124263 KO Critical Media Analysis (2022W)

Food has played an important, yet often overlooked role in feminist movements. Inspired by the well-known feminist adage “We don’t want a bigger slice of pie, we want the whole bakery!”, in this class we will analyse feminist assemblages around food in its material culture sense, the discourses around it as well as its representations in different media. We will talk about feminists and their affective relations to food, its production, distribution and consumption, asking about power relations and the ways it influenced and continues to influence feminist activisms from the suffragettes and second wavers to digital activists like @thesweetfeminist, who engages in mediatised forms of radical baking (sharing photos of motto cakes with slogans like “abortion isn’t a bad word” or “let’s unlearn white feminism together” on Instagram).

After the successful completion of this course, students will be able to critically examine the representation of food (as well as its production, distribution and consumption) in Anglophone feminist movements from the 1900s until today, as 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, uncovering contradictory positionings with the help of broader sociopolitical context.

Our class will deal with questions like: Which foodstuffs, apart from sugar, feature most prominently in feminist activism? Why? What do they signify? What role do approaches like agroecology or notions like the commons (see Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Federici 2019), of communally taking care of land and communities, play in feminist movements, feminist food politics and lived foodways? What about the relationship between feminism and vegetarianism/veganism and a politics of no harm, reconnecting with earth in more-than-human relations? What are – and were – the implications of celebrities’ eating habits, as they are “our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work”, as Petersen (xiii) so nicely puts it?

Based on our class readings, students will learn how to notice and scrutinise cultural markers of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, body type, ability/health, and age in a variety of different media and online contexts. 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 role of food in feminist movements in an informed, intersectional way after they have completed this class.