Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Presidential politics in the United States are the site of an ongoing struggle over the meaning of American manhood. As scholar Paul Cohen puts it, a candidate’s ability to appear the most manly “has played an outsized role in deciding who will be president.” The conspicuous consumption of food on the campaign trail is central to the way in which candidates for president attempt to display the proper masculinity essential to and, in fact, constitutive of the most important and powerful job in the world. Curiously, few scholars have analyzed the centrality of food consumption to the performances of gender at the heart of presidential campaigning and politics. And while several scholars have emphasized the importance of gender, race, and class in shaping hegemonic ideals of masculinity, very few have investigated how ideas of proper manhood are indelibly constructed and made legible by discourses of disability. An analysis of how and what candidates for the US presidency eat and drink on the campaign trail, I argue, reveals not only the centrality of food consumption to displays of proper manhood required of the chief executive but the constitutive role of disability in shifting meanings of hegemonic masculinity throughout US history.