Category Food and Gender:

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

Posted on by Natalie Jovanovski

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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Changing the Game of Sports Nutrition, Challenging the Ideal of “Athletic” Men? The Game Changers and Hegan Masculinity

Posted on by Jan Weber

The controversial documentary The Game Changers seeks to debunk the myth that plant-based proteins will never be as good as their animal counterpart. For those who have not seen the documentary, a quick look at the film poster might help to better understand what is at stake here: in the documentary, vegan athletes are depicted as so ultra-masculine that they also make their dietary choice “manly” and, therefore, do not challenge hegemonic ideals of masculinity. We see a strong arm, a clenched fist, and enlarged veins with green blood circulating through them. Next to this arm, green and white letters proclaim: “Fueled by the Truth: The Game Changers.” At first glance, the poster seems to announce a remake of the…

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The American Dream of Being Enough: The Story of Jean Nidetch, a Slim Entrepreneur

Posted on by Maria Wiegel

In 1963, patriarchal social structures in the United States seemed to be getting stirred up by female voices challenging the hegemonic imaginary woman, when Betty Friedan published her seminal book The Feminine Mystique. That same year, Jean Nidetch started a company helping women reduce their body weight: Weight Watchers, now called WW. By losing weight, as Marisa Meltzer argues in her book This is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me) (2020), Nidetch “basically earned the American dream” (8) and then sold it as a commodity. Meltzer explains that “Jean had a Cinderella story for the ages. She was a maven and mogul who lost weight, spectacularly found her calling, and helped to create a national pastime and obsession that endures today” (276).…

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The Business with Postfeminist Healthism: Tensions between Thriving Mothers and Rebellious Daughters

Posted on by Judith Schreier

  “Can you imagine my mom’s reaction?” [Abby asks]. “Eat Healthy with Norah!’s Norah suspected of having a fat kid!” —Amy Spalding, The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles (91) This quote from the well-received young adult novel The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles) by Amy Spalding vividly captures the essence of the novel: The main character’s (Abby Ives’s) striking line pictures the tensions between her mother and herself that are based in their different approaches to how to live a good life—and the good life is immediately connected to a healthy and slim body. While Abby stridently points out that her fat body visibly contradicts her mother’s lifestyle, the name of her mother’s…

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Gender, Expression, and Eating on the American Trail, 1890s-1920s

Posted on by Nicholas Blower

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, hikers, backpackers, and mountain climbers on the United States’ east and west coasts spoke as excitedly about campfire food as they did about the continent’s ‘pristine’ wilderness. In hiking accounts and articles in outdoors magazines, early recreationalists explored what food meant to them. For many, trail fare and campfire cooking were about more than sustenance; they provided a means to transcend contemporary society’s gendered expectations about food and its consumption. The early hiking clubs of the United States were not overtly exclusionary in the ways that their European contemporaries were, but resistance to women’s inclusion was evident. In their early years, Massachusetts’s Appalachian Mountain Club (est. 1876), California’s Sierra Club…

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