Since feminist food studies began to cohere into a field of its own twenty-five years ago, academics and scholar activists have developed a theoretical framework that draws from a range of interdisciplinary studies to create distinctive methodologies that deal explicitly with the body and with the ideological and material realities that regulate its existence. The more rhetorical approaches examine symbolic networks that inscribe and regulate the body and its hungers, using textual and visual representations—books, art, film, and material culture. Other approaches focus on the material and systemic forces that shape the body. No longer individuated, sterilized, or hidden from view altogether, the body has emerged in twenty-first century feminist food studies with its viscera on full display. Scholarship now dwells in the gut where biosocial forces are internalized and made flesh or Othered through excretion. Here, “the materiality of food choice (bodily experiences of food) and ideologies regarding food and eating” intersect (Hayes Conroy & Hayes Conroy 2008: 462).
The most recent anthology devoted to the field, Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives (2020) underscores the dynamic research taking place as "feminist food studies engages intersectionality to make sense of the tangled and complex social relations and structures through which identity, consumption, and production are mutually constructed," focusing, in particular, on the socio-cultural, the material, and the corporeal (4-5). The essays draw from a stunning array of fields, ranging from biology and economics to museum studies and history. In the book's first chapter, "Critiquing Hegemony, Creating Food, Crafting Justice: Cultivating an Activist Feminist Food Studies," Alice Julier recalls the origins of feminist food studies as a field that began to germinate as far back as Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet (1971) and Joan Dye Gussow's Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture (1991). Women of color likewise nourished the field through activism and historical intervention. In particular, Vertamae Grosvenor (Vibration Cooking, 1970) and Ntozake Shange (If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, 1998) challenged, deconstructed, and revised the dominant whitewashed patriarchal narrative of US culinary history. They challenged and overturned the racist stereotypes of Black women in the kitchen by excavating, animating, and narrating the food stories of the African diaspora and the essential roles that Africans and African Americans played in the development of US food culture. Grosvenor's and Shange's innovative food writing coupled with the historical research of Jessica Harris (1989, 2011) have, in turn, nourished the emergence of black activism within the realm of academic food studies, a field "birthed" by Marion Nestle "within the public health and nutrition department at New York University" (Julier 18).
A decade before food studies formally emerged at NYU, feminists from a range of fields including anthropology, history, folklore, sociology, literature, and medieval studies had begun to conceptualize appetite and food choice (or food refusal) as “an important voice in the identity of a woman” and to explore cookery and recipe writing as crucial forms of self-expression (Brumberg, 168 1988; Bynum; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; Ireland; Leonardi; Michie; Schofield). Toward that end, scholars not only claimed domestic and community cookbooks as rich sources for academic investigation but also established women’s culinary autobiography as a canonical form of literature.
In the 1990s the work of such scholars began to coalesce within and alongside the burgeoning field of food studies, ultimately emerging into a recognizable subfield of its own, an emergence marked by the publication of several anthologies that serve as foundational texts in feminist food studies—Anne Bower’s Recipes for Reading (1997); Carole Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan’s Food and Gender: Identity and Power; selected essays on gender and women’s studies from Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterick’s Food and Culture (1997); Dean Curtin and Lisa Heldke’s Cooking, Eating, Thinking (1992); Marjorie DeVault’s Feeding the Family (1981); Mary Anne Schofield’s Cooking by the Book; and Arlene Voski Avakian’s Through the Kitchen Window (1998).
As Julier eloquently underscores in "Critiquing Hegemony," the hard intellectual labor performed by these women has too often been elided from popular discourse. In the masculinized narrative of food studies consumed by the general public, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Eric Schlosser are emblazoned on the marquee. Simultaneously, the labor women perform within the field, factory, and home remains hidden from and silenced within the privileged public imaginary as codified by spokesmen of the idealized neoliberal foodscape.
Julie Guthman has repeatedly taken to task the masculine narratives that dominate public discourse around food and that define individual food choices as political activism, equating "ethical judgment with biophysical taste (big organic = bad; little organic = good)" (2007). Guthman likewise draws attention to the enormous, often unacknowledged debt that popular food writers such as Pollan owe to food studies and to environmental scholarship. Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), for example, treads much of the territory covered by Guthman's own Agrarian Dreams (2004).
Just two years after Guthman's Agrarian Dreams cohered a theoretical framework for analyzing California's agro-industrial complex, Psyche Williams-Forson's Building Houses out of Chicken Legs would inaugurate intersectional feminist food studies, derived from methodology, practice, and theory that aims to effect social change by illuminating, challenging, and and dismantling systemic oppressions. In the 2011 essay "Intersectionality and Food Studies," Williams-Forson and Abby Wilkerson expressed "a need to place the methodologies and theories of gender, race, and intersectionality at the center of food studies research" (15). They cite Breeze Harper's Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health & Society (2010) and the doctoral research built upon the book as modeling "the beauty of cross- fertilization that includes social activism, geography, gender studies, and critical race and food studies" (14). One of the first essays to take up the challenge, “Black Women’s Food Work as Critical Space,” draws together the work of five scholars, activists, and food practitioners whose narratives each express a unique food voice. When read alongside and in conversation with one another, the five narratives demonstrate the power of cross-pollination as a tool for critical investigation and provide a dialogic model for future feminist scholarship (Nettles-Barcelon, 2015). Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives likewise develops the theoretical framework inspired by the methodological breakthrough of Williams-Forson's Building Houses.
Another body of feminist food studies has built on the work of Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2012), which advanced the field of rhetorical feminist food studies by innovating a methodological and theoretical framework for "Critical Eating Studies." Tompkins blends literary analysis and critical race studies to explore the mouth and the kitchen as spaces where white fear, anxiety, and hunger for the racialized Other play out in nineteenth-century US literature and popular culture. Building on bell hooks' and Williams-Forson's work, Tompkins examines the indigestion that occurs when Black bodies are consumed as edible commodities, teasing out "the logic of racial embodiment, and of the distinctive ways in which cultures of food and eating came to imbue thinking about nation formation and racial difference" (Roy, 2012, p. 318). The influence of Tompkins's innovative theoretical work can be seen most explicitly in a special issue of Food, Culture, & Society devoted to Edible Feminisms (Vaughn 2019). Falling clearly at the crossroads of intersectional feminist practice, the issue extends the theoretical possibilities of Tompkins's "Critical Eating Studies" to move beyond the material food in order to "reflect on how received ideas about ingestion and digestion reveal the political beliefs and structures that organize us as individuals and communities" (Tracy 516). According to the editors: "shifting focus from food to eating meant our attunements—both conceptual and logistical—had to be interdisciplinary, multisensory, feminist, and decolonial" (517). In her contribution to the collection, Hannah Landecker demonstrates the extraordinary importance of such an approach in her study of twentieth-century America, which "mapped out a set of relations between industrial chemistry, agriculture, and eating that not only transformed daily life and material culture, but also ecologies, bodies, and the material interdependencies between different kinds of organisms.... as nutrition and toxicity came to travel together in animal feeding" (531). Today, "we are left in the twenty-first century to inhabit the altered metabolisms" created by this legacy.
Late Twentieth-Century Development of Key Themes
Eating Problems, Eating Pleasures
Since the 1970s feminist scholars have focused intently on the ways in which patriarchal culture deforms woman’s relationship with food. Such work targets sexism by illuminating pervasive ideological constructs that align woman’s appetite for food, for public voice, and for economic, political, or social power with greed and moral corruption (Bruch 1978; Brumberg 1988; Chernin 1981; Michie 1987; Orbach, 1978). Such an alignment, scholars have argued, fuels an ideal of femininity that lauds subservient, demure, and domesticated behavior. Such ideals encourage women to stifle their physical and intellectual hungers, a repression that results in eating disorders ranging from bulimia and anorexia to obesity. Historically, Western women have used food refusal, both unconsciously and consciously, as a means of expressing their protest against the patriarchal forces that subordinate them within the private realm and deny them agency within the public sphere. As anthropologist Carole Counihan explains: “[p]atriarchal Western society not only restricts women’s economic and political opportunities but also defines their role within the family as nurturer and food provider, a role compatible with the use of food as voice” (107 1999). As a result, feminist scholars study the ways in which women use food refusal to voice their protest against “the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger—for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification—be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited” (Bordo 171).
