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 Author's personal copy
Women's Studies International Forum 44 (2014) 205–208
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Women's Studies International Forum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Introduction to the special issue: Eating like a ‘man’: Food and
the performance and regulation of masculinities
The impetus for this special issue arose from a conversa-
tion about a 2012 consumer research study revealing that US
men associate meat-eating with masculinity (Rozin, Hormes,
Faith, & Wansink, 2012). The research findings were widely
publicised in the global press with headlines spruiking
the study's main message: ‘real men’ do not eat vegetables. We
were intrigued that although a considerable body of interdisci-
plinary feminist and gender research has critically engaged with
‘hegemonic masculinity’, Connell's (1995) germinal conceptual-
isation of culturally idealised performances of masculinity, and
its evolution,1 public interest in masculinities and food still
seemed to revolve around banal gender stereotypes about men's
food choices, particularly the deeply entrenched western cultural
view of meat as an ‘archetypal masculine food’ (Sobal, 2005,
135). Although the extant literature has provided evidence for
the relationship between gender and the preference for certain
types of foods (e.g. Lupton, 1996; Ruby & Heine, 2011), the media
attention devoted to this research study merely reasserted
and protected the hegemony of white male heterosexual
masculinities. As Halberstam (2002) has observed, the exclusive
attachment of masculinity to a subset of privileged (biologically
male) bodies encroaches on our ability to shift current
understandings of gender and power. This raised questions
for us in terms of how the conversation about food and its
intersections with masculinities and feminist theory, in particu-
lar, has grown and developed from its early foundations and how
we can continue to move the conversation forward.2 We decided
to edit a special issue that would uniquely contribute to the field
by providing a more nuanced answer to a seemingly simple
question: What does it mean to eat like a ‘man’?
Food and eating offer especially useful lenses through which
to explore questions about what it means to be or act like a ‘man’.
This is because food is never just ‘something to eat’, but is instead
a material and symbolic resource through which individual and
communal identities are constructed and affirmed (Bourdieu,
1984; Counihan, 1999; Inness, 2001; Mennell, 1996). Food's
embeddedness in questions of meaning, identity and the
everyday makes it one of the key ways in which both men and
women ‘do gender’ (West & Zimmerman, 1987, 127). Who
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.03.007
0277-5395/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
cooks, who eats, what types of foods are eaten, when and under
what circumstances, are closely linked to the institutions and
social structures through which gendered meaning, power and
identities are constructed and negotiated. It is this connectedness
to everyday structures of power and meaning that makes food, as
Levi-Strauss (1963, 89) observed in a slightly different context,
not only ‘good to eat’, but also ‘good to think’. That is, the food we
(do or do not) eat offers not just physical sustenance, but is also
embedded with ideas about who we are, how we live and how
our relationships and identities are structured.
But despite a long history of feminist scholarship examining
gendered patterns of consumption, gendered metaphors of
food, and numerous studies of food as a site for the
performance and regulation of gender, most major studies
have tended to focus on the experiences and practices of
women (e.g. Avakian & Haber, 2005; Bordo, 1993; Counihan,
1999; Lupton, 1996; Probyn, 1996). This has been for a range of
good reasons. Food's interwovenness into the routines of daily
life makes it useful for revealing the particularities of time,
place, and culture through which women's everyday lives can
be contextualised (Avakian & Haber, 2005, 7). Food's connec-
tion to family, to the gendered division of household labour,
and to both dietary restraint and ‘fatness’, has also made food a
focus of feminist scholars interested in understanding women's
experiences (Bordo, 1993; DeVault, 1994; Lupton, 1996;
Orbach, 1978). Nonetheless, the marginalisation of men and
masculinities in this area has also been surprising given the
positioning of hegemonic masculinity at the centre of gender
relations (Connell, 1995). Some attention has been paid to the
special prestige enjoyed by conventionally ‘masculine’ types of
foodwork such as hunting, barbecuing, and professional (paid)
cookery (e.g. Deutsch, 2005; Swenson, 2009), but most of the
major studies on food and gender have focused on the bulk of
the ordinary, domestic, ‘feminised’ food work that has
traditionally been done by women.
