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All posts tagged: gender
A Bit from the Dissertation: Acknowledgements + Abstract
A few words of summary and thanks from my dissertation, “The Dudification of Diet: Food Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century America.”
Sports, Gender & Society…and Food?
Addressing sport, identities, health, media, access, and justice, this conference provided good thinking for my own work on gender, food, and media.
“Lose Like a Man:” Gender & the Constraints of Self-Making in Weight Watchers Online
I argue that Weight Watchers constructs gender by upholding strict binaries and making limited types of self available to women and men through depictions of food, the body, and technology.
Healthy Food Blogs: Creating New Nutrition Knowledge at the Crossroads of Science, Foodie Lifestyle & Gender Identities
I’m delighted to share a recent publication, which considers the knowledge and hyper-feminine identities produced in a sample of healthy food blogs.
Presenting My Students’ Final Project in Food + Gender
I’m thrilled to share my students’ final project, an e-journal that culminates our course, “Food and Gender in U.S. Popular Culture,” at Brown University. In this seminar-style course, twenty students (mostly in their first and second years of study) completed four main writing assignments — a cookbook analysis (which I blogged about here), a mini media exhibit, an interview profile, and a restaurant review — all of which engaged the themes of food and gender. For the final project, students worked to revise one of these assignments for inclusion in the class e-journal. We invite you to start with the About page to learn more about the class and our writing. As you will read, these writing assignments expect (and deliver!) clear and sophisticated argument, as well as what we called “compulsively readable” prose. Course readings included not only academic food studies texts, but also a full serving of food writing, providing a taste of different styles and formats. Throughout the semester, we aimed to craft not only compelling thesis statements, but also at least one “aspirational sentence” …
Teaching Food Studies, Cookbooks & Writing
How do cookbooks speak? What stories do they tell—and whose? What do cookbooks reveal about power and how it operates? How do cookbooks communicate and construct gender? These are some of the questions my students and I have pondered lately in our course “Food and Gender in U.S. Popular Culture” at Brown University. For our first assignment, students analyzed how cookbooks prescribe and transgress conventional gender roles. A uniquely interdisciplinary field, food studies scholarship often employs various methods, but the close reading of cookbooks is one method that approaches universality. I’m working with a thoughtful and engaged group of 20 mostly first- and second-year students. While most had read and used cookbooks for cooking, few had previously considered them as elements of popular culture, as valuable historical evidence, as prescriptive literature that shape notions of gender, or as sources in which the so-often-silenced voices of women and people of color can be heard. In an effort to fully scaffold and support our work with cookbooks, we first did some reading. While there are many incredible texts I could have assigned, we read from: Jessamyn Neuhaus. …
Publication Update! Toned Tummies & Bloated Bellies: Activia Yogurt & Gendered Digestion
I’m thrilled to share that my article, “Toned Tummies and Bloated Bellies: Activia Yogurt and Gendered Digestion,” was recently published in CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures. I blogged about this project when I first completed it about a year ago and could not be more honored that it was selected as CuiZine‘s best graduate student paper in 2013 by a committee featuring the food writers, scholars, and researchers Maeve Haldane, Ian Mosby, and David Szanto. As I analzyed this probiotic yogurt that continues to populate the dairy case with its iconic green containers, I drew from print and online advertisements, product packaging, press coverage, and industry reports, as well as a variety of secondary sources that analyze digestion as a cultural act. When I first began this study, Jamie Lee Curtis served as a spokeswoman so enthusiastic that her commercials had become the stuff of Saturday Night Live parody. Most all Activia advertisements targeted women, many featuring feminine touches, from the product’s waist-like logo to commercials’ girly jingle—“Ac-tiv-i-aaaah!” Furthermore, whether a print ad or TV commercial, nearly every marketing effort …
Food and Matriarchy in “Sons of Anarchy”
While Charlie Hunnam‘s handsome face and blonde locks are reason enough for anyone to be watching Sons of Anarchy with unwavering interest, after watching the first five seasons, I’m struck by the way that scenes of eating express the harmony or discontent of the motorcycle club (MC). As its members seek to protect the interests of their aptly named hometown of Charming, California, as well as their families and their MC brothers against drugs, violence, and general discord, three meals mark the club’s progress. Notably, the presence and absence of these meals reflect the changing power and influence of the family matriarch, Gemma Teller-Morrow (Katey Sagal). Spoiler alert: If you haven’t yet watched the show and think you might like to, I’d suggest getting up to speed before reading further. Family is a strong theme throughout Sons of Anarchy, as members of the club treat one another as brothers, willing to fight, kill, and die to protect one another and those dear to them. While these family-like ties grow apparent throughout the first episodes, they are also made …
Labor Day Laments and the Masculine Glory of Groom’s Cakes
