Feminist Food Studies

Feminist food studies is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship that is concerned with identifying, describing, and challenging the ways that gender and gender-based oppression manifest, are maintained, and are reinforced through social, economic, and cultural practices of food. Generally speaking, two streams within the broader literature of feminist food studies may be distinguished by their approach to sex and gender. Early feminist food studies scholarship tended to fall within the first stream, which focuses on women and men as fixed, biologically defined objects of analysis, and thus conducted research on topics such as women’s paid and unpaid food work and the rates of food insecurity and eating disorders among women versus men. Although this research remains important today, feminist food studies has grown alongside other areas of scholarship to include a second stream of theoretical and empirical research that explores the ways in which food and gender, as well as other aspects of identity, are co-constituted through everyday practices. Thereby, feminist food studies scholarship engages with queer theory to broaden its scope to consider how food and food practices shape and are shaped by ideas about femininity and masculinity as aspects of identity that are not biologically defined, but rather socially constructed. For example, in addition to research that may document women’s disproportionate involvement in family foodwork, feminist food studies scholars demonstrate how different forms and degrees of participation in family foodwork are implicated in the production of individuals’ gender identity. Today, feminist food studies scholarship has also adopted intersectionality as a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approach to understanding how food is implicated in systems of power beyond gender, meaning that it is also concerned with the ways that gender identity and gender-based oppression interact with other forms of social and structural oppressions, such as racism, heterosexism and heteronormativity, homo- and trans-phobia, sizeism, ableism, classism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism. Within feminist food studies, social justice and activism are key activities alongside theorizing power in food practices as social change requires resisting and contesting dominant discourses that reproduce stereotypes and maintain hegemonic power. However, delineating what “counts” as feminist food studies is not straightforward. Not all scholarship that addresses sex and/or gender necessarily does so from a feminist perspective. A feminist perspective implies that consideration is given to the ways in which sex and gender are axes of power that give rise to privilege and oppression. Moreover, not all scholars who address gender-based oppressions identify with feminism or intersectional feminisms, in part because the feminist movement has historically ignored, and even exacerbated, the struggles of racialized, Indigenous, immigrant, poor and working class, disabled, queer, trans, and other women. The vital contributions by the authors of the texts in this article represent feminist food studies from the perspective of the three authors of this piece, who all identify as white, cis, Western, feminist scholars, which may be biased by these social positionalities.