Despite the rapid growth of masculinity studies as a field of
interdisciplinary research in its own right with deep roots in
queer and feminist theories (e.g. Connell, 1995; Halberstam,
1998; Kimmel & Messner, 1995), masculinity remains an
 Author's personal copy
206 M. Nash, M. Phillipov / Women's Studies International Forum 44 (2014) 205–208
invisible presence in studies of gender, food and eating. Prior to
this special issue, the main contribution to the study of food and
masculinities was a 2005 special issue of Food and Foodways,
entitled ‘Mapping men onto the menu: Masculinities and food’,
which featured articles examining men and masculinities in a
range of contexts, including men's fitness magazines (Parasecoli,
2005), Japanese television cooking shows (Holden, 2005),
boyscouts (Mechling, 2005), urban firemen (Deutsch, 2005),
public health officials (Block, 2005), married men (Sobal, 2005),
17th century Caribbean buccaneers (Wilk & Hintlian, 2005), and
Norwegian tradesmen (Roos & Wandel, 2005). While some of
these studies considered the ways in which men's cookery can
complicate hegemonic forms of masculinity, most focused on
men's cookery in traditionally ‘masculine’ environments (Julier &
Lindenfeld, 2005, 9). Subsequent work has also tended to focus
on the ways in which food and eating can be incorporated within
recognisably hegemonic masculine identities (e.g. Buerkle, 2009;
Hollows, 2003; Swenson, 2009).
To date, we still have a limited understanding of the
complex ways in which men and masculinities are drawn
into the politics, preparation and consumption of food in
terms of discursive constructions or embodied experiences,
particularly those that exist outside of hegemonic norms.
Women's Studies International Forum is the ideal place to
explore this topic further given the journal's long and rich
history of examining gender and its production, perpetua-
tion, and transgression. As there have been no special issues
focussed on masculinities or food in this journal to date, we
feel privileged to be able to use this forum to showcase the
work of internationally recognised and emerging scholars in
the field.
This issue has been titled ‘Eating like a ‘man’: Food and the
performance and regulation of masculinities' to reflect our
desire to build a special issue that sees masculinity as a flexible
concept and that highlights research that takes methodologi-
cally distinctive approaches to men's (and women's) relation-
ships to masculinity, eating, and embodiment. The articles in
this special issue raise important questions on several levels:
conceptually (how can masculinities help to us understand and
define contemporary gendered relationships to food?), cultur-
ally (what discourses of masculinity are attached to food, and
how do men and women negotiate these in their daily lives?),
and politically (how can feminist perspectives on food and
masculinities assist us to understand, and contest, relationships
between food, eating, gender and social power?) Each of the
papers in this collection explores these questions in different
ways.
We open with a paper that takes an innovative approach to
what Claire Tanner, Alan Petersen, and Suzanne Fraser describe
as a ‘pervasive silence’ surrounding Australian fathers' involve-
ment in feeding their families and their relationship to
nutritional care work. In ‘Food, fat, and family: Thinking fathers
through mothers' words', the authors situate their qualitative
study in the context of childhood obesity discourses that attach
primary responsibility for the feeding and care of children to
mothers' bodies and maternal practices. Through an intertex-
tual reading of mothers' accounts of fathers' involvement in
food work, the authors provide new, critical insight into the
dynamics of power that produce and sustain gendered
responsibilities in heterosexual households. The paper reveals
the ways in which mothers' accounts contrasted their own
responsibility, altruism, and commitment to ‘healthy’ food
choices with disclosures about paternal authority, selfishness,
and complacency with respect to men's own and their
children's diets.
Following this is Shu Min Yuen's exploration of changing
discourses of contemporary Japanese masculinity in her
paper, ‘From men to ‘boys’—The cooking danshi in Japanese
mass media’. Yuen analyses the phenomenon of the bentō
danshi (‘boxed-lunch boy’), which was popularised in
Japanese mass media in the late 2000s. In Japan, bentō
preparation has been traditionally conceived as women's
work, with men's cookery largely confined to the profession-
al realm and to the more ‘masculine and muscular’ style of
otako cooking. However, Yuen argues, men's increasingly
prominent involvement and investment in preparing their
own workday lunchbox reflect both a desire on the part of
male workers to save money following the global financial
crisis in 2007–8 and a response to changing notions of
masculinity in early 21st century Japan. That these cooks are
represented as danshi (boys) rather than otako (men)
suggests that they are, at least in part, feminised by their
involvement in everyday domestic labour, but since the
danshi's cooking occurs in the home, but is not for the home,
the primacy of work in the construction of Japanese
masculine identity remains largely unchanged. Yet while
some aspects of hegemonic masculinity persist, Yuen sug-
gests, the prominence of representations of the bentō danshi
in a range of popular media texts nonetheless signals a
softening and expansion of gender expectations for men in
contemporary Japan.
