Food and Gender Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?” This tagline from Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body horror film The Substance is a powerful but mostly redundant question for most women. Which woman hasn’t been (or should I say isn’t) obsessed with the quest for eternal beauty because of – if nothing else – sheer volume of social messaging that to be a woman of any value, one must be slim, young, and aesthetically pleasing, according to received cultural standards? In The Substance, ageing Hollywood superstar Elisabeth Sparkle embodies this pursuit to grotesque extremes. In the film, she engages a mysterious medicalized protocol known as “The Substance,” which allows her to produce an unidentical ‘clone’…

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Food is one of the most common and intimate ways of expressing care, which is particularly evident in how adults relate to children. Feeding children is a biological act filled with cultural meanings and expectations, an expression of love and care. But do we, perhaps, care too much about children’s food? During my ethnographic research on the politics of children’s food in Poland, one of the participating fathers told me: “When I was at the food market the other day, I saw a mother with her 2-year-old child in a stroller, and that child was holding in her hand a huge Snickers bar and eating it. A 2-year-old child! It’s sometimes outrageous what people give their children to eat, how…

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Hey I keep seeing that most of the gays in the gay community are well-toned. Are you not accepted as a fat person in the community or do they just not find that attractive? In spring 2020, an anonymous user turned to the collective intelligence of the German Q&A platform gutefrage.net expressing his personal concerns: “I’m overweight myself and afraid of not being accepted.” Responses from the online community depicted mixed sentiments: While some users affirmed the societal rejection of fat bodies, others countered by asserting that within the gay community, specifically for so-called “bears,” there is a designated place for fat male bodies. The “gay community” comprises social networks and places where homosexual men interact with each other and manifest shared…

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“Big Momma Ya’ Arm!” is a 25-year running ‘joke’ within some Black American communities. The phrase comes from a film titled Soul Food which chronicles the trials of the Joseph family after the death of their matriarch, Mother (Big Mama) Joe. The film details the importance of foodways in Black communities throughout history and across time, and helped bring to mainstream the importance of Sunday Dinners in our cultural traditions. The name “Big Mama” was at one point common for matriarchs in Black American families, and while it might invoke a fat-bodied matriarch, that is not a prerequisite for use of the term. In the film, however, Big Mama is fat-bodied and diabetic. There is a moment in the film where…

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I am a fat gamer. The “gamer” part is easy to write, the “fat” part does not come as easily and it still feels like admitting to a flaw. I have felt, like most gamers I assume, my share of guilt and even shame after I could not turn off whichever game had me sucked in and especially so, whenever I canceled social events in favor of a night with just myself, some food, and a video game. Fat-shaming, however, makes admitting to fatness much harder (in our cultures in the Global North). In identifying myself as fat, I build on work at the nexus of critical feminist, queer and fat studies; as Marilyn Wann has phrased it: In fat studies, there…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Food and Gender:

Rotten Women in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)

The Politics of Children’s Food (and Mothers’ Feeding)

“No Fats No Fems”: Fat-Shaming in the Gay Community

Playing Fat? The Fat Gamer Meme