In this article, we examine the gendering of ethical food discourse by focusing on the ideal of the 'organic child'. Drawing from qualitative focus groups and interviews with Canadian mothers of various class backgrounds, we find that the organic child reflects the intersecting ideals of motherhood and ethical food discourse, whereby 'good' mothers are those who preserve their children's purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases. Women in our study express the desire to nurture the organic child, and feel responsible for protecting their children's purity. At the same time the organic child represents a gendered burden for women, our participants negotiate the ideal in complex ways that involve managing emotions and balancing the normative expectations of motherhood with pragmatic demands. The idealized figure of the organic child not only works ideologically to reinforce gendered notions of care-work, but also works to set a classed standard for good mothering that demands significant investments of economic and cultural capital. We argue that the organic child ideal reflects neoliberal expectations about childhood and maternal social and environmental responsibility by emphasizing mothers' individual responsibility for securing children's futures.
Driven by a central question-"why do so many women care so much about food?"-Cairns and Johnston investigate the contemporary contours and connections between food and femininity, detailing the diverse ways these two things intersect and emerge in women's lives. Their research is done in a Canadian context where, they argue, food is used as a standard to judge a good mother, a responsible caregiver, a discerning consumer, a healthy woman, and an ethically minded shopper -standards that are not easy to achieve, particularly if time and money are scarce. Nowadays, given that food is so central in the lives of many North Americans, the increasing consumer concern over the unsustainable nature of the current food system, and the intensity with which feminine food standards are applied to women, this book is both timely and timeless, and illuminating for anyone interested in food and gender (which, in my opinion, and that of Cairns and Johnston, should be everyone).Using data from detailed narratives obtained during focus groups and in-depth interviews with 129 food-oriented consumers in Toronto, Canada (109 women and 20 men) and a discourse analysis of popular food blogs and magazines, Cairns and Johnston outline why food and femininity remain intricately connected topics that require "open-minded kitchen table discussions as well as critical research" (p. 6). The book is organized around key sites in the performance of food femininities: shopping, mothering, health and body, politics, and pleasure. These food femininities, they argue, help us to better understand the complex ways that food and femininity are intertwined within contemporary consumer culture.The first chapter introduces the reader to the authors' big research questions, motivations, and study methodology, while also providing a "quick and dirty" history of food, femininity and CFS/RCÉA Braun
The concept of “territorial stigmatisation” identifies the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalised places. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with a food justice organisation in Camden, New Jersey, to examine youth's responses to territorial stigma. The analysis demonstrates how Black and Latinx youth rewrite the story of Camden in a way that locates the “good” within it, using narratives of the city's prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatised place. I argue that the perspectives of youth illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the blemish of place in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. The article contributes to a growing literature examining the strategic responses of those who dwell in pathologised places. Because youth are uniquely situated within the production of place, their perspectives offer important insights in this process.
This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implications for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequities persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.
Canada's rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender uphold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analysis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global "others." I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as "dirts" by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby reclaim a pure white rural idyll.
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