Donica O’Malley Publishes an Essay in Food and Foodways

Donica O’Malley, a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication who is completing her dissertation, has recently published an essay in a special issue of Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment, a Taylor and Francis scholarly journal.  O’Malley’s essay, titled “‘Even the Sex and the City Girls Eat Them!’: A Textual Analysis of DC Cupcakes and Cupcake Girls,” explores gendered performance in two reality cooking shows that showcase women as both entrepreneurs and chefs.  As post-feminist critique it argues that these shows, through their emphasis on the current cupcake phenomenon, reinforce stereotypes of gender and heteronormativity while reproducing negative equations between women and food, such as eating disorders.  In these shows women are largely portrayed as inept at business.  Thus, instead of being platforms for viewing women’s roles outside of the home, these programs conceive of women through gendered typecasting. 

The essay has been published online, but will appear in hard copy, in vol. 25.4 (2017).

For more on Food and Foodways see http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gfof20