By the 1980s, postcolonial feminists had begun to critique the essentialism that characterized much early scholarship, an essentialism built on a notion of womanhood that often elided race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality from the equation. In an attempt to rectify such essentialism, Becky Thompson expanded the scholarship on women’s eating disorders beyond the white, middle-class, heterosexual woman to include “African-American women, Latinas, and lesbians.” In her research, published in A Hunger So Wide and So Deep (1994), Thompson discovered that “the particular constellation of eating problems among the women did not vary with race, class, sexuality, or nationality.” Across the spectrum, they arose “as sensible acts of self-preservation—in response to myriad injustices including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse” (221). As Counihan explains: “that Western women strive for power and identity through closing off the body and denying their own physicality and penetrability is a clear statement that their bodies are source and symbol of their subordination,” a fact clearly borne out by Thompson’s study, which unearthed sexual abuse as the most pervasive cause of eating problems among the women she studied (62, 1999).
Beginning in the late 1980s, scholars began to expand their focus beyond women’s eating problems in order to construct a more nuanced conception of women’s relationships with food. Many scholars began to study the force-fed suffragist, who simultaneously embodied woman’s oppression, her self-empowerment, and her vociferous hunger for a public voice (Betterton; Howlett; Schlossberg; Tickner). Whereas the eating problems women develop as a response to injustice both arise from and attest to their subordinate place within society, the history of British and American suffragists demonstrate food refusal as a means of political empowerment. When British and American suffragists were imprisoned for picketing, many of them chose to go on hunger strike. Officials responded with force-feeding. As scholars have shown, the figure of the force-fed hunger striker replicates the dynamics of patriarchal suppression, yet, at the same time, public outrage over her treatment helped earn women the vote. In such cases, women performed their culturally scripted role of self-denial, yet successfully transformed its significance from a gesture of deference to the needs of others into a powerful venue for political self-expression and cultural transgression.
Like scholars of the hunger-striking suffragist, medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum took on the self-starving figure. In researching the renunciation of food by medieval women for her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), Bynum relied heavily on the written and spoken words of female mystics to uncover “women’s use of food as symbol, putting it into a cultural context” (xiv). She found that the women themselves, as well as hagiographers, did not perceive of fasting as a renunciation of the flesh. “Rather they spoke of abstinence as preparatory to and simultaneous with true feeding by Christ. It was identification with Christ’s suffering. It was affective, even erotic, union with Christ’s adorable self” (120). Bynum’s findings on the cultural meaning of medieval fasting as well as the self-perception of the fasters themselves provides a stunning contrast to contemporary food refusal. As Bynum reflects “Medieval people saw food and body as sources of life, repositories of sensation.... In contrast, modern people see food and body as resources to be controlled. Thus food and body signify that which threatens human mastery” (300).
