Module Catalogue 2024/25

Pre Requisite Comment

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Co Requisite Comment

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Aims

How does food impact our lives? In what ways can we use food to help us understand our personal identities and our social world? And how does gender shape what and how we eat as well as the meanings we attach to it?

This course aims to develop student’s understanding of the relationship between gender and food culture. We identify food both as a medium of communication and as a socially constructed practice intimately tied with the formation of gender distinctions and gender norms. We discuss the history and practices of food preparation and consumption and take a gendered approach to examine such topics as meaning, discourse, identity, sexuality, ideology, politics, capitalism, and globalization. An intersectional approach is taken wherein issue of class, race, and ethnicity are considered with respect how they relate to the connection between gender and food culture specifically. We finish off with a section on social justice and the biopolitics of food culture.

Outline Of Syllabus

Readings/Lecture Focus:

Taste lifestyle (Bourdieu, Featherstone)

Food as symbol (Barthes, Mead)

Gender and Foodways
"Conflict and Deference" Marjorie Devault (FaC)
"Hunger as Ideology" Susan Bordo (EC)
"Who Deserves a Break Today? Fast Food, Cultural Rituals and Women's Place" Kate Kane (FUSA)

Ethical Consumption + Environmentalism
Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, and Malpass, "Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption"
Littler, "Cosmopolitan Caring: Globalization, Charity, and the Activist-Consumer"
Connolly and Prothero, "Green Consumption: Life-Politics, Risk and Contradictions"

New Media
Caldwell, Alison. “Will Tweet for Food: Micoblogging Mobile Food Trucks–Online, Offline, and In Line.” Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, 306- 321. Edited by Psyche A. Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Fonseca, Vanessa. “Targeting Hispanics/Latinos Beyond Locality: Food, Social Networks, in Online Shopping.” In The New Cultures of Food Marketing Opportunities from Ethnic, Religious and Cultural Diversity, 163-79. Edited by Adam Lindgreen and Martin K. Hingley. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT : Gower Pub. Co., 2009
Television
Adema, Pauline. “Vicarious Consumption: Food, Television and the Ambiguity of Modernity.” Journal of American Culture 23.3 (2000): 113-23.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Feminism, Postfeminism, Martha, Martha, and Nigella.” Cinema Journal 44.2 (Winter 2005): 106-16.

Postcolonialism and Globalization
Forth, Christopher E. “Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination.” History Workshop Journal 73.1 (Spring 2012): 211-39.
Houston, Lynn Marie. “‘Making Do’: Caribbean Foodways and the Economics of Postcolonial Literary Culture.” MELUS 32.4, Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures (Winter 2007): 99- 113.
Ram, Uri. “Liquid Identities: Mecca Cola versus Coca-Cola.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.4 (Nov. 2007): 465-84.

Race/Ethnicity
Tuchman, Gaye and Levine, Harry, "New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern”, in Shortridge,
B. & Shortridge, J., (Eds.) The Taste of American Place. Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, (163 - 186) (ONLINE)
Poe, Tracey, “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915-1947 (USA, 91-108)
Narayan, U. Eating cultures: Incorporation, identity and Indian food.

Documentary screenings followed by discussion
Feeding Frenzy,
We Feed the World, Out Here

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

In this class, students will:
1.       Gain an understanding of the debates and controversies surrounding the cultural studies of food as they intersect with contemporary feminist theory.
2.       Learn and apply some of the techniques of discourse analysis
3.       Recognize both gender and food as socially constructed yet materially felt
4.       Analyze social media, and traditional media with respect to the symbolic representations of food and gender
5.       Reflect on your own relationship with food both materially and symbolically
6.       Connect practices of food consumption and production with social justice and community

Intended Skill Outcomes

Write an critical and essay
Understand core concepts around food and culture
Learn to perform primary cultural and media analysis

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

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Assessment Rationale And Relationship

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General Notes

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