Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture

by Emily J. H. Contois

Overview

The phrase "dude food" likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what's on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois's provocative book begins with the dude himself—a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn't meet traditional standards of economic and social success or manly self-control. In the Great Recession's aftermath, dude masculinity collided with food producers and marketers desperate to find new customers. The result was a wave of new diet sodas and yogurts marketed with dude-friendly stereotypes, a transformation of food media, and weight loss programs just for guys.

In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469660752
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/02/2020
Series:	Studies in United States Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Emily J. H. Contois is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Contois has demonstrated that there is much fertile ground for considering how, why, and where the trope of 'the dude' functions and the arguments remain engaging throughout the entirety of Diners, Dudes, and Diets. She makes a significant contribution to food studies, gender studies, and cultural studies by deftly weaving an analysis of gendered power dynamics with observations of race, class, sexuality, age, and disability at important consumer culture sites.--Kathleen LeBesco, coeditor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture



Contois's focus on 'dude masculinity' is original and will make an important contribution to the fields of food studies and gender studies insofar as it complicates our understanding of the gendering of food--its production, distribution, and consumption--food media, and cultural narratives around the idealized male and female body and dieting.--Peter Naccarato, coeditor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating work of cultural studies that makes evident the continued power and threat of explicitly gendered food production and consumption in the 21st century. Recommended broadly for students and scholars of fields related to gender, culture, and consumption.--Library Journal



In an important new book, Emily J.H. Contois expands our understanding of food and masculinities in 21st-century North America. In fresh and lively close reading of food media and advertising . . . Contois very convincingly demonstrates . . . if we do not stop to ask ourselves why the diet soda 'for men' is in a grey can and claiming not to be a diet soda, she warns, we are going to miss a lot of what passes for common sense around gender identity."—International Journal of Food Design



The 'dude' and the 'weight loss closet' provide two unique analytical tools to explore the gendered nature of food culture as well as trends toward a more inclusive food media. Contois offers a lens onto the recent past as well as the current food trends that fill our television screens, making it possible to be more critical of the way we approach food and the underlying assumptions of how gender is acted out through food media."—Men & Masculinities



A sharp-as-hell dissection of how cultural notions of masculinity and femininity are weaponized in the kitchen, the grocery store, the dinner table, and everywhere else. Fascinating, mordant, enraging, illuminating."— Helen Rosner's "Great Food-ish Nonfiction 2020"



"As a survey of a generation worth of food marketing and messaging, the book offers a useful overview of how corporations package food, identity, and gender norms for consumption. Perhaps even more valuable, and hopeful, is the closing section, 'Dude, What Happened?' which explores how the election of Donald Trump, the MeToo movement, and the pandemic have caused many of the companies with the most egregiously gendered approaches to food to seek more neutral, inclusive territory."—Civil Eats



Focusing on the concept of dude foods, the book follows the evolution of food marketing for men. In doing so, Contois shows how industries used masculine stereotypes to sell diet and weight loss products to a new demographic. She argues that this has influenced both the way consumers think about food and their own identities."—Food Tank



Positioned at the intersection of media studies, gender studies/masculinity studies, and marketing and advertising, this book offers insight into the ways in which food media promises that the way to a cisgender, heterosexual man's heart—and his sense of masculinity—is through his stomach." —Journal of Consumer Culture

From the Publisher

10/16/2020

American masculinity has long struggled with its relationship to consumer culture, and perhaps no area so recently as the physical consumption of food. This first book by Contois (media studies, Univ. of Tulsa) dives into the complex gender and power dynamics of food culture leading up to, and in the wake of, the Great Recession of 2007–09. Contois specifically highlights how food, media, and marketing companies were able to engage male consumers during a specific moment of economic and gender crisis by leveraging the 21st-century stereotype of the immature, physically ambivalent yet still fundamentally privileged "dude" personality. From the blatantly gendered marketing of men's "dude food" cookbooks to the rise of dude-friendly Food Network personalities like Guy Fieri, Contois argues convincingly how consumer industries have used fear of gender contamination to manipulate food culture and shape larger gender norms. Yet, the incredible power of food is also a possible path forward for Contois, who sees in it the potential to reveal the complex dynamics of consumption, by making them literally visible on our own bodies. VERDICT A fascinating work of cultural studies that makes evident the continued power and threat of explicitly gendered food production and consumption in the 21st century. Recommended broadly for students and scholars of fields related to gender, culture, and consumption.—Robin Chin Roemer, Univ. of Washington Lib., Seattle

Library Journal