In keeping with the revaluation of women's physical appetite as imbricated with hunger for knowledge, for power, and for creativity, scholars have conceptualized food in women’s lives as a “vehicle for artistic expression, a source of sensual pleasure, an opportunity for resistance” (Avakian, 6, 1997; Abarca; André; Bower; Beoku-Betts; Black; DeSalvo; Heller and Moran; Randall; Sceats; Schaffer; Scott; Theophano; Upton; Williams-Forson; Yaeger; Zafar). Writing as late as 1997, however, Barbara Haber could still lament the fact that feminist scholars focused almost exclusively on “eating disorders and the victimization of females,” reflecting that “[i]t will be a great relief to me when feminists ... can see food as a way in which women have historically sustained and celebrated life” (Avakian 68, 73). Haber’s commentary appears in Arlene Voski Avakian’s pioneering anthology of women’s writing Through the Kitchen Window, an anthology that would make an invaluable step toward rectifying the imbalance noted by Haber. Including celebratory essays by such feminist icons as Dorothy Allison, Margaret Randall, and Gloria Wade-Gayles, Through the Kitchen Window took part in a change that would help cohere feminist food studies into a subfield of its own. “Provocative, questioning, and destabilizing of essentialist stereotypes” collections such as Through the Kitchen Window; Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat (Scholder 1995); and Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (DeSalvo and Giunta 2002) “have foregrounded the psychological, economic, social, and political implications of food-making and eating” in contemporary women’s lives (DeSalvo 7).
Feminist Food Studies Arrives in the Twenty-First Century
Fifteen years after Haber lamented the relative lack of scholarship on women’s empowerment through food, studies exploring the topic abound, including several essays that appear in the anthology that Haber coedited with Avakian in 2002, From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Other contributions include anthologies of literary criticism, which “explore how women write about food and oral pleasure, and, in so doing, negotiate their relation to the body as well as to language and culture” (Heller and Moran, 2; André; Floyd and Forster; Schofield); and projects that conceptualize women’s cookery as a form of community-building and self expression and women’s cookery instruction and recipe writing as a means of recording and preserving the values and traditions that characterize familial, social, ethnic, racial, and national foodways (Abarca; Avakian; Beoku-Betts; Blend; Bower; Counihan, 2009; DeSilva; Goldman; Inness, 2001; Leonardi; Pilcher; Sharpless; Theophano; Williams-Forson; Witt). Studies such as Meredith Abarca’s “Charlas Culinarias” (2012) and Carole Counihan’s “Mexicanas Taking Food Public” (2012) examine the interstices of the private and public realms to uncover how women bring their considerable cooking and community-building skills into the public realm in order to support themselves and their families, working to “rescue and revive many of the silenced voices omitted in the official discourse of history” (André, 18). Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad (1995) traces the rise of the late nineteenth-century domestic science movement, which worked to transform food preparation and other household duties into a science. The movement’s success led to the rise of home economics departments at the university level, bringing the realm of domestic management into the field of public education. In “Recipes for Patria” (1997), Jeffrey Pilcher explores how nineteenth- century Mexican women helped to secure Native American foods as an integral part of their national cuisine, resisting the effort of Mexican leaders to adopt a decidedly Western European model of cookery.
Scholars likewise blend field research with activism in order make visible and correct the injustices of the agri-food business, which institutionalize and perpetuate the subordination of women. Through the “Tomasita Project,” which traces the journey of a corporate tomato from Mexico, through the United States and into Canada, Deborah Barndt “gathers the stories of the most marginalized women workers in the food chain” and, in so doing, implements the principles of popular education, integrating “research, learning, and organizing for social change” (2002, 79; 1999). Like “The Tomasita Project,” Carole Counihan’s A Tortilla is Like Life gives voice to Mexicanas “who have been previously excluded from the pages of history” and draws inspiration from and methodological grounding in ecofeminism. In keeping with “Chicano environmentalism,” Counihan “seeks to promote just and sustainable communities and to document Mexicano food production and land and water use” (xiii).
