| This project studies the relationship among food films, consumption, gender, race, and U.S. American identities. In its analysis of food films produced between 1992 and 2002, it questions what this genre can reveal about the gendering, racialization, and production of subjectivity, identity, culture, and relationships of power in contemporary U.S. society and in understanding how food narratives perform, critique, and (re)establish cultural norms. The study examines twelve food films, their marketing and distribution, and the discourse surrounding these films in online chat rooms and film reviews. The films attempt to represent culture and identity through a critical lens, yet they consistently undermine these efforts in an attempt to situate the film within hegemonic discourses of gender, race, sexuality, and class. These markers of identity, thus, often serve as foils against which hegemonic culture can position itself. In the process of “feasting our eyes,” hegemonic U.S. culture also devours otherness. The of gender, race, sexuality, and class as represented in these films (as well as in responses to the films from critics and viewers) allows insight into the ways hegemony is negotiated and the role that both cinema and food play in this struggle. The virtual experience of eating while experiencing “Otherness” provides audiences with potentially “safe” spaces to play out anxieties about racial differences, alternative sexualities, class distinctions, and gender/power issues. Food films perpetuate the link to women's bodies as consumable objects of desire. It becomes pornographic, the mark of otherness, and the narrative vehicle to men's actions. Drawing on bodies of literature and thought from the areas of food studies, cultural studies, and critical, rhetorical, media, and film criticism the analysis argues that representations are, furthermore, linked to the larger cultural context of the 1990s in their reworking of masculinity, their continued objectification of women's bodies, and their anxieties about immigration and assimilation. |
