Dear Jonas,

For the next six months or so you will only eat one thing: breast milk. Its flavor may change depending upon what I eat, but you will have to grow some more before you experience food as a variegated, manipulative series of differences. As you get older, you will judge culinary success through a dish’s singularity as well as its ability to be reproduced. You will evaluate food according to how well it works within, whilst deviating from, its genre. I say “genre” because a meal’s style invokes its eponymous culture. A kind of gastronomic Epcot Center, categories such as Italian or Soul not only mime categories of identity, they prepare diners for hackneyed but reassuringly consistent flavors, ingredients, and packaging. For example, one expectation of American “Chinese Food” is that at the end of your meal you will be given a fortune cookie. This is a shimmery, crunchy, mass-produced confection with a piece of paper inside that either predicts your future, gives you advice, or tells you something about yourself. (This tradition actually seems to have started in Japan, which should tell you something about American food named after other countries.) The last type of fortune cookie is what I’d like you to think about.

For some other things I have to write, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “constitutive outside.” A theorist named Judith Butler uses this phrase to describe the repetitive and social ways in which recognition and belonging are individually and collectively endowed. Butler holds that seemingly static or transparent categories of identity are quite often the result of the enactment of a kind of statement named a “performative.” For example: “You are a boy.” I have repeated this statement to curious strangers since you’ve been born in response to the question of what you “are.” According to Butler, these kinds of performative speech acts have no force if they are only pronounced once, like a spell. A number of actions (performances) must follow (and precede) this pronouncement if its wisdom is to hold true. Conforming to and rejecting dominant understandings of what “boy” means will be a lifelong process. We, your parents, won’t be able to help our complicity with this process, but we are trying to be careful. We don’t believe that your gender is like the last kind of fortune cookie—static and didactic. The constitutive outside will swaddle you with layers of ways in which people understand what it does and will mean for you to be a boy. We hope your boyishness will, like a proper performative, reinstate itself in many different ways. We're here to help you with that process.

You are one month old.

You are asleep right now.

You are sometimes inconsolable. You are especially cranky in the afternoon.

You are not a fortune cookie.