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Paper short abstract

White asparagus is a spring delicacy claimed as food heritage across Germany. Asparagus Queens and Supermale asparagus plants reify those claims via phallocentric, white, regional imaginaries. Fairytale-like, they turn exploitation into a shared cultural good. Can they be unsettled from within?

Paper long abstract

Spring in Germany arrives in the shape of white asparagus, a delicacy celebrated across the country with unlikely religiosity. Two lead characters are central to German asparagus economies: regionally crowned asparagus queens and internationally traded supermale asparagus plants. We show how they make consumable ideas of phallocentric traditionalism paired with hegemonic whiteness and imagined regionality.

Asparagus queens are young women promoting asparagus regions through their public performances of carefully managed femininity. The sexualised bodies of those young women make tradition socially legible and emotionally compelling. “Supermales” are masculinized mutations of the asparagus plant that stand for resistance to illnesses and labour-efficiency, stronger, and often “whiter” than the rest. Harvested by migrant farmworkers, the spears of those lab-bred supermales are claimed as regional food heritage.

As asparagus queens and supermales reify social orders and domesticate agro-capitalism as regional belongings across Germany, they also feed on the identities of others, systematically erasing them from the picture: migrant food workers, who carry the heaviest burden in asparagus production labouring under harsh conditions. Fairytale-like, both lead characters transform multiple exploitations into a shared cultural good.

Our project wants to unsettle the fixedness of heritage claims from within, asking how queens and supermales may also lift up a critical mirror to the traditions they are meant to serve - as provocateurs? In a short, experimental film we will use feminist visual practice to open spaces of recognition, complicity, and critique, reworking heritage as a social relation that can be laughed at, questioned, and reimagined collectively.