Fourteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

We are fixated on nourishment and good food. At the same time gender seems to have us in a fix. We pursue and embrace the delights of great meals. Meanwhile gender is hard to escape – we struggle both personally and culturally to loosen the grip of gender on our habits, norms and identities. This paper argues that our food fixations and the fix of gender share common origins. In this commonality lies both peril and potential. The danger is that the scenes of nourishment we most avidly seek, a great restaurant meal for example, further trap us in traditional and normative experiences of gender. The potential lies is the way the transports of good food create openings for reconsidering and remaking our relationship to deep-rooted notions of need and desire that lend gender its remarkable hold over us. Our obsession with good food, restaurants and eating out is wrapped up with foundational and conflicted feelings regarding nourishment and human connection. As such, there is a danger that we can experience nourishment as a way to revisit and reestablish gendered notions of care rooted in early childhood — particularly notions of care associated with a distrust of women’s desires and impulses. The potential, alternatively, is that by engaging deep-rooted sources of desire and anxiety, we gain an opportunity to transform both, and their ties to our notions of gender.