Natalie Jovanovski – författare

This book is the first of its kind to explore how women challenge the powerful sociocultural and gendered phenomenon of diet culture across the broad anti-diet movement and beyond. Showcasing the voices of over 150 everyday women, activists, and health professionals across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the author provides new insight into anti-diet practices while giving agency for women who remain main targets of diet culture. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a novel starting point to develop a concept of the diet habitus, the author explores the possibility of a fragmented but unified diet counterculture. Drawing on feminist perspectives from women’s and fat liberation movements, the author demonstrates that women’s anti-diet practices are grounded in a combination of self and society; one that has the power to significantly re-shape the broad landscape of food and eating for women. This international book appeals to scholars, students, activists and health professionals interested in the intersections of the sociology of the body, fat studies, sociology of food and nutrition, social movements, health sociology, and women''s studies.

This volume addresses how the rhetoric of feminist empowerment has been combined with mainstream representations of food, thus creating a cultural consciousness around food and eating that is unmistakably pathological. Throughout, Natalie Jovanovski discusses key texts written by women, for women: best-selling diet books, popular cookbooks produced by female food celebrities, and iconic feminist self-help texts. This is the first book to engage in a feminist analysis of body-policing food trends that focus specifically on the use of feminist rhetoric as a harmful aspect of food culture. There is a smorgasbord of seemingly diverse gender roles for women to choose from, but many encourage breaking gender norms and embracing a love of food while perpetuating old narratives of guilt and restraint. Digesting Femininities problematizes the gendering of food and eating and challenges the reader to imagine what a genderless and emancipatory food culture would look like.