120691 PS Proseminar Cultural and Media Studies (2025S)

Food is a fundamental necessity, access to it a human right. Food is also a marker of distinction and violent power structures, related to the performance of gendered, classed and racialized identities, dissected for its health benefits, beauty bonuses and ecological impacts.

In this class, students will be invited to think about food in two ways:
1) as part of material culture, against the backdrop of the escalating climate crisis, wars, famines, “food deserts” and “obesogenic environments”, “produced by (and symptomatic of) the broader workings of a capitalistic, highly centralized food system“ (Shannon 260), which Nancy Fraser calls “cannibal capitalism.”
2) as a relational practice of care, entangled with affect, emotion, and desire (e.g. “food porn”), as well as notions of gender, family, and home (e.g. “comfort food”) that inspire resistant movements like feminist agroecology and community farming.

By focusing on a different food item in every session, by engaging with cultural studies approaches to fruit, meat, and grains, students will acquire a deeper understanding of the food systems and culinary power dynamics that surround them. Our class will deal with questions like: Where does my food come from? How is it produced? What does it mean to consume food ethically today? How do feminist approaches criticize patriarchal, profit-driven food systems in the name of “food justice”? How does the notion of the commons (see Re-Enchanting the World, Federici 2019), of communally taking care of land and communities, inform feminist food politics and futures?

After the successful completion of this course, based on class readings and interactive exercises, students will be able to critically examine the role of food (i.e. its representation, production, distribution and consumption) in contemporary Anglophone culture. Students will be able to situate the food products chosen for their research projects within the wider context of capitalist, patriarchal food systems. Students will learn how to identify and scrutinise cultural markers of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, body type, ability/health, and age – and their intersections - in food texts in a variety of different media and online contexts (e.g. ads, social media posts, etc.), discuss their content and form with technical vocabulary. In short, they will have learned how to appropriately use a toolbox of genre-specific methods of cultural analysis (e.g. semiotic analysis, mis-en-scène analysis for moving images, conjunctural analysis for socio-cultural contextualization). By introducing students to key texts in gender, media and cultural studies and providing them with a toolkit for cultural analysis, students will be able to discuss the cultural politics of food in an informed, intersectional way after they have completed this class. Most importantly, students will learn basics in academic writing in the age of AI in line with academic best practice, how to look for secondary literature, how to formulate research questions and find one’s analytic voice, how to structure their first research papers and bibliographies.