Queer Cooking And Dining: Expanding Queerness In Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday?

This essay is concerned with the ways in which Fumi Yoshinaga’s comic series What Did You Eat Yesterday? sheds new light on the relationship between queer people and domestic space. Of particular interest is how the suggestion of alternative lifestyles and modes of masculinities is made by Yoshinaga through her deployment of gastronomic discourses as metaphoric modalities which capture the attention of mainstream audiences in contemporary Japan. The essay argues that Yoshinaga’s comic series has been instrumental in making the inhabitation of domestic space by a queer couple visible in Japanese media. It also argues that the series’ commercial success with mainstream audiences is evidence of how well it has spoken to the concerns of many who live in the current neoliberal social condition.