RECIPES FOR DISOBEDIENCE: Rituals, Superstitions, Mythologies is an open call for written contributions on Food and the Erotic to an upcoming publication by researcher Sveva Crisafulli exploring appetite as a cultural, political and erotic force through which femininity is constructed and negotiated. We invite artists, writers, researchers and practitioners to submit short texts engaging with the intersections of food, eroticism and ritual, drawing from personal experience, research, inherited knowledge, folklore, fictions or speculations. Selected contributions will be credited and form a collective counter-culinary archive in the upcoming printed publication, to be released at the beginning of 2027.
In Lexicon of the Mouth, Brandon LaBelle writes: “the tensions surrounding the biting mouth carry within them additional erotic energies. (…) eating appears as a series of mutual transformations in which the border between outside and inside becomes blurry. (…) a greater fever of unconscious grammars, hidden drives, forgotten myths".
Genealogies of appetite are scripted and transmitted, carrying bodily knowledge across generations through repetition, gossiping, mistranslation, and secrecy. Such recipes circulate far beyond the kitchen: bathing in milk the night before the wedding; the one thing you have been warned not to eat while menstruating; a dish served after birth; the snack before sex – or afterwards; a cocktail to increase the libido; a Reddit post; a fertility ritual.
Rather than a simple set of ingredients and measurements, we welcome recipes in their most surprising and expanded form. We wish to read the superstitions, gossips, fabrications and fictions surrounding what should enter or touch the body, or how it may transform it. We welcome short written contributions through experimental, autobiographical, or hybrid forms. Text may take the form of recipes, fragments, testimonies, instructions, speculative texts, oral histories, or other forms of writing that respond to the idea of the recipe.
Length: 100–250 words (max. 300 words), ingredient list (optional) is excluded from the word count
Language: English + the recipe’s original/mothertongue language (optional)
Deadline: December 15th, 2026
Further editorial and publication details will be communicated to selected contributors.