This dissertation examines how women’s food writing, from blogs to cookbooks to novels, demonstrate a desire to articulate themselves as people within communities rather than accept a dehumanized identity as a consumer or set of credit-card numbers. I argue that through an emphasis on connection with one another via a discourse of scratch cooking and locally sourced foods, women are able to push back against the hegemony of corporate food and industrial agriculture. Working from a case study model, each of my chapters examines the distinct ways in which women assert their personhood apart from the homogenizing influences of mainstream food culture. As a means of articulating this woman’s culinary culture, predicated on a foundation of scratch cooking and local ingredients and relationships, I examine the food blog Fed Up With Lunch and the author’s use of an anonymous persona to interrogate the federal school lunch program; feminist vegetarian and vegan cookbooks authored by collectives of women who rely on oppositional identities in order to push back against what they view as hegemony; how diasporic Indian women use scratch cooking as a means of self-expression within the context of migration; and the novel cookbook as an example of injecting a feminist discourse of food into a traditional fictional narrative. Read together, these discrete case studies make an argument for women’s power to effect meaningful change from within the circumscribed space of the kitchen. / text

Though casual readers may often assume cookbooks are primarily reference materials,cookbooks actually offer readers a type of autobiography; I examine cookbooks as literary autobiographical acts by analyzing three celebrity chefs' cookbooks and the recent film, Julie and Julia. Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, illustrates several key autobiographical ideas, specifically Barthes' ideas of readerly and writerly texts and the distinction between an author and a persona. The film acts as a visual representation of the way a reader engages with a text and makes it a writerly text while successfully distinguishing between an author and a persona/narrator. After a brief review of autobiography theory through Julie and Julia, the three selected authors' work further magnifies the ideas. The first celebrity chef, David Lebovitz, uses a highly narrative style and incorporates numerous autobiographical details into his books. The second, Ina Garten, utilizes different methods of creating a persona, including photography. The third chef, Dorie Greenspan, uses the same methods used by Lebovitz and Garten, but has been replicated extensively in online baking groups, making her texts ideal for understanding the role of the reader in an autobiography. The work of these three authors illustrates well how autobiographies function and how readers can reiterate their own autobiographies through the books and food they consume.

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