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Making her cake and eating it too: the productive feminist politics of food blogs

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Making her cake and eating it too: the productive feminist politics of food blogs

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Content MAKING HER CAKE AND EATING IT TOO:

THE PRODUCTIVE FEMINIST POLITICS OF FOOD BLOGS

by

Tisha Dejmanee

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Tisha Dejmanee

2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been incredibly fortunate to have received such stellar mentorship during my time at the
University of Southern California. I will always be indebted to my advisor, Sarah Banet-Weiser,
for being the first to believe in my work and for her unwavering faith in me throughout the
dissertation writing process. Her wisdom and humour are what I will miss most about graduate
school. My dissertation committee members – Alison Trope, Aniko Imre and Tara McPherson –
are academics whose work I respect so much and I am thankful to have had their guidance in
research and in life over these past few years. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the
input of Henry Jenkins and Sharon Hays, who offered critical insights into this project in its most
nebulous, formative stage. Finally, I would like to thank Diane Negra for her generous
mentorship over the past few years.

Cynthia Wang, Roxanne Samer, Sam Close, and Raffi Sarkissian have been dear friends as we
have muddled through this dissertation writing path together, providing intellectual support and
deeply valued friendship. Many thanks also to the humbling number of friends in Los Angeles
and around the world who have kept me sane and whole.

My family have made so many sacrifices for the sake of my education. My mum and dad have
always supported me through my choices and loved me through my mistakes. Nina and Art have
made shaped me in the way that only siblings can, and their long-distance companionship and
occasional visits have been gifts during my time in Los Angeles.

Finally, special thanks go to my partner Flemming, who has nourished me in every way possible.
I have become a better researcher due to his analytical insights, and a better person due to his
unconditional love.