Postcolonial and poststructural scholars have examined “the ideological boundary between home and marketplace” in order to illuminate the ways in which women bridge “public (productive) and (private) reproductive spaces” (Julier, 169 2012; Abarca, 109 2012; Allen and Sachs; Barndt; Schroeder; Sharpless; Williams-Forson). They also investigate the role of food in the construction and maintenance of empire and the gendering of colonial bodies (Chaudhuri; Goldman; Roy; Zlotnick). In “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England,” Susan Zlotnick demonstrates how “British women helped incorporate Indian food into the national diet and India into the British Empire” (63). In “‘I Yam What I Yam: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism,” Anne Goldman explores how writers of the culinary autoethnography are driven “to represent the relation between subjectivity and ethnicity as a conscious, practiced one.... Without sacrificing an acknowledgement of the physical and emotional burdens imposed by imperialism, these writers recuperate a sense of agency for people who, in traditional political and literary theory, have often been subject in name only” (192).
Masculinity and queer studies scholars have made invaluable contributions to the study of gender and food, expanding and reconfiguring the bounds of feminist food studies to account for gender as “a dynamic and purposeful accomplishment: something people produce in social interaction” (Carrington 50). Toward that end, scholars have begun to theorize “eating and feeding” as acts that “enable modes of cultural analysis that are attentive to ... sex, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, geopolitical location, class and gender. Eating... makes these categories matter again: it roots actual bodies within these relations” (Jarvin 784; Probyn 9). In particular, masculinity studies explores how men negotiate and perform masculinity when taking on (or refusing to take on) the culturally coded feminine task of cooking for others (Deutsch; Mechling; Parasecoli). Scholars likewise analyze dietary practices as a means of masculine performance— ranging from Ghandhi’s hunger strikes in India to Progressive-era male fasting and the Atkins diet in the United States (Roy; Griffith; Bentley). In Alimentary Tracts, Parama Roy explores “carnality, including alimentation, [as] an important theater for the soul making of Indians as well as for the self-making of Anglo-Indians,” finding that [m]eat eating or a kind of culinary masculinity... would nourish, in the most literal sense, not just Indian resistance to British rule but an entry into modernity and a condition of postcoloniality” (80-81). In “The Other Atkins Revolution,” Amy Bentley examines the “masculinization of dieting” effected by the Atkins regimen, which enables men to ingest an abundance of foods—namely meat and fat—that are culturally coded masculine (35).
Over the past decade, queer food studies has actively extended and reconfigured the investigative strategies that have preoccupied women’s studies scholars since the 1980s. Queer studies has begun not only to expand our understanding of the kitchen as a space where heterosexually gendered subjects are produced but also to conceptualize it as a site where individuals can effectively queer—challenge, bring into question, destabilize—the very same heteronormative ideology upon which the traditional family structure and, in turn, patriarchal ideology, depends. As Anita Mannur reflects, queer studies scholars have begun to “highlight the powerfully affective potential of food, and its ability to engender anti-normative forms of desire that challenge the notion that the home, as microcosm of the nation, is a necessarily heterosexual formation designed to reproduce citizens that will uphold tradition and its concomitant values” (237).
A foundational queer cookbook, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, for example, has garnered critical attention as a work that destabilizes and reconfigures the rigidly gendered boundaries of the domestic kitchen as well as the domestic cookbook (Kelly, Linzie, McLean). By inserting recipes into a gastronomic travelogue, Toklas effectively “queers” the bounds of the domestic food writing tradition, creating a text that moves freely between the private and the public realms. Dorothy Allison’s “Lesbian Appetite” has likewise inspired scholarship that explores the importance of eating and feeding to the construction of “sexual identities, personal histories and lesbian communities” (Lindenmeyer 19). In particular, Christina Jarvis demonstrates how Allison’s story showcases the performance of a “variety of lesbian roles and identities through the very material realm of eating and sexual practices,” which “undermine the heterosexist fiction that sex, gender, and desire are coherent, interrelated, biologically determined elements” (775).
