In this talk, I shall examine the gendered and sexualized language often used to describe food and eating in Cajun contexts, in which talk about food, particularly food considered by outsiders to be unusual, even disgusting or abject, becomes a metaphor for a model of identity based on the accentuation of ethnic difference. Though the expressions in my title refer to crawfish eating techniques, in the early 1980s, they were also used on t-shirts to proclaim Cajun pride. As children's books such as The Adventures of Crawfish Man as well as legends about the origins of the crawfish in the Acadian diaspora demonstrate, in many cases Cajuns' identification with the crawfish is so complete that personifications of it come to represent an ideal embodiment of Cajun difference and identity. Since, presumably, the t-shirts mentioned above could be worn by people of both genders, the specter of sexual marginality reinforces an identification with ethnic difference. In short, they proclaim Cajun identity as queer.

A similar connection between food and sex is found in the poem "Je vas vendre mon chasse-neige/Sellin' My Snow Blowin' Machine" by the Cajun poet Beverly Matherne. This poem is written in a literary French heavily influenced by the Cajun vernacular; it is thus a marker of linguistic difference as well as sexual and culinary specificity. In it she speaks of returning to Louisiana to escape the bad "love-makin' habits" of Michigan men and uses a culinary vocabulary specific to southern Louisiana to describe the "Cajun-lovin'" she expects to find upon her return. In this example, eating Cajun food, making love Cajun-style, and a positive declaration of Cajun identity go hand-in-hand. “We are what we eat,” as the saying goes, and eating, here, can by understood in its sexual as well as its digestive meanings. We need only think of the multiple meanings of the word gumbo to understand the connection between food, language, and identity; of African origins, it not only refers to a dish, but also to the Louisiana Creole language. In addition, it often serves as a metaphor for identities resulting from cultural, racial, and ethnic métissage.