Michelle K. Szabo examines the lived experiences of
Canadian male home cooks from various social backgrounds
in her article, ‘“I'm a real catch”: The blurring of alternative
and hegemonic masculinities in men's talk about home
cooking’. Drawing on multiple data sources including
in-depth interviews, food journals, and cooking observations,
Szabo unpacks the multiple ways in which men frame their
cooking responsibilities, ranging from seeing cooking as a
‘gender neutral’ practice (food preparation is a basic skill that
has little to do with gender) to viewing it as a reflection of
alternative/non-hegemonic masculinities (men value their
‘feminine’ qualities and do not see food preparation as strictly
‘women's work’). However, Szabo observes that men who
distanced themselves from ‘macho’ masculinities paradoxi-
cally reaffirmed them in other ways, namely in their
association of home cooking with romantic (heterosexual)
seduction and being a ‘good catch’ for women. Female
partners, she argues, have a distinctive role in reinforcing
an unequal division of labour when they take on less visible,
more onerous tasks in the home to compensate for a male
partner who is a ‘catch’ and cooks regularly.
In ‘Gluttonous crimes: Chew, comic books, and the ingestion
of masculinity’, Fabio Parasecoli explores how the comic book
series, Chew, uses food to reimagine the hegemonic masculinities
normalised in other popular cultural forms, including western
comics, detective fiction, and Japanese manga. The series'
protagonist, Tony Chu, is an Asian detective with ‘cibopathic’
powers that enable him to psychically and viscerally experience
everything that has happened to the food, flesh and objects
he ingests, making the consumption of everyday meals a source
of great anxiety and anguish. In constructing a male hero that
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M. Nash, M. Phillipov / Women's Studies International Forum 44 (2014) 205–208
sits outside of the comic and detective genres' powerful,
hard-bodied, white male stereotype, Chew offers depictions of
alternative or queer masculinities that represent the male/
masculine body as ambivalent, emotional, permeable and
vulnerable to intrusion. While in some respects, Parasecoli
argues, this marks Chew as a radical text that resists popular
culture's traditional expectations of gender and ethnicity, Chew's
commercial success also reflects a growing audience for texts
that are less dependent on the white, heterosexual, macho action
heroes of the past.
Dale C. Spencer's article, ‘“Eating clean” for a violent body:
Mixed martial arts, diet and masculinities’, offers an ethno-
graphic account of how Canadian male mixed martial arts
(MMA) fighters challenge and accommodate hegemonic mas-
culinity via their relationships to their bodies through food.
Whereas in feminist scholarship, food restriction has typically
been associated with female bodies and cultural pressures
associated with slenderness (e.g. Bordo, 1993), Spencer
approaches food restriction from the perspective of a fighter's
desire to produce a ‘clean’, strong and ‘violent’ body. In
chronicling his participants' efforts to ‘cut weight’, Spencer
challenges the more commonly held view of hegemonic
masculine performance in which men are positioned as
disconnected from food and appetite (traditionally associated
with femininity and women's bodies—see Lupton, 1996). In
contrast, interviews reveal fighters' deeply held negative
emotions surrounding weight loss and food restriction. In
other aspects of their lives, MMA fighters reinforce hegemonic
masculinity through their commitment to an ascetic lifestyle
and in their domestic arrangements where a traditional
gendered division of labour (in which female partners prepare
food) secures fighters' heterosexual identities.
In the final paper for the special issue, ‘A dietetics of virile
emergency’, Parama Roy considers the politics of meat-eating
in 19th century India via an examination of the writings,
speeches and correspondence of Swami Vivekananda, a
prominent Bengali thinker on diet and masculinity. In
contrast to contemporaries who were committed to vegetar-
ianism, Vivekananda adopted what Roy characterises as a
‘heroic carnivory’, an exhortation for men to eat meat,
despite moral concerns about the sacrifice of animals, in
order to build the strength and muscle needed for an active,
virile life. For Vivekananda, carnivory offered a resistance
both to colonial assumptions about the effeminacy and
degeneracy caused by the Bengali male's vegetarian diet,
and to the ‘tyrannising apparatus of caste-based prohibitions’
that imposed vegetarianism on men, robbing them of their
strength for manual labour, their capacity to protect their
families, and their duty to alleviate the hunger and famine
that was widespread in India at the time. While he did not
deny that vegetarianism was spiritually enabling, he believed
it was not ideal for all, and urged Bengali men to eat for those
who, for reasons of poverty or otherwise, could not, and
thereby assist in the project of social and cultural regenera-
tion. Vivekananda's linking of masculinity and muscularity
to the consumption of animal flesh conforms to broader
discourses about appropriately ‘masculine’ foods, but
Vivekananda's carnivory is one associated not only with
conventionally hegemonic forms of masculinity but also with
an ethics of care—a form of selfless eating that is as much
about building national sovereignty as individual capacity.
