Fall 2024 Showcase Knox-McConnell
Astrid Knox-McConnell
Our Sweet Mamas: A Queer Food Legacy Project in “Dixie” Land
What is queer food? And what does it look like in the South? In the small town of Water Valley in Mississippi, chef and restaurant owner Dixie Grimes serves up a slice of her work that helps us figure out how we can answer these questions.
Our Sweet Mamas is a short documentary film exploring the role of Southern food in Dixie’s life, highlighting how her new restaurant serves the people, both literally and metaphorically, that helped get her where she is today, and revealing what drives her latest project.
Dixie’s focus on old-school Southern cooking, fused with fine-dining technique and international flavors, is an example of queerness in action: taking the traditions and norms and turning them into something more radical; honoring the past while imagining a more diverse, and delicious, future. By bringing communities together over a real-deal, tasty meal, Dixie hopes to move past the divisions sowed in the South, and truly get everyone sitting around the table.
This film is for everyone who is hungry for more – in more ways than one. So, dig in!
Astrid Knox-McConnell is a first-year MA Southern Studies student originally from Bradford, England. They achieved their BA in History and Politics of the Americas from University College London in 2024, where their dissertation focused on the role of food in queer quotidian protest from the 1970s-1990s. They intend to use their time at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture to expand on this undergraduate work, particularly utilizing oral histories and storytelling to highlight the voices of queer Southerners and champion their foodways.