Return to Home

Food in the USA: A Reader

The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power

Food and Culture: A Reader

Food and Gender: Identity and Power

Slow - the international herald of taste and culture

Around the Tuscan Table

Food and Gender: Identity and Power
edited by Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan
Amsterdam: Harwoood Academic Publishers, 1998.

Food and Gender: Identity and Power examines the significance of food-centered activities to gender relations and the construction of gendered identities across cultures. Food and Gender investigates how men's and women's relationships to food may influence or determine both gender complementarity and heirarchy.

Two central questions about food and gender are emphasized in this book. First, how does the control of food production, distribution and consumption contribute to power and social position? Second, how does food symbolically connote "maleness" or "femaleness," and help to establish the social value of men and women? Other issues discussed include the differences in men's and women's attitudes about food and their bodies, and the "legitimacy" of the appetites of men versus women.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Introduction - Food and Gender: Identity and Power by Carole M. Counihan

Chapter 2 - Food and Sexual Identity among the Culina by Donald K. Pollock

Chapter 3 - "Men are Taro" (They Cannot Be Rice): Political Aspects of Food Choices in Wamira, Papua New Guinea by Miriam Kahn

Chapter 4 - Hospitality, Women and the Efficacy of Beer by Kathryn S. March

Chapter 5 - Feeding their Faith: Recipe Knowledge among Thai Buddhist Women by Penny Van Esterik

Chapter 6 - An Anthropological View of Western Women's Prodigious Fasting by Carole M. Counihan

Chapter 7 - Women as Gatekeepers by Alex McIntosh and Mary Zey

Chapter 8 - What Does It Mean To Be Fat, Thin and Female in the United States by Carole M. Counihan

Index