
6. The marriage between football and Thanksgiving dates back to at least 1869 (Pope 1997, 54). The western genre and football developed concurrently as rituals of homecoming and turkey carving were being ushered into the Thanksgiving holiday. Once radio entered homes in the 1920s, football “threatened to overwhelm the domestic occasion.” Some accused the game of being too violent and dangerous, a training ground for war, and a symbol of imperialism. It is hard to escape the irony of Thanksgiving as a family event when it is “punctuated by (mostly) men listening to a game noted for its aggressive body contact, warlike language, male bonding, and the ability of contestants to withstand pain” (Pleck 1999, 782). In this trajectory, the overtly masculine game expresses “territorial, sexual, or economic conquest” (Lindquist 2006, 448), through its association with the master narrative of the “first Thanksgiving,” in which the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians allegedly shared a harvest feast in 1621. Although the narrative is based on fiction, legend, and public relations rhetoric rather than historical fact, a plethora of institutions actively perpetuate this self-serving version of American history (Reese 2006). Historians have brought to the fore painful truths about relations between Wampanoag and Pilgrims, which were marred by distrust and betrayal. As such, like the western and football, the American Thanksgiving is linked to national imperialism and territorial expansion (Lindquist 2006, 448; see also Pope 1993, 73). Return to text.
7. Alternating shots of the two men are framed so that a glass of white wine (actually yellow in color) is positioned in the foreground. As each man returns from the television, the glass of yellow liquid is positioned directly below his crotch, framing that equates their power struggle to a pissing contest. Return to text.
8. Cultural critics have observed a process of “phallic appropriation” occurring in genres ranging from westerns and crime films to horror films. The gun in this schema becomes an extension of the western hero, assuming masculine and sexual meanings (e.g., Clover 1992). While there is no gun per se in Brokeback Mountain’s Thanksgiving sequence, knives operate here as phallic substitutes. Return to text.
9. Turkey males are said to be polygamous, mating with at least five females during the breeding season (Wolf Howl Animal Preserve 2009). Hunting-supply companies capitalize on this knowledge with the sale of life-size turkey decoys locked in intercourse. Sold separately, the three-dimensional “breeding tom” is designed to fit atop the “Delta Hot Hen Decoy.” The advertisement closes with, “You haven’t seen anything until you try this guy. The breeding pose drives gobblers wild to investigate and fight with the intruder tom. Used alone or in conjunction with a couple of Hot Hens, Feeding Hot Hens, and a Jake. The combination will lure in even the most stubborn toms” (“Supreme Breeding Tom” 1998). Return to text.
10. The dramatic turkey presentation montage is accompanied by a triumphant musical soundtrack and the sounds of “oohing” and “aahing” from family members. Return to text.
11. In addition to the male turkey adopted as the core symbol of the holiday, husbands are sometimes referred to as turkeys, the term denoting lazy, stupid, or insipid behavior—especially those husbands who sit in front of the television on Thanksgiving Day while their wives do all the work (Tuleja 1987). Worthless politicians are also referred to as turkeys, a point repeatedly made in political comics and even by presidents at the now-annual Presidential Turkey Pardoning Ceremony (see Davis 2001, 17–24; Fiskesjö 2003, 3; A. F. Smith 2006, 110–129). Return to text.
12. This Friends episode probably derives from a Mr. Bean episode (“Merry Christmas Mr. Bean”), in which the title character (Rowan Atkinson) loses his watch while stuffing the Christmas turkey. To retrieve it, he sticks his head inside the cavity and gets stuck just as his girlfriend arrives. I am indebted to Diane Tye for drawing attention to this lineage. Return to text.
13. All references to online videos appear in quotation marks without dates and should be searched in the filmography. Return to text.
14. Currin has described this painting as an allegory of his wife Rachel’s pregnancy (see http://aphelis.net/thanksgiving-john-currin-2003/). Return to text.
15. In addition to the “Miss Drumstickz Pageant,” one of the main attractions of the Turkey Trot Festival (since 1946) is the “turkey drop,” in which live turkeys are thrown out of airplanes (He’s Mine 2009; Miss Turkey Trot 2010). Return to text.
16. Consider a blog posting, Why Women Hate Men, a website that makes fun of Internet personal ads. Critiquing an ad, “Weasel” writes: “He’s about as spontaneous as the ritual preparation of a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Which, ironically, might make it easier for him to fuck you, because if he fucked you in a 4-inch pan lined with carrots and rotated you every thirty minutes, at least he’d know he was following the proper directions. But either way, I guarantee you his stuffing would somehow end up leaving you dry” (“Mr. Spontaneity” 2008). Return to text.
17. Other examples of turkeys eager to be eaten include: “Mr. Turkey” (sung to the tune of “Mr. Sandman”); “Turkey in Yo Belly Time”; “Stuff It Good” (sung to Devo’s “Whip It”); “We Will Eat You” (sung to Queen’s “We Will Rock You”); “The Turkey Song” (sung by Adam Sandler); and “Turkey Jive Thanksgiving.” Return to text.
18. The trailer pays homage to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), which implicates the audience in the crime by showing events from the killer’s point of view. Return to text.
19. Roth recounts his inspiration for the trailer: “We grew up in Massachusetts and were huge slasher movie fans—and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey, and then his father killed it, and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town” (quoted in Edwards 2007). Return to text.
20. This juxtaposition of shots makes the connection between knife and phallus—between the penetration of the knife into the turkey and the penetration of the phallic knife into human bodies. Roth credits generic expectations as influencing his decisions when he remarks: “If I don’t exploit this girl I have failed as a Grindhouse director” (quoted in Edwards 2007). Return to text.
21. Consider the advice in “How to Dress and Clean a Turkey”: “To gut a turkey, cut a slit from the end of the breast bone nearly to the vent (anus). Insert your fingers into the opening and gently pick up the large intestine. Then, with your other hand carefully cut a complete circle around the anus, which will free the intestine. Next, carefully reach inside the body cavity, find the gizzard and pull it out along with the intestines. Reach back in to remove the heart, lungs and liver. Finally, rinse the body cavity with fresh water” (Adele and Raisch 1998–2002). Return to text.