This thesis examines how gender operates in food theory, and reads across three contemporary
North American writers to understand how they take up or divert gendered culinary
configurations.
Food is deeply embedded in cultural practices, and is therefore inflected by gender and
gendered roles of a particular culture. In North America, for example, meat is commonly
understood as symbolic of masculinity and eaten by men, and vegetables are symbolic of
femininity and eaten by women. Sallie Tisdale’s The Best Thing l Ever Tasted (2000), Ruth
Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and The
Kappa Child (2004), can be read as investigations into how a gendered subjectivity can be
established or destabilised through food. By offering a close reading of moments of food
consumption in these texts, I argue that Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto offer a complicated and
implicated gendering of food that moves beyond the binary model.
The thesis is divided into three chapters that discuss how each writer approaches food
and gender, and reformulates eating practices as a complex conversation rather than as a direct
result of gender. The first chapter offers an introduction to how gender operates in food
theory, an in-depth analysis of contemporary gendered food practices and commercials, and
gives an outline for how Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto write oppositionally from within a gendered
culinary structure. Chapter two investigates how the implementation of gender roles through
food practises, and cultural figures such as Betty Crocker inform how women cook and eat in
Tisdale and Ozeki’s texts. Chapter three is devoted to how Hiromi Goto challenges received
notions of gender and food by not gendering her protagonists and refusing to make her female
characters readily consumable by the reader.
In my conclusion I theorise how seeing food practices as an extension of a character’s
subjectivity can root theories of food in the materiality of the food itself. I conclude that,
rather than abiding by gendered stereotypes, Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto promote awareness,
creativity and joy as more sustainable ways of knowing and eating our food.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4125 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Harris, Lisa |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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