Feminist Food Studies: A Critical Overview By Alice L. McLean Excerpted from “The Intersection of Gender and Food Studies” in The Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, Routledge, 2013 While feminist scholars have been examining women’s relationship with food since women’s studies first formed into a field of its own in the 1970s, feminist food studies has only begun to cohere into a self-referential field of study within the past twenty years. As it has done so, key sites of investigation have come firmly and repeatedly into relief. In keeping with women’s studies at large, feminist food studies has locked onto the domestic sphere as a conflicted site, one that simultaneously reproduces patriarchal values and, hence, the physical, intellectual, and ideological subordination of women and that serves as a space where women enjoy an amount of power and control far surpassing that which they exert over the public and political realms. Feminist food studies likewise focuses intently on the female body and the myriad ways in which its appetites are nourished or suppressed by cultural forces. Beginning in the 1980s, feminists from a range of fields including anthropology, history, folklore, sociology, literature, and medieval studies began to conceptualize appetite and food choice (or food refusal) as “an important voice in the identity of a woman” and to explore cookery and recipe writing as crucial forms of self-expression (Brumberg, 168 1988; Bynum; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; Ireland; Leonardi; Michie; Schofield). Toward that end, scholars not only claimed domestic and community cookbooks as rich sources for academic investigation but also established women’s culinary autobiography as a canonical form of literature. In the 1990s the work of such scholars began to coalesce within and alongside the burgeoning field of food studies, ultimately emerging into a recognizable subfield of its own, an