Feminist Food Rhetoric: Women's Rhetorical Strategies Across Instagram, Food Podcasts, and Community Cookbooks

Abstract

Demonstrating that food and cooking instructions are important everyday artifacts worthy of rhetorical criticism, Feminist Food Rhetoric advances rhetoric and writing studies scholarship on food by moving beyond the dominant focus on studying cookbooks. Analyzing multiple media used to teach cooking skills, I define cooking texts as any form of media (e.g., social media platforms, radio shows and podcasts, and cookbooks) used to circulate cooking knowledge. I argue that people use food to create collaborative community-oriented spaces that utilize the active creation and sharing of content alongside learning to rhetorically construct identities while uncovering and recovering voices and epistemologies often ignored or excluded. Drawing on feminist rhetoric, food studies, and media studies, I use rhetorical criticism, interviews, and qualitative coding to identify how women use cooking texts across time and locations. I apply these methods to a variety of cooking texts, studying how a hashtag on Instagram led women to find a community at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rhetorical strategies of a food radio host that works to recover foodways while teaching listeners how to cook, and the gendered and classed ideologies subverted, reinscribed, circulated, and memorialized in community cookbooks. Investigating elements of remediation and participatory culture, I find that cooking texts are a form of constitutive rhetoric that create a communal identity through opportunities for collaborative co-authorship, build community despite geographical distance, are used to respond to cultural upheaval and become a form of social activism that memorializes places, cultures, people, and events.