Eating Well in Women’s Creative Arts : Bodies, Politics, Ecologies

Injunctions to eat well have become ubiquitous, tightly binding eating practices to ethical and political imaginaries. Food can both nourish and harm, and choices about what and how much to eat are often perceived through normative discourses about health, bodies, and personal responsibility. Food choices are also politically charged, from the conservative resonances of gastronationalism to the neoliberal underpinnings of responsible consumerism and the radical aspirations of boycotts and food sovereignty. The Derridean echoes of “eating well” also point to complex questions about the consumption of animal and vegetal life in times of ecological crisis.

This seminar series invites researchers to explore and problematise these discourses through literature and visual and performing arts by women, non-binary and trans* people. Food cuts across binary oppositions like self and other, culture and nature, material and symbolic, making its representation in the arts a particularly fruitful, if still under-studied field. The myriad gendered inflections of eating practices – such as the surveillance of bodies, the feminisation of social reproduction, and the insights of intersectional (eco)feminism – highlight the distinctive importance of the perspectives of artists from gender and sexual minorities.
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