3
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
5

DEFINING
FEMININITY
7

FEMININITY
RENDERED
DIGITAL
9

METHODS
11

THE
FOOD
BLOGOSPHERE
AS
DIGITAL
ARCHIVE
13

CHAPTER
OUTLINE
15

THE
RISE
OF
FOOD
BLOGS:
DOCUMENTING
AN
EVERYDAY,
PLEASURE-‐BASED
RESISTANCE
19

PRODUCING
GIRLIE
FEMININITY
19

CONTEMPORARY
FEMINISMS:
POST,
POP
AND
THIRD
WAVE
22

PURSUING
FEMINIST
PLEASURES
IN
GIRLIE
AND
DIY
CULTURE
29

FEMINISM
AND
FOOD
36

WHAT
IS
A
FOOD
BLOG?
40

CONCLUSION
46

POSTHUMAN
DOMESTICITY:
TECHNOLOGY,
MATERIALITY
AND
THE
FEMALE
BODY
49

POSTHUMANIST
TIME
AND
FEMINIST
HISTORIES
50

COOKING
LITERATURE:
READING
FOOD
AND
FEMININITIES
54

JULIA
CHILD
AND
FOOD
TELEVISION
60

CONVENIENCE
FOODS
66

DIGITAL
FOOD
PORN
AND
THE
POSTFEMINIST
BODY
70

A
BRIEF
HISTORY
OF
FOOD
PORN
ACROSS
MEDIA
71

BODIES
ON
AND
BEHIND
THE
SCREEN
75

LEAKY
BODIES
78

DEPTH
AND
THE
BODY
81

FASHIONING
THE
FOOD
BODY
86

CONCLUSION:
EXCLUSIONS
OF
TECHNOLOGICAL
FORM
89

GIRLIE
ENTREPRENEURIALISM:
FEMININITY
AS
DIGITAL
LABOUR
97

WORK-‐LIFE
BALANCE
AND
THE
CRISIS
OF
CONTEMPORARY
FEMINISM
99

DIGITAL
PURVEYORS
OF
THE
ENTREPRENEURIAL
DREAM
102

STRATEGIC
FEMININITY
AS
BUSINESS
PLAN
106

GIRLIE
ENTREPRENEURIALISM
ON
THE
PIONEER
WOMAN,
SMITTEN
KITCHEN
AND
BAKERELLA
111

POSTFEMINISM
AND
THE
DIGITAL
LABOUR
OF
SELF-‐BRANDING
114

WHAT’S
ON
THE
MENU?
TEMPORALITY,
ORGANISATIONAL
SYSTEMS
AND
ADDED
VALUE
120

TAGS
AND
HYPERLINKS:
SPACES
OF
RESISTANCE
126

CASHING
IN
ON
INTIMACY:
CORPORATE
UNDERWRITERS
OF
THE
PERSONAL
BRAND
131

EMPOWERING
FOR
WHOM?
THE
LIMITATIONS
OF
GIRLIE
ENTREPRENEURIALISM
139

TAKING
RISKS
AND
MAKING
GOOD
CHOICES
139

DIGITAL
ROLE
PLAY
IN
AN
AGE
OF
ANCHORED
IDENTITY
141

CONCLUSION:
INDIVIDUALISM
AS
POLITICS
144

MAMAS
ON
A
BUDGET:
CLASS
AND
CONSPICUOUS
NON-‐CONSUMPTION
148

MOTHERHOOD
IN
POSTFEMINIST
TIMES
149

INTENSIVE
MOTHERING
AND
NEW
MOMISM
150

INTRODUCING
THE
CRUNCHY
MAMA
153

4
100
DAYS
OF
REAL
FOOD
ON
A
BUDGET:
ACCOUNTING
FOR
THE
INVISIBLE
PRIVILEGE
OF
CLASS
158

ALTERNATIVE
FOOD
AND
MIDDLE
CLASS
MORALITY
158

BEING
CLASS(LESS)
AND
PERFORMATIVE
MORAL
ACCOUNTING
164

CLASS
AND
THE
CONTRADICTIONS
OF
FORM
AND
CONTENT
175

A
GIRL
CALLED
JACK:
AUSTERITY
AND
THE
WORKING
CLASS
CHALLENGE
182

CLASSING
‘GOOD’
MOTHERHOOD
187

AUSTERITY
CELEBRITY
AND
THE
MARKETING
POLITICAL
ACTIVISM
191

CONCLUSION
195

RECIPES
FOR
COMMUNITY:
HEALTHISM
AND
THE
VIRTUAL
VEGAN
POTLUCK
198

NEOLIBERAL
INDIVIDUAL
RESPONSIBILITY
200

HEALTHISM
AND
ALTERNATIVE
FOOD
203

PRIVILEGED
INDIVIDUALISM
AND
THE
QUANTIFICATION
OF
SELF
MOVEMENT
205

THE
TECHNOLOGICAL
LIMITS
OF
COMPREHENSION
211

FEMINISED
QUANTIFICATION
OF
SELF
215

THE
VIRTUAL
VEGAN
POTLUCK
217

GENDERED
BURDENS
OF
INFORMATION
IN
THE
DIGITAL
AGE
222

HEALTHISM
AND
OPINION
LEADERS
227

THE
DIGITAL
STRUCTURE
OF
THE
VVP
COMMUNITY
231

KNOWLEDGE
EXCHANGE
AND
THE
DIGITAL
GIFT
ECONOMY
237

WOMEN’S
ONLINE
FOOD
COMMUNITIES
242

CONCLUSION
245

CONCLUSION:
EVERYDAY
POLITICS
IN
THE
DIGITAL
AGE
248

LIST
OF
IMAGES
253

LIST
OF
REFERENCES
255

5
Introduction

In September 2013, a food blog by the name of 300 Sandwiches went viral. Its name refers to an
inside joke between author Stephanie Smith and her boyfriend Eric, who voices his approval of
her turkey-swiss sandwich with the comment: “You’re, like, 300 sandwiches away from an
engagement ring” (Smith, 2012). Smith accepts this joke as a challenge to cook her way to her
desired proposal and document the process through a food blog, explaining: “Sandwiches meant
more to him than nice gifts, regular sex or any other incentive I could use to get him closer to
putting a ring on it…It also seemed like a lofty enough goal, out of easy reach, to set without
complete confidence that I would accomplish it. And so, I got cooking” (Smith, 2012).
Although Smith evidences an awareness of feminism, her retort to disapproving friends
and readers is that her sandwich making is empowering: “When I reach my 300
th
sandwich, I’ll
have an arsenal of meals I can use for dinner, parties, picnics, breakfast and desserts…I’ll need
