Starting from scratch : community, connection, and women's culinary culture
| dc.contributor.advisor | Perez, Domino Renee, 1967- | |
| dc.creator | Haupt, Melanie Kathryn 1972- | en |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-03-02T20:08:45Z | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2012-05 | en |
| dc.date.submitted | May 2012 | en |
| dc.date.updated | 2015-03-02T20:08:46Z | en |
| dc.description | text | en |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines how women’s food writing, from blogs to cookbooks to novels, demonstrate a desire to articulate themselves as people within communities rather than accept a dehumanized identity as a consumer or set of credit-card numbers. I argue that through an emphasis on connection with one another via a discourse of scratch cooking and locally sourced foods, women are able to push back against the hegemony of corporate food and industrial agriculture. Working from a case study model, each of my chapters examines the distinct ways in which women assert their personhood apart from the homogenizing influences of mainstream food culture. As a means of articulating this woman’s culinary culture, predicated on a foundation of scratch cooking and local ingredients and relationships, I examine the food blog Fed Up With Lunch and the author’s use of an anonymous persona to interrogate the federal school lunch program; feminist vegetarian and vegan cookbooks authored by collectives of women who rely on oppositional identities in order to push back against what they view as hegemony; how diasporic Indian women use scratch cooking as a means of self-expression within the context of migration; and the novel cookbook as an example of injecting a feminist discourse of food into a traditional fictional narrative. Read together, these discrete case studies make an argument for women’s power to effect meaningful change from within the circumscribed space of the kitchen. | en |
| dc.description.department | English | en |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/2152/28714 | en |
| dc.subject | Cookbooks | en |
| dc.subject | Women's studies | en |
| dc.subject | Feminism | en |
| dc.subject | Big food | en |
| dc.subject | Literature | en |
| dc.subject | Chick lit | en |
| dc.subject | Food blogs | en |
| dc.subject | Recipes | en |
| dc.title | Starting from scratch : community, connection, and women's culinary culture | en |
| dc.type | Thesis | en |
| thesis.degree.department | English | en |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English | en |
| thesis.degree.grantor | The University of Texas at Austin | en |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | en |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en |