Food and Femininity

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Over the space of a few generations, women's relationship with food has changed dramatically. Yet despite significant advances in gender equality food and femininity remain closely connected in the public imagination as well as the emotional lives of women. While women encounter food-related pressures and pleasures as individuals, the social challenge to perform food femininities remains: as the nurturing mother, the talented home cook, the conscientious consumer, the svelte and health-savvy eater. In Food and Femininity, Kate Cairns and Jose Johnston explore these complex and often emotionally-charged tensions to demonstrate that food is essential to the understanding of femininity today. Drawing on extensive qualitative research in Toronto, they present the voices of over 100 food-oriented men and women from a range of race and class backgrounds. Their research reveals gendered expectations to purchase, prepare, and enjoy food within the context of time crunches, budget restrictions, political commitments, and the pressure to manage health and body weight. The book analyses how women navigate multiple aspects of foodwork for themselves and others, from planning meals, grocery shopping, and feeding children, to navigating conflicting preferences, nutritional and ethical advice, and the often-inequitable division of household labour. What emerges is a world in which womens choices continue to be closely scrutinized a world where failing at food is still perceived as a failure of femininity. A compelling rethink of contemporary femininity, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the sociology of food, gender studies and consumer culture.

Reviews

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 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 *
Food and Femininity is a highly readable and informative text that offers an up-to-date, contemporary analysis of the longstanding discussion of the relationship between femininity and food The book is a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of feminist food studies, particularly because Cairns and Johnston incorporate intersectional analysis throughout the text, being careful to examine the ways in which gender intersects with race/ethnicity and class to shape womens experiences with food. More than this, Food and Femininity adds to the development of a collective feminist food politics. * Food, Culture and Society *

Author Bio

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.