Women, Food, Performance

Women, food, and performance share a complex and tumultuous history. This book is the first to examine their legacy through the slippery figure of the domestic goddess, taking Nigella Lawson as a starting point to trace its construction in postfeminist culture. Across four parts - Fantasy, Confession, Consumption and Work - the chapters bring cultural studies and feminist debates on women and food to bear on performances of culinary femininity, looking back and across at examples of theatre, live art, musical film, food adverts, pop stars, TV chefs and food media personalities from the 20th and 21st century. Women, Food, Performance examines the entangled political and cultural legacies circumscribing the evolving territory of food and performance for women, non-binary, queer and trans artists navigating a postfeminist, neoliberal, Western context; and celebrates how they grapple with dominant conceptions of food and women that circulate in the cultural imaginary. The analysis reveals how food operates as a locus of power that intersects with performance in multifarious ways and holds the potential to both construct and reimagine culinary identities. Including discussion about cakes and baking, food confessions, disordered eating, food and sex, feminised and racialised edibility, service work, and culinary trans activism, this book intervenes in and expands the construct of the domestic goddess otherwise and positions women’s food performance as central to the project of dismantling culinary norms. Jenny Lawson is Lecturer in Contemporary Performance in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK. She is a feminist scholar and practice researcher, whose work investigates food, femininity and domesticity across popular culture and performance practices.