When convenience is inconvenient: ‘healthy’ family foodways and the persistent intersectionalities of gender and class

This article draws on findings from an auto/biographical study about relationships with food to demonstrate how everyday foodways continue to be influenced by the intersectionalities of gender and class. Following Bourdieu [1984. Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge] how ‘foodies’ use food and foodways (the production, preparation, serving and eating of food) as a material and cultural display of capital (Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. 2010. Foodies, democracy and distinction in the gourmet kitchen. London: Routledge) or even ‘culinary capital’ (Naccarato, P., & LeBesco, K. 2012. Culinary capital. London: Berg) has been demonstrated. There has been less work exploring how mothers use ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, M. I. 1991. Feeding the family. London: University of Chicago Press) as a source of cultural capital for themselves. Three-quarters of the 75 respondents in my UK study were parents and all mothers with dependant children fed their family ‘healthy’ food as a means of performing a particular middle-class habitus. I therefore examine how mothers engaged in ‘healthy’ foodwork as a means of positioning themselves as ‘good’ mothers or ‘yummy mummies’ (Allen, K., & Osgood, J. 2009. Studies in the Maternal, 1). Indeed, despite decades of gender equality in the public sphere and neo-liberal assertions regarding individualism, ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, 1991) continues to be a highly gendered activity, with the added pressure of now having to provide ‘healthy’ food cooked from scratch. In these accounts, convenience foods and/or ‘unhealthy’ family foodways were vilified and viewed with disgust, with an adherence to ‘healthy’ family foodways used as a means of drawing boundaries within fields of ‘organised striving’ (Martin, J. 2011. On the explanation of social action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Savage, M., & Silva, E. B. 2013. Cultural Sociology, 7, 111–126). This article considers ‘healthy’ foodwork as a significant aspect of ‘good’ middle-class mothering, whereby ‘healthy’ family foodways become significant in the performance and display of ‘proper’ middle-class femininity that pathologises alternative family foodways and ‘other’ femininities. This serves to illuminate continuities within the intersectionalities of gender and class, with a commitment to ‘healthy’ family foodways central to ‘future oriented’ (middle classed) maternal identity.     

Gender trouble on the German soccer field: can the growth of women’s soccer challenge hegemonic masculinity?

Soccer in Germany represents a social sphere for the expression of masculinity and features significant ideological battles over gender roles. This paper discusses whether the growth of women’s soccer can challenge the prevailing hegemonic masculinity in an area that represents an important economic aspect of consumer culture and social identity. Does women’s soccer have the potential to subvert existing gender norms and challenge dominant understandings of gender? While women’s soccer has seen some important areas of growth in Germany, there are reasons to remain sceptical about the subversive potential of women’s soccer. This article argues that the unholy trinity of the sports-media-business alliance is the root cause for the limitations women’s soccer faces in challenging hegemonic masculinity. This sports-media-business alliance has served as the structural framework that has shaped societal discourses about women’s soccer in Germany. This paper discusses three of those discourses: the evolution of the macro-historical discourse over the societal role of women’s soccer in post-World War II Germany; the discourse comparing men’s and women’s soccer and asserting the superiority of men’s soccer; and the discourse on the role of femininity in women’s soccer and the sexualization of the players.     

“It Is So Swedish That You Have to Work”. Returning Swedish Migrant Women’s Negotiations of Gender Equality and Heterosexuality

Notions of gender equality are strongly linked to the Swedish self-image. This article explores returning Swedish migrant women’s negotiations of heterosexual gender equality ideals based on their experiences of being housewives to middle- and upper-class men with work contracts abroad. From fieldwork conducted within two networks for returning Swedes, the article provides an analysis of the ways in which the women talk about work, gender equality, and domestic workers.

The analysis of the women’s accounts of gender relations shows that different ways of doing femininity are central in their narratives. By using the concepts “emphasized femininity” and “gender-equal femininity” the article highlights the different forms of femininity that can be traced in the women’s narratives. Drawing from the empirical examples, it is shown that the women are troubled by Swedish gender equality ideals and express a feeling of not “fitting in” after returning to Sweden. I suggest that the women’s articulations of not “fitting in” to (imagined) gender-equal Sweden tend to downplay the fact that they still have advantages that assist with “fitting in” from social positions such as class, whiteness, and (hetero)sexuality: positions which may create space for negotiating social norms in Sweden.     

Ellie’s first time: constructing self-cutting in a teen drama

Self-cutting attracted a growing interest in society during the 1990s and the early 2000s, and this was reflected in a similar increase in media during this period. In this article, the example of Ellie Nash’s self-cutting in the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation is used to investigate articulations of the phenomenon during this period. The starting point is that self-cutting, a behaviour that previously had mostly been connected to masculinity, had to be rearticulated to fit into already established constitutions of femininity. If this was not possible, self-cutting could only be understood as a radical and aggressive behaviour easily connected to movements such as Riot Grrrls that emerged during the same period. With the help of formal and narrative methods, and discourse theory, the scene that includes Ellie’s first cut is analysed. The results of the analysis show that themes such as success, control, family and alternative culture framed self-cutting as being executed by girls who are fragile and vulnerable but also sensible. Even if the things that led up to Ellie’s self-cutting were presented as structural problems, the solution for her was individual conversational therapy, which fitted with the hegemonic neoliberal values that dominated this period.     

Love Scenes and Garden Plots: Form and Femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Abstract

This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden That I Love (1894). The Garden That I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately, von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat.