Food and Gender

Identity and Power

Carole M. Counihan, Steven L. Kaplan, Carole M. Counihan, Steven L. Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135294502
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume examines, among other things, the significance of food-centered activities to gender relations and the construction of gendered identities across cultures. It considers how each gender's relationship to food may facilitate mutual respect or produce gender hierarchy. This relationship is considered through two central questions: How does control of food production, distribution, and consumption contribute to men's and women's power and social position? and How does food symbolically connote maleness and femaleness and establish the social value of men and women? Other issues discussed include men's and women's attitudes towards their bodies and the legitimacy of their appetites.

“FOOD AND GENDER IDENTITY AND POWER”

Carole M.Counihan

INTRODUCTION

The value of studying food as a path to understanding culture and history has by now been well established. The pioneering work of anthropologist Audrey Richards (1932, 1939) in the early part of this century launched the formal acknowledgment of foodways as an effective prism through which to illuminate human life. Since then, a growing number of studies in the social sciences and humanities have contributed depth and breadth to the study of food and culture. A decade of publishing the journal Food andFoodways has firmly established the myriad interdisciplinary contributions made by the study of human alimentation.

Food and Gender: Identity and Power marks the first in a series of planned collections anthologizing articles originally published in Foodand Foodways. We chose the focus of our first volume because of the clear significance of food-centered activities and meanings to the constitution of gender relations and identities across cultures. Gender matters in food centered activities as it does in “structuring human societies, their histories, ideologies, economic systems and political structures” (Moore 1988:6). We highlight two central questions about food and gender in this volume: (1) How does control of food production, distribution and consumption contribute to men's and women's power and social position? (2) How does food symbolically connote maleness and femaleness and establish the social value of men and women?

FOOD, POWER, AND GENDER

We focus on power and foodways in two principal ways. First, there is the power that society allocates or denies to men and women through their access to and control of one essential resource: food. Men's and women's ability to produce, provide, distribute and consume food is a key measure of their power. This ability varies according to their culture, their class, and their family organization, and the overall economic structure of their society.

The second meaning of power we examine is personal power: whether men's and women's relationship to food and its meanings contributes to a valued sense of self. Men's and women's attitudes about their bodies, the legitimacy of their appetites, and the importance of their food work reveal whether their self-concept is validating or denigrating. We are concerned with how their relationship to food may facilitate gender complementarity and mutual respect or produce gender hierarchy.

FOOD AND POWER:
PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION AND CONSUMPTION

There are many important studies that link the control of food to political and economic power. In his comprehensive historical study Famine, Arnold (1988:3) claims that “food was, and continues to be, power in a most basic, tangible and inescapable form.” Lappé and Collins (1986) argue that hunger is the clearest sign of powerlessness, for hunger means one lacks the control to satisfy one's most basic subsistence need. Many authors point out that women very often suffer hunger and famine more severely than men because of their socio-economic and political subordination in many countries of the world (e.g. Arnold 1988; Lappé and Collins 1986; Leghorn and Roodkowsky 1977; Vaughn 1987).

Class, caste, race and gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, through differential control over and access to food (Goody 1982). Different consumption patterns are one of the ways the rich distinguish themselves from the poor and men from women (Bennett 1943; Fitchen 1988; Mintz 1985; Weismantel 1988). Many studies demonstrate that men eat first, best, and most. According to Adams (1990:189), “The message of male dominance is conveyed through meat eating—both in its symbolism and in its reality.” In Sweetness and Power, Mintz (1985) describes at length how control of sugar production and consumption contributed to class hierarchy and colonial dominance but neglects consideration of gender. However, a telling photograph conveys the unstated message of assumed male control. The caption reads “Etienne Tholoniat, a great French sugar baker, puts the finishing touches on a life-size chocolate nude with spun-sugar hair. She is lying on a bed of six hundred sugar roses” (Mintz 1985:184). Here the active, powerful male literally defines the female as a supine, passive, object of consumption—a food symbol for cultural practice mirroring male-female power relations.

In this volume, both Kahn and Pollock demonstrate how gender is constituted through men's and women's roles in the production, distribution and symbolism of food. Kahn shows that for the Wamirans of Papua New Guinea, men and women. establish their complementarity and balance through their roles in the production of taro, the most important food both symbolically and nutritionally. Yet taro is the quintessentially masculine food; it “is alone capable of symbolically communicating male status and virility.” Taro plants are men's “children,” and they metaphorically enable men to balance women's creation of human children. Taro stands for masculinity and is the most important food distributed at the political feasts where men jockey for power in the village. Yet women's essential contributions to taro production reinforce their needed role in Wamiran economy and culture, just as men's recognized role in reproducing children reinforces their importance. By making a symbolic parallel between taro and children, and involving men and women in the production of both, Wamirans equalize male and female powers (see also Kahn 1986).

In this volume, Pollock shows that among the Culina of the western Amazon, men and women similarly establish their distinctive identities as well as their social and economic interdependence through the production and distribution of food. A clear sexual division of labor allocates most of the gardening to women and the hunting to men. The sexes are identified with the different products of their labor: women with vegetables and men with meat. Marriage involves the reciprocal exchange of “food for food: meat for cultivated garden products.” In this egalitarian culture, male and female differential control over diverse aspects of the food system is explicitly balanced in belief and practice.

In many cultures, the exchange of food is a most profound way of making social connection. Mauss (1967) has shown the pervasive cultural power of the gift which keeps individuals constantly indebted to each other and continuously engaged in positive interaction through giving. Food is an extremely important component of reciprocal exchanges, more so than any other object or substance. As Sahlins (1972: 215) says: “By comparison with other stuff, food is more readily, or more necessarily shared.”

Because of this, food is often a medium of exchange, connection, and distinction between men and women, as noted for the Culina above. However, exchanges must be reciprocal to maintain equality. McIntosh and Zey in this volume point out the lack of reciprocity in men's and women's food exchanges in the United States. They explore Lewin's (1943) concept of women as “gatekeepers” of food into the home, which implies that women hold much power over food distribution. They suggest that while women may have responsibility over provisioning food, “responsibility is not equivalent of control” which may in fact reside with men. Their work contributes to that of DeVault (1990) and Charles and Kerr (1989) who also recognize women's widespread responsibility for food provisioning in both the United States and England. These authors see women's food provisioning as a mixed bag, one that is a potential source of influence on husbands and children through the ability to give them a valued substance—food—but one that also is linked with female subordination through women's need to serve, satisfy, and defer to others, particularly husbands or boyfriends.

In U.S. society, female college students report that they feel ashamed to eat in front of men with whom they have a romantic involvement, so they may offer food but not eat it (Counihan 1992). They also report that men denigrate and gain power over them by saying they eat too much or are too fat (Millman 1980; Counihan 1992). In gender stratified cultures as diverse as England (Charles and Kerr 1988), Italy (Counihan 1988), Mexico (edlander 1979), and Andean Ecuador (Weismantel 1988), men exert control over women by claiming the authority to judge the meal cooked by them, but women do not usually have a similar power because men rarely cook, and when they do so claim commendation simply for taking on this task (he power relations around food mirror the power of the sexes in general. Whereas men's economic status is demonstrated by their control of food purchasing (Charles and Kerr 1988), women wield considerable power in all cultures by their control of meal planning and cooking. Behar (1989) discusses how women in 18th century Mexico fed ensorseled food to husbands to tame their abusive behavior. Adams (1990) argues that patriarchal power in Western society is embodied in the practice of eating meat which, she argues, involves the linked objectification and subordination of animals and women. But women can rebel through vegetarianism which, from this perspective, is a political statement: a rejection of patriarchal power and values, an expression of feminism, and a claiming of female power over self and nature. Among the Zumbaguan Indians of Andean Ecuador (Weismantel 1988:28–29), the senior female is in charge of preparing and serving meals. This gives her the ability to determine hierarchies by the order in which she serves people and the contents of the plate she gives them (Weismantel 1988:182). A woman can even punish her errant husband when he finally returns from a drinking spree by serving him massive quantities of rich food which the husband, by force of etiquette, is obliged to eat with extremely unpleasant physical results.

