Food and Gender Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

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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“Tacogate” is what actor Mishel Prada calls it. Thanks to the way Prada’s character, Emma, eats a taco in the very first episode of the STARZ show Vida (2018), the series immediately caused a stir. In a scene set at a Mexican restaurant in the East LA neighborhood Emma grew up in but has long not visited, she douses her carne asada taco in Valentina hot sauce and brings it to her mouth straight on, rather than tipping her head and biting it from the side, letting pieces of meat fall all over the table as she tears the tortilla with her teeth and then with her fingers. Her way of eating and especially her choice of condiment took people to Twitter to share memes of shock and…

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In LOVE Magazine’s 2017 advent calendar, model Emily Ratajkowski is featured rubbing spaghetti on her body as she rolls around seductively on top of a dining table. In a post-photoshoot interview, Ratajkowski professes her love of pasta and “being greased up in olive oil,” urging women to “do what [they] want” in the name of feminism. The shoot – which was intended to promote a ‘feminist’ message about choice in response to sexual assault allegations in Hollywood – used food coupled with the thin, white, pornographized, female body to express ‘female empowerment’; a trope that has been used in advertising many times before. As some feminist researchers have argued, these themes are commonplace in a postfeminist media landscape; one that embraces gender stereotypes and…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Food and Gender:

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

Playing Fat? The Fat Gamer Meme

How (Not) to Eat a Taco – Queering Mexican Food Practices in VIDA

Sexy Food, Tasty Women: Challenging the Soft-Core Pornographization of (Wo)men’s Appetites