Food and Femininity

Food and Femininity helps us to further understand why women invest so much energy in foodwork [and] reminds us that the pressures surrounding food are immense for women not just in terms of foodwork but in terms of the implications for their own weight management and the nearly universal goal of thinness. -- Charlotte N. Markey * Psychology Today * Women do not all react to foodwork in the same uniform manner. Food and Femininity therefore offers a useful exploration of food and the construction of femininities, and demonstrates how food itself can be used as a means by which social inequalities can be uncovered. * LSE Review of Books * [Cairns and Johnston] provide thought-provoking contributions to the fields of feminist scholarship and food studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty. * CHOICE * Cairns and Johnstons book is sure to be of interest to a wide range of academicscritical geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists alikenot merely those who have a distinguished taste for food research. * Antipode * With their call for the development of feminist food studies and feminist food politics, Cairns and Johnston contribute to an important perspective in the multivocal dialectic on gender and food. * Gender & Society * Cairns and Johnston take forward understanding food politics by focusing on how femininity is performed through foodwork practices. Through an immersion in the processes of decision making for household food choices, Food and Femininity offers a rich account of the thorny tensions faced by shoppers attempting to work out food ethics in their everyday eating lives this book offers a rich and rigorous contribution to examinations of contemporary western food politics [and] not only examines food and femininity, it also sets out feminist methodologies for researching food issues. * The Sociological Review * Overall, this book was excellent and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the sociological study of food and/or gender. It is scholastically rigorous, but remains firmly grounded in the everyday, real life experiences of women who care about food. In addition to its thoughtful and careful theoretical analysis of the varied performances of food femininities, the authors helpfully provide readily relatable examples and anecdotes to illustrate their ideas. This had the effect of connecting both theory and practice in a seamless and engaging way. * Canadian Food Studies Book Review * Finally, a book that gives a thorough, scholarly treatment to a phenomenon that affects so many women on a daily basis, sometimes quite painfully: negotiating the ever fraught cultural messages about shopping, cooking, serving, and eating food right, including the exhortations that we should simply relax about these things. -- Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Mom is in the kitchen making dinner. She is also doing gender, reinforcing stereotypes that a womans place is in the home. Why are women still responsible for feeding the family in our postfeminist age? Food and Femininity reveals the pleasuresas well as the inequitiesof home cooking. -- Christine Williams, University of Texas at Austin, USA A brilliant book that will set the agenda for future debates about gender and food. Combining rich empirical material and persuasive theorizing, Cairns and Johnston demonstrate why contemporary food practices raise crucial issues for feminism. -- Joanne Hollows, Independent Scholar, UK In this path-breaking work, the authors show how femininity is both empowering and constraining for women, and how this tension plays out in the food arena. -- Melanie DuPuis, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Cairns and Johnston take forward understanding food politics by focusing on how femininity is performed through foodwork practices. Through an immersion in the processes of decision making for household fo

Kate Cairns is an Assistant Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, USA. Jose Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada.

A Personal Food Prologue 1. Caring About Food 2. Thinking through Food and Femininity: A Conceptual Toolkit 3. Trolling the Aisles and Feeling Food Shopping 4. Maternal Foodwork: The Emotional Ties that Bind 5. The "Do-Diet": Embodying Healthy Femininities 6. Food Politics: The Gendered Work of Caring Through Food 7. Food Pleasures in the Postfeminist Kitchen 8. Conclusion: Cooking as a Feminist Act? Appendix A: Participant Demographics Appendix B: Methods Appendix C: Discourse Analysis of Food Media References Index