It’s Labor Day, which signals summer’s approaching end, as well as a seasonally-based, social ban on white clothing. [Though really, when are white pants ever a good idea?] This holiday also tends to mark the end of the summer wedding season, but I’ve got weddings and cakes on the brain because I’m head-over-heels in love with Cherry Levin’s recent article, “He Can Have his Cake and We Will Eat It Too: The Role of the Groom’ Cake in Southeastern Louisiana Wedding Receptions,” in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture. While I’m not sure the claim that the groom’s cake tradition is waining everywhere but in the south holds water, I greatly enjoyed the author’s analysis of the groom’s cake as a masculine detail within the otherwise ultra-feminine affair that is most big, white weddings. Levin comments upon the “visual and symbolic relationship” between the wedding cake—or “bride’s cake” if you prefer—as its towering tiers and feminine, frosted details mirror the bride herself, adorned with lace, tulle, and beading. Furthermore, she contends that “celebratory cakes communicate important messages …
Toned Tummies & Bloated Bellies: Activia Yogurt & Gendered Digestion
In Experiencing Food and the Senses, one of the core courses in the MLA in Gastronomy program at BU, we shine a spotlight on all of the senses, especially those so often left out of scholarly inquiry. I continued my study of gender, coupling it with exploration of digestion as portrayed in advertising for Activia yogurt. Here is a taste from “Toned Tummies and Bloated Bellies: Activia Yogurt and Gendered Digestion.” Often considered a taboo topic in the United States, the promotion and popularity of Activia, a probiotic yogurt launched in the U.S. in 2006, has in some ways opened a dialogue among American women on regularity, digestion, and constipation. In studies exploring gendered perceptions of food, yogurt is often considered a feminine comestible (Kiefer et al. 2005; Jensen & Holm 1999). Furthermore, Dannon states that they have only ever marketed their products to women (Sandler, 2008). As a functional food sold to appease digestive ills, the female-focused marketing of Activia provides a new and different opportunity to analyze gender in Dannon’s marketing tactics. Activia’s probiotic market prowess takes place within …
April Showers Bring May Flowers—and Thesis Due Dates
Spring has finally sprung in New England and tomorrow looks to be a great day for the Boston Marathon. Luckily, I’ll be able to take some time to enjoy Patriots’ Day because I’ve spent the last few weeks glued to my desk chair, pounding out the second draft of my thesis, which examines the marketing of weight loss programs to men. Here’s a little taste… Over the past decade, much has changed on the twenty-first century landscape of dieting, as the “low carb craze” of Atkins and South Beach made way for today’s Paleo Diet, evangelizing the diet of Stone Age hunter-gatherers and encouraging dieters to “eat like a caveman.” Perhaps no change is more notable, however, than the new target audience of weight loss programs—men. Considered a masculine food in cultures the world over (Jensen and Holm 1999), the high intake of meat in low-carbohydrate diets made the Atkins and South Beach diets more popular among men than conventional low-fat diets. While men joined these diets in new numbers (Weinbraub 2004), Men’s Health Magazine …
Meat is Bad & The World is Flat: Thoughts from the Critical Nutrition Symposium
On March 8, 2013, I had the pleasure of attending the Critical Nutrition Symposium at UC Santa Cruz, organized by Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In. The event was spawned from a roundtable discussion at last year’s Association for the Study of Food and Society conference. The symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to critically examine what is missing from conventional nutrition science research and practice, discuss why it matters, and brainstorm how to move forward in an informed and balanced way. What follows are a few of my favorite key ideas from the day’s discussions. Adele Hite, a registered dietitian and public health advocate who is not afraid to ask big and delightfully confrontational questions regarding nutrition science, began the day by dissecting Michael Pollan’s now famous aphorism—Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Step by step, she revealed the decades of revisionist myth and shaky science on which the diet most often considered healthy (one that is plant-based) is built. For example, she argued that the recommendation to eat like our grandparents is …
Cooking Up a Storm at the 2013 Cookbook Conference
The Roger Smith Cookbook Conference in New York City drew an eclectic mix of culinary scholars; food studies academics; food writers and bloggers; food photographers and stylists; cookbook writers, editors and publishers; chefs; and those hoping to become any of the above. I participated in the panel, “Cookbooks as Works of Art and Status Objects,” which explored the slew of elaborate and expensive cookbooks that have come out recently that function as coffee table books more so than cookbooks. Examples include: The French Laundry Cookbook, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, Alinea, Eleven Madison Park, NOMA, and Modernist Cuisine. The panel also featured Kim Beeman, Jane Black, Sarah Cohn, and Anne McBride, each of us bringing a different perspective to the nature and meaning of these cookbooks. I discussed these cookbooks as extensions of the trophy kitchen, given their ornamental nature and status-making potential. I also attended several other panels, which I summarize in this post. I have captured what I found to be the most tantalizing sound bites from panelists, but I have by no means provided an …
Family Dining on Christmas and in ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’
Between college, grad school, working, and grad school again, I’ve lived a thousand or more miles from my family for the last ten years. This means that for one reason or another, I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner in just about as long — and this year, that fact is making me even sadder than usual. Suffice it to say, I’ve got family and meals on the brain, which made me think of a favorite food film. In Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), director Ang Lee expertly tells the story of changing family dynamics in Taipei, Taiwan during a time of rapid modernization, employing a universal medium — food. Through Chef Chu who has lost his sense of taste and his three daughters, this film addresses many themes, including gender, family, and globalization. Gender and authority come to the fore in this film, as they do in the public world of food where men in general are more likely to hold positions of power. Such is the case for Chef Chu. While he no longer …
Emily Contois 