GENDER, FOOD, AND THE SUPERNATURAL

In many cultures, food is instrumental in maintaining good relations between humans and their deities. Ancient Greeks, and many other peoples, use food sacrifices as a means of propitiating their gods (Détienne and Vernant 1989; Mauss 1967). In patriarchal cultures, men claim exclusive mediating powers with the supernatural; in more egalitarian cultures, women's control over food carries over into an essential mediating role in rituals supplicating gods and spirits. In Catholic ritual, for example, only male priests can perform the ritual of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ. Interestingly, Medieval holy women sometimes subverted the totality of male control by refusing to eat anything but the consecrated host, challenging the legitimacy of some priests by vomiting the host and thus claiming it unconsecrated, and by exuding miraculous foods from their own bodies (Bell 1985; Bynum 1986).

In this volume, both March and Van Esterik show how women use food gifts in religious rituals to coerce supernatural beings to act favorably towards humans. March discusses Sherpa and Tamang Buddhists who live in the highlands of Nepal. Although distinctive peoples, they share many religious beliefs and rituals. Among both populations, hospitality, especially in the form of commensality, is central to maintaining relations between humans and gods (see also Ortner 1978). March points out that “women and symbols of femaleness are crucial at all levels of exchange” due to their central role in food, especially beer, production and their symbolic association “with the many blessings—of health, strength, fertility, prosperity, plenitude, and general increase—that fermented and distilled offerings are thought to secure.” The essentially female cast of offerings to the gods underlines the ambiguous nature of all offerings: that they are simultaneously altruistic and selfish, simultaneously a gift and an effort to secure a return.

Van Esterik in this volume also underlines the significance of women's role in feeding and food gifts. Because women prepare and control food, they are agents for ritual and religious knowledge and food offerings. They underscore the “‘connectedness’ of the living and the dead” by preparing food for the ancestors and they give food to the Buddhist monks and deities central to their religious expression. The male/meat, female/vegetable association that obtains among groups as diverse as Amazon Indians (Pollock this volume, Siskind 1973) and Western urbanites (Adams 1990) is also symbolically significant. Women feel compelled to offer meat to monks because it is a highly valued food requiring economic sacrifice, but meat is also tainted because of the Buddhist prohibition on killing. “The contradiction between feminine generous giving of food to the monks and masculine ascetic rejection of such sensuous pleasures as eating lies at the heart of Buddhist belief and practice.” Women constantly negotiate the contradiction by offering food to several monks; they know that some will reject meat to affirm their holiness and others will accept it to validate the women's sacrifice.

Just as giving food creates connection, refusing it severs connection. Both giving and refusing can be a means of attaining power. Kahn illustrates how Wamiran village chiefs demonstrate their power both by distributing food at feasts and by resisting its consumption through wielding powerful hunger suppression magic on themselves. The ability...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Food in History and Culture
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction-Food and Gender: Identity and Power
• 2 Food and Sexual Identity Among the Culina
• 3 "Men Are Taro" (They Cannot Be Rice): Political Aspects of Food Choices in Wamira, Papua New Guinea
• 4 Hospitality, Women, and the Efficacy of Beer
• 5 Feeding Their Faith: Recipe Knowledge Among Thai Buddhist Women
• 6 An Anthropological View of Western Women's Prodigious Fasting
• 7 Women as Gatekeepers
• 8 What Does It Mean To Be Fat, Thin, and Female in the United States?
• About the Contributors
• Index