207
As the papers in this collection demonstrate, food and
food practices offer insight into the different ways in which
masculinities can be constructed, negotiated and contested in
both public representation and in the everyday lives of
individuals. They highlight food's value as a ‘methodological
tool’ (Miller & Deutsch, 2009, 7) for understanding a range of
local, global and cross-cultural practices. This is because food
is both universal and particular: we all must eat, but what we
eat, how we eat, and the meanings we ascribe to food and
eating are highly variable and culturally specific. The papers
in this special issue highlight that to talk about food is always
to talk about other things: not only gender, but also race,
ethnicity, class, sexuality, family and nation.
Food's capacity to access a range of human experiences
provides a valuable lens for gendered analysis, and the papers
in this issue allow us to re-examine the relationship between
food and masculinities in a range of cultural, national and
historical contexts. By drawing from a range of disciplinary
perspectives (sociology, anthropology, media and communica-
tions, food studies, history and English) and from a variety of
methodological approaches (ethnography, qualitative inter-
views, and discourse and textual analyses) this special issue
highlights the ways in which the study of food and masculinity
can both confirm and complicate existing feminist understand-
ings of gendered consumption. By bringing masculinities into
focus—by exploring the moments in which men are not merely
beneficiaries of women's foodwork or simply limited to the
barbecuing, meat-eating western stereotype—the feminist
study of food can shed important light on the changing
constructions of contemporary masculinities, the changing
nature of relationships between masculinities and femininities,
and the different ways in which men (and women) can be—and
eat—like a ‘man’.
The articles in this special issue also make clear that there
are questions still to be answered and that new frameworks
are necessary to organise and explain the complex roles that
men and masculinities play in foodwork and in embodied
experiences of eating. In the remaining paragraphs, we shall
highlight a few domains where we believe the relationship
between food and the performance and regulation of
masculinities has potential to further develop.
One domain can be found in the term ‘hegemonic
masculinity’ and the evolution of its meaning for men (and
women). A number of articles in this special issue have
problematised men's (and women's) relationships to hege-
monic masculinity or highlighted the ways in which notions
of hegemonic masculinity are frequently shifting, contingent,
and open to change, including those by Tanner et al., Yuen,
Szabo and Spencer. Revisions of hegemonic masculinity are
likely to continue to inform future work on men and
(women) and food and, as this special issue has shown,
addressing the complexity of masculine subjectivities is now
timely.
Current debates around queer identities and subject
positions would be another good place to further develop
this analysis. Articles like Parasecoli's present a useful
starting point for doing this. In what ways do the eating
practices of queer men both accommodate and destabilise
hegemonic masculinity? How can queer theory be more fully
encompassed in the study of food and eating? Also at stake in
future developments is how we can incorporate female
 Author's personal copy
208 M. Nash, M. Phillipov / Women's Studies International Forum 44 (2014) 205–208
masculinity into studies of food and eating. Challenging the
view that masculinity is solely the province of biological men
opens up new spaces for thinking through constructions of
gendered selfhood and sexuality—an idea that Halberstam
(1998) has pioneered but is yet to cross over into food
studies. What does it mean to talk about food and
masculinities without biological men?
Finally, as this special issue has been focussed primarily
on discussions of the industrialised world, invariably, there
are topics and locations that were not considered and that
clearly warrant debate and discussion. We are hopeful that
this special issue will motivate others to raise their own
questions and to consider other food-related issues and
gendered experiences using critical perspectives beyond
what has been discussed here. Without a doubt, food and
gender will remain a fertile topic in feminist and gender
studies for many years to come.
Endnotes
1
For a comprehensive overview of the field, see Connell, Hearn and
Kimmell (2005).
2 carpenters, drivers and engineers in contemporary Oslo. Food and
For a discussion of feminism's engagement with masculinity studies,
see Wiegman (2002).
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Meredith Nash
University of Tasmania, School of Social Sciences, Private Bag 22,
Hobart, Tasmania, 7001, Australia
Corresponding author.
Michelle Phillipov
University of Tasmania, School of Social Sciences, Private Bag 22,
Hobart, Tasmania, 7001, Australia