to know how to cook a variety of meals for my kids and house guests anyway” (2012). Rather
than seeing her food labour as a concession to her oppressed status in this relationship, she
furnishes evidence of Eric’s superior cooking ability – “On our second date, he cooked me
dinner – tuna tartare and fresh scallops on a tomato compote” (Smith, 2013) – and his gratitude:
“No matter what’s on the menu, Eric smiles and says thank you. He’s just happy I cook for him
at all” (2013). Smith therefore presents her sandwich challenge as a personal choice that is
pleasurable and useful, an activity that allows her to restore gender equality within her modern
partnership.
This unabashedly regressive approach to feminised food labour marks a departure from
the edgy and ironic use of food in pre-postfeminist media of the late 1980s/early 1990s which
featured iconic moments such as Meg Ryan’s diner orgasm in When Harry Met Sally (Reiner &

6
Scheinman, 1989), the sensually charged food fight between Idgie and Ruth in Fried Green
Tomatoes (Avnet, Lear & Kerner, 1991), and the vengeful deployment of key lime pie against a
cheating husband by Meryl Streep in Heartburn (Nichols & Greenhut, 1986). Instead,
contemporary culture has restored food’s traditional symbolism as a gesture of love offered by
women to men (even more meaningful now that it is not strictly obligatory) and as a form of
creative self-actualisation from which modern women are able to derive pleasure. Women are
encouraged to see the personal and professional potential of cooking – it is a transaction from
which Smith earns the marriage proposal she desires while also materially profiting through a
cookbook deal and accompanying media ventures. In this manner, the power that has long been
socially ascribed to women through food production is cloaked and rendered innocuous through
the performance of conservative, saccharine femininity.
Smith’s sandwich project is just one example of the traditional femininity that has
recently been revived as part of a larger social phenomenon that Emily Matchar calls New
Domesticity, where “smart, educated, progressive-minded people, people who in other eras
would have been marching for abortion rights or against apartheid are now…food blogging,
lovingly photographing and describing their gluten-free muffins or home-grown tomato salads to
an appreciative community of other (mostly female) food bloggers and readers” (2013, p. 98). In
this project, I explore the economic value and political potential of this stylised femininity as it is
performed on food blogs. I believe that the extensive communities that gather around feminised
digital spaces such as food blogs are understudied, and that their social influence is largely and
wrongly overlooked in discussions of digital politics. In this way, food blogs fit the trajectory set
by feminist cultural studies scholars who argued for the feminist political significance of
devalued feminised texts such as romance novels (Modleski, 1982; Radway, 1985), soap operas

7
(Modleski, 1982; Ang, 1984) and women’s magazines (McRobbie, 1991). I continue this work
with attention to the emergent qualities of food blogs as digital texts produced within the
postfeminist media context.
The current cultural context is best described as one of political ambivalence (Banet-
Weiser, 2012) and flux. In the context of feminism, debates about what constitutes ‘legitimate’
politics have been convoluted through the influences of postfeminism, consumer culture and
digital technologies. On the one hand, the digital sphere has given rise to the popular
performance of exaggerated, traditional femininity while, on the other hand, digital media have
contributed to the unprecedented popularisation of feminism as an identity and ideology. It is
within these discursive chasms – between private and public, feminism and femininity, body and
technology, materiality and virtuality – that I situate my enquiry.