Cooking, Caring, Feeding
Masculinity and queer studies have done much of late to complicate the work of feminist food scholars, particularly in illuminating the rigidly gendered act of feeding or cooking for others. As anthropologist Carole Counihan explains: “The predominant role of women in feeding is a cultural universal, a major component of female identity, and an important source of female connection to and influence over others” (46, 1999). Until the 1990s, woman’s domestic role as food provider was understood to provide her with an amount of power; she acted as gatekeeper of the household’s food provisions (Allen and Sachs, 25). Recent scholarship by sociologists Marjorie DeVault, Alex McIntosh, Mary Zey, and Jeffrey Sobal has significantly challenged this notion. In Feeding the Family, DeVault traces the modern conception of family to the industrial revolution and the rise of separate spheres, which designated men’s work as wage earning outside the home and women’s work as focused on “transforming wages into the goods and services needed to maintain the household” (15). Such a bifurcation constructed a notion of “family” patterned on “women’s service for men.” As DeVault argues, however, such “patterns are not ‘natural’; they are produced by characteristic ways of understanding the family” (18). When Alex McIntosh and Mary Zey re-examined the notion of women as gatekeepers, they found that “although women have generally been held responsible for these roles, men, to varying degrees, control their enactment” (126). In turn, “family meals are masculine meals” in that “men’s food preferences dominate family food choices” (Sobal, 142).
Since such dynamics produce and reinforce a patriarchal structure, scholars have begun to research the caring work within LBGT households in order to uncover the patterns that occur within same-sex families. In his study of gay and lesbian households, Carrington discovered that the traditional gendering of caring work greatly impacted the self-presentation of the couples whom he studied. Lesbian families worked to present both partners as “care-givers” and gay- male families worked to downplay the domestic work of the main caregiver. In other words, hisfindings uncover “an abiding concern about maintaining traditional gender categories, and particularly of avoiding the stigma that comes with either failing to engage in domestic work for lesbian families or through engaging in domestic work for gay-male families” (59). Among the participants in Carrington’s study, those individuals earning the least money or with less prestigious careers were far more likely to act as the main caregivers, a finding that replicates the dynamic found in most heterosexual families.
Extending the scholarship on caring work, masculinity scholars have begun to explore the tensions that arise when heterosexual men take on domestic cookery. Findings show that men cooking for other men will “draw upon multiple versions of masculinity” and work to masculinize their actions through crude humor and gender play (Deutsch 93). Men also underscore—consciously or unconsciously—cooking for others as a “noble gesture of affection and brotherhood” (Mechling 86). As Jonathan Deutsch has demonstrated in his study of firehouse cookery, however, despite the fact that the firefighters perform the act of cooking for one another “in a decidedly self-conscious way, a proverbial winking over one’s shoulder,” the meals they cook are inspired by and materialize the concerns of the domestic, or female, cook—a concern with economy, health, pleasing the group, and cooking with efficiency.
Research Methodologies
Largely structuralist in approach, early feminist scholarship focused on uncovering the ways in which patriarchal structures subordinate, silence, and devalue women physically, intellectually, and psychologically. Beginning in the 1980s, third wave feminist scholars began to take much second wave feminist scholarship to task for essentializing women’s experiences, effectively articulating a feminist agenda that speaks from, of, and to a white, middle-class, heterosexual positionality. Taking part in the theoretical shift from structuralism to postmodern and postcolonial thought, third wave feminism jettisoned the dualistic thinking that essentialized the female experience, an essentialism built on a unified notion of womanhood that often elided race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality from the equation. Scholars began to shift feminist thought from its monolithic conception of womanhood toward a more nuanced, dynamic, and, ultimately, complex understanding of women.
