Yu-Yen Lin-Woywod

Today, dumplings have become a popular and ubiquitous dish on dining tables across the world. But how has this seemingly ordinary food evolved into a tool for articulating personal and cultural identity? Furthermore, how can dumplings serve as an entry point for exploring queer theory? This course will examine, step by step, how global information exchange, travel, and migration influence the construction of self-identity. Through the act of making different kinds of dumplings, we will reflect on how national and cultural identities shift, and question how deeply family traditions are rooted in our soul. In This block seminar will have three parts: we will reading texts, making cooking experiments, and experiment with audiovisual (re)presentations: reading texts like:Drawing upon Lisa M. Heldke’s philosophy of everyday experience, particularly her reflections on cultural food colonialism through the act of dining in foreign cuisine restaurants, alongside Gopinath’s theory of queer diasporic interventions, we will explore how to engage with the histories that have shaped us, and how to translate critical awareness into everyday practice. Through cooking workshop experiences, this course invites participants to deconstruct and analyze their insights and realizations following practical engagement with Dumpling-making, also experimenting with audio and visual representations, with the what be discussed In this exploration, we become metaphorically embodied as the "dumpling wrapper" — the vessel that contains history, identity, and meaning. Through the acts of watching, wrapping, naming, and tasting, we trace the entangled roots of belonging, appropriation, and resistance. --- Today, dumplings have become a popular and ubiquitous dish on dining tables across the world. But how has this seemingly ordinary food evolved into a tool for articulating personal and cultural identity? Furthermore, how can dumplings serve as an entry point for exploring queer theory? This course will examine, step by step, how global information exchange, travel, and migration influence the construction of self-identity. Through the act of making different kinds of dumplings, we will reflect on how national and cultural identities shift, and question how deeply family traditions are rooted in our soul. In This block seminar will have three parts: we will reading texts, making cooking experiments, and experiment with audiovisual (re)presentations: reading texts like:Drawing upon Lisa M. Heldke’s philosophy of everyday experience, particularly her reflections on cultural food colonialism through the act of dining in foreign cuisine restaurants, alongside Gopinath’s theory of queer diasporic interventions, we will explore how to engage with the histories that have shaped us, and how to translate critical awareness into everyday practice. Through cooking workshop experiences, this course invites participants to deconstruct and analyze their insights and realizations following practical engagement with Dumpling-making, also experimenting with audio and visual representations, with the what be discussed In this exploration, we become metaphorically embodied as the "dumpling wrapper" — the vessel that contains history, identity, and meaning. Through the acts of watching, wrapping, naming, and tasting, we trace the entangled roots of belonging, appropriation, and resistance.