Defining Femininity
Femininity is understood as a social construction, separate from female sex but used to
make binary gender (and binary sex) coherent. As Judith Lorber writes, “bodies differ in many
ways physiologically, but they are completely transformed by social practices to fit into the
salient categories of a society, the most pervasive of which are ‘female’ and ‘male’” (1993, p.
569). Michele White describes femininity as “produced through personal and cultural messages
about what clothing, figure, comportment, life course, and values are expected of women” (2015,
p. 5). Similarly, Sandra Bartky describes femininity as ‘an artifice’ that is produced through a
spectrum of disciplinary practices including “those that aim to produce a body of a certain size
and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures,

8
postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an
ornamented surface” (1998, p. 27).
Yet, even despite an awareness of the social constructionism of gender, it remains
difficult to escape its hold. White writes that, “[w]hether embraced or resented, most women
recognize that there are cultural expectations for feminine norms and are influenced by these
standards” (2015, pp. 5-6). This same conclusion can be drawn from Judith Butler’s work on
performativity, where gender is considered to be malleable – “a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame” (2007, p. 45) – but nevertheless the opportunities for potentially
subverting this performance are limited. Furthermore, femininity is always constructed in an
inverse, binary relationship to masculinity where it is operates as the unmarked and inferior
category. For these reasons, femininity has historically been positioned antithetically to feminism
as a political movement, as “a cultural category that forms and controls women” (White, 2015, p.
5) and a vestige of oppressive gender socialisation that feminists have rallied against.
However, young women and feminists have fixated on experimenting with an
exaggerated “normative femininity…ordinarily associated with young, white, middle-class, and
heterosexual women” (White, 2015, p. 6). This ‘girlie’ culture has been variously interpreted as
supporting or betraying feminist interests. For instance, Angela McRobbie considers that
postfeminist subjects “want to be girlish and enjoy all sorts of traditional feminine pleasures
without apology” (2009, p. 21) as a melancholic response to the second-wave, liberal feminist
legacy. Alternatively, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards posit femininity as a form of
rebellion that is central to third wave feminist power, arguing “you don’t have to make the
feminine powerful by making it masculine or ‘natural’; it is a feminist statement to proudly claim
things that are feminine” (2010, p. 135). These oppositional understandings of femininity reflect

9
the fluidity and ambivalence inherent to contemporary politics, and the generational divide that
haunts contemporary feminisms.
In this dissertation I explore the resurgence of a stylised ‘girlie’ femininity that is
circulated through digital media and manifests primarily through the celebration of hegemonic
feminine interests including heteronormative romantic relationships and the nuclear family, the
glamorisation of traditional feminine pursuits such as cooking, crafting and mothering, and the
naturalisation of these behaviours within the fetishisation of a white, middle-class lifestyle.
Femininity Rendered Digital
In this project I focus particularly on femininity as it is transcribed through digital
culture. I use the term digital culture to refer to not only digital texts, but to indicate my interest
in thinking holistically about the practices and objects that inform the usage of digital media. In
my study of digital femininity I consider the ways that gender identity is shaped on and through
technology and, specifically, the affordances of new media platforms.
Technologies have always been gendered and have contributed to the social construction
of gendered identity. For instance, Lorber describes the ways that,

within the short space of time that computers have become ubiquitous in offices, schools,
and homes work on them and with them has become gendered: Men create, program, and
market computers…women microwire them in computer factories and enter data in
computerized offices; boys play games, socialize, and commit crimes with computers;
girls are rarely seen in computer clubs, camps, and classrooms (1993, pp. 574-5)

10
However, these gendered differences have tended to lead to technological determinist
arguments about gender difference and power, exemplified through the surge in interest in
encouraging girls to learn and participate in coding and STEM as a solution to gender inequality.
In a more abstract sense, feminist science and technology studies scholars have sought to
theorise the relationship between humans and machines as a way to unpack the binary
construction of gender. In this tradition, N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) articulation of the
posthuman is framed as an intervention against the replication of humanist hierarchies and their
attendant oppressions in this contemporary moment of the digitisation of subjectivity. In
response to a digital environment that tends to privilege informational pattern over material
presence, Hayles argues for a recognition of the inherently embodied qualities of information,
digitality, cognition and consciousness. Alternatively, Anne Balsamo – building on Donna
Haraway’s pivotal theorisation of the cyborg – thinks through the ways that technologies inform
“cultural practices of ‘making the body gendered’” (1996, p. 4). Balsamo uses the phrase
“‘technologies of the gendered body’ as a way of describing … interactions between bodies and
technologies” (1996, p. 9) and, in this exploration, notes the ways that new technologies
variously liberate the body from the cultural enactment of gender and reinforce binary and
essentialist logics of gender and identity.
Within digital culture, an exploration of ‘technologies of the gendered body’ might focus
on the relevance of the relationship between the material labours of the body and the ways an
online body is digitally constructed and anchored through avatars, social media profiles and data
doubles. It would consider the effect of the pervasive digital logics and processes of user-
generated content and the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism in the production of digital gendered
identity. Moreover, it would explore the significance of binary gendered online spaces and the

11
exaggerated feminisation of sites such as the lifestyle blogosphere, Pinterest and Etsy, and how
they are structured to appeal to female sensibilities. My aim is to theorise the impact of the
digital in shaping contemporary femininity, and I do this through an attention to these digital
specificities as well as the elements that are unique to the genre and culture of food blogging.

Methods
This project is built upon the traditions of feminist cultural studies. My study of food
blogs – and their snapshots of mundane, domestic life – recalls Raymond Williams’ (1989)
arguments for the ‘ordinariness’ of cultural production, as well as the Birmingham school’s
argument that culture is inherently political. My focus on food blogs, with their feminocentric
communities and their investment in topics of normative Western femininity, gives an indication
of their devaluation within the cultural canon. Following the paths pioneered by feminist cultural
studies scholars such as Janice Radway, Angela McRobbie, Ien Ang and Tania Modleski, this
study seeks to recuperate food blogs as a feminised cultural form, and to argue for their political
significance within the current technological and economic environment.
The methods that I use to inform my arguments are textual and visual analysis, with a
special attention to new media affordances and platform specificity. In this spirit, I employ an
analytic that is attentive to the emergence of digital subjectivities within the posthuman tradition
of interrogating the binary separations that have historically structured the discrete and
hierarchical categories of human and machine, male and female, real and virtual. This approach
is informed by the work of digital scholars who argue for the imperative to approach the study of
digital texts beyond representational analysis and “toward the analyses of form, phenomenology
or computation that [are] so compelling and lively” (McPherson, 2011, p. 23). Thus, in the same

12
way that Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White argue for the “co-production of race and
computing” (2011, p. 6), I explore the co-production of femininity and digital media. In practice,
this entails exploring food blogs in a manner that refuses the primacy of the blogger (and her
flesh) over her discursive subjectivity/representation on the screen; paying equivalent attention to
the meaning of form – the language of the machine – as to the meaning embedded in the content
– the language of humanism; understanding bodies as dynamic and discursive materialities and
information as always embodied; respecting the live and animate qualities of the digital corpus;
and, finally, paying attention to the multiple ambivalences inspired by these forms of social
media.
To adopt such an approach is to argue that, far from the utopian, disembodied dream of
early online identity play, food bloggers’ bodies are reinforced through and attached to their
digital labour and the vitality of the blogging platform. Blogs are what Hayles describes as
‘autopoietic systems,’ not bound by the control and authorship of the blogger herself but, rather,
unpredictable and autonomous outcomes of the interactions between platform, blogger and
reader. This perspective disturbs the assumed superiority of the human over machine, in line with
what Haraway has long argued as an evolution where “[o]ur machines are disturbingly lively,
and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (1991, p. 152) and Kember and Zylinska’s reminder to
respect the “lifeness, or vitality, of media…referring … to the possibility of the emergence of
forms always new or the potentiality to generate unprecedented connections and unexpected
events” (2012, p. 24). Digital artefacts mediate the enacted, fleshy body and the represented,
discursive body (Hayles, 1999), providing fertile ground for exploring and challenging the
artificial boundaries that have historically been used to denote the privileged human subject.

13
Ultimately, many of my arguments about the strategic deployment of femininity on food
blogs arise from the juxtapositions between the amateur, hyperfeminine content displayed and
the specificities of the blogging platform which belies a professional orientation to this
performance. I explore the ways that various identity categories are being inscribed through the
platform and genre of food blogs. This is an approach that tempers the unbridled optimism of
utopic perspectives on femininity as a digital construct, while remaining open to the potential for
new technological couplings, identity play, exclusions and political expression.

The Food Blogosphere as Digital Archive
This project ambitiously takes up the study of food blogs as a digital genre. One of the
main challenges in researching these artefacts is the sheer size of the blogosphere, the amount of
content produced by each blog, and the ephemerality of these digital texts. Although I have
explored thousands of food blogs over several years, I have also consistently been surprised by
new case studies, examples and posts – a seemingly inevitable occurrence within the data-
saturated digital context.
I have sought due diligence in my representation of the food blogosphere and my sample
selection with a digital ethnography of food blogs that entailed viewing food blogs accessed from
blog aggregators, search engine queries, snowball sampling from blogrolls, mainstream media
attention, and happenstance. These research results have informed my general comments on food
blogs. However, I have chosen to arrange this dissertation thematically around subgenres of food
blogs. I have selected a handful of case studies for each chapter, as samples that are intended to
be illustrative rather than representative of recurring feminist themes within the food
blogosphere.

14
The selected case studies tend to be those which have achieved a high degree of
prominence within their subgenre and/or the food blogosphere as a whole. The relative
popularity of the food blogs chosen for analysis is indicated by analytics such as their Alexa
website ranking, their search engine optimisation, and their recognition within the blogosphere
through awards, mentions and cross-referencing. The fact that the overwhelming majority of
these popular food blogs were created by white, middle- and upper-class women in
heteronormative relationships is not a coincidence, and becomes important to my conclusions on
the political potential of feminist food blogging and the exclusions of technological form. That
is, while the scope of the food blogosphere and the mechanisms of user-generated content
hypothetically allow for a multiplicity of voices and diverse identities, what is much more
striking is how homogenous the blogosphere is. I argue that the food blogs are a platform that
reward the participation of normative women who most faithfully reproduce hegemonic
femininity. Moreover, I suggest that the relative visibility of food blogs is strictly hierarchical,
meaning that the work of only a small fraction of food bloggers is disproportionately circulated
and ultimately comes to stand in for the genre as a whole.
Thus, while it is difficult to find definitive demographic information, I regard food
blogging as a genre dominated by middle-class, white females and the case studies depicted here
reflect this assumption. At the same time, it remains true that for whatever point is made about
the blogosphere, it will be possible to find an example that refutes it. Given the plethora of food
blogs that have been created, it is of course true that there exist numerous examples of bloggers
of colour, queer bloggers, male bloggers, and exciting alternative, explicitly radical and
countercultural food blogs that express an open interest and concern with social justice and
politics. Many of these blogs are explicitly affiliated with veganism and/or contemporary punk

15
culture, such as Sistah Vegan (Harper, n.d.), Post-Punk Kitchen (Chandra Moskowitz, 2003),
Afro Vegan Chick (Glasper, J. D., n.d.), The Feminist Kitchen (Broyles, 2010), and Queer Vegan
Food (Brown, S. E., n.d.). Although it is true that particular niche interests and subgenres are
offered greater opportunities for publication and networked community than through previous
broadcast media models, it is also true that such works are outliers that are defined in contrast to
the hegemonic norms of the food blog genre. While I believe that these radically-motivated food
blogs and minority food bloggers warrant scholarly attention, such a project is different to the
one I envision here.
My interest is in the ways that the genre of food blogging codifies and rewards the
performance of a stylised normative femininity. The selection of blogs in this project therefore
demonstrates the ways that digital culture perpetuates an investment in limiting representations,
despite its participatory, user-generated ethos. Indeed, the insidious ways in which hegemonic
identity is rewarded in the blogosphere can be considered even more problematic because of the
participatory, empowering rhetoric of Web 2.