As scholarship interweaving food, gender, and women’s studies has grown, so too have the number of methodologies in use. Reflecting the trend in scholarship at large, early feminist food studies tends to utilize the methodological approach(es) specific to a given field— anthropology, sociology, folklore, literature, history. As interdisciplinary fields—including women’s studies, American studies, cultural studies, African American studies, and food studies—have flourished, so too has multidisciplinarian scholarship. While much leading scholarship in feminist food studies will inevitably continue to reflect the single-disciplinarity of its author(s), innovative multidisciplinarian contributions have multiplied exponentially of late. In their nimble, provocative, and inventive investigations of how gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nation are constructed through food, the authors of such scholarship provide one model for future feminist food studies—one that, refusing to be bound by field or methodology, enjoys a deep familiarity with the interdisciplinary fields of food, gender, and postcolonial studies as well as an expertise in the myriad ways they overlap. Meredith Abarca’s Voices in the Kitchen; Fabio Parasecoli’s Bite Me; Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts; Doris Witt’s Black Hunger; Psyche Williams-Forson’s Building a House Out of Chicken Legs, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion provide just such models. Yet another model can be found in the work of scholar activists such as Breeze Harper and Toni Tipton Martin, whose work comfortably bridges the scholarly and public realms. Contemporary research in feminist food studies has also been collected in Melissa Goldthwaite's Food, Feminisms, and Rhetoric (2017), which brings together a rich collection of essays covering topics ranging from "The Embodied Rhetoric of Recipes" to "Feeding the Self: Representations of Nourishment and Female Bodies in Holocaust Art" (Cognard Black, Baker). Among the single or co-authored books expanding the field, both Shelley L. Koch's Gender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System and Kate Cairn and Josée Johnston's Food and Femininity (2015) stand out as pedagogically oriented studies that are deeply grounded and fluent in the literature of food studies.
In Their Own Words: Scholars Advocate Paths for Further Research
We suggest that weaving the strands of feminist studies together with political economy and sociology can provide strong theoretical grounding for a feminist food studies that would illuminate causes, conditions, and possibilities for change in gender relations in the agri-food system.
We need to understand much more about gender relations in the food system. We need to know much more about who women food activists are, their motivations, and their visions for the food system. We have much to learn about the possibilities for changing gender relations and the emerging field of feminist food studies can lead the way through weaving together feminist studies of food and the body with feminist work in the sociology and political economy of agriculture.
——Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs, “Women and Food Chains”
Race and gender are often deployed as labels that describe only the experiences of women or people of color, as if these were not reciprocal, structural, and relational terms that define life circumstances for dominant groups, too. What if we saw the construction of race and gender, of the ‘devalued Other’ as a defining feature of both the production and consumption of food?
Most emphatically, it seems essential that studies of food and social life must explore how gender and race and class collide to create both the local and the global. Such research would focus on how specific food behaviors and roles regarding commensality are given gendered and racial meanings, how paid and unpaid food labor is divided to express gender and race differences symbolically, and how diverse social structures—not just families or ethnic groups—incorporate gender and racial values and convey advantages. These books would analyze the construction of such packages, simultaneously emphasizing the symbolic and the structural, the ideological and the material, the interactional and the institutional levels of analysis.
——Alice Julier, “Hiding Gender and Race in the Discourse of Commercial Food Consumption”
Within a context where desire for contact with those who are different or deemed Other is not considered bad, politically incorrect, or wrong-minded, we can begin to conceptualize and identify ways that desire informs our political choices and affiliations. Acknowledging ways the desire for pleasure, and that includes erotic longings, informs our politics, our understanding of difference, we may know better how desire disrupts, subverts, and makes resistance possible.
—bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”
Against arguments that see in eating a confirmation of a predetermined identity, the point is to focus on the different forms of alimentary assemblages. It is here that we see glimpses of the types of intermingling of bodies that suggest other ways of inhabiting the world.
—Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities
Biologically grounded approaches to the psychosocial mapping of the body lead us to understand the metaphoricity of the gut as more than political symbolism: we find in the gut a site where the social is registered, broken down, and processed, then ejected and dispersed throughout the body as the kind of nutritive information that the subject, immersed in political culture, needs to survive.
—Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, "On the Visceral"
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The Rise and Development of Feminist Food Studies, 1970–2020
The original essay, which has been revised and updated, was published as "The Intersection of Gender and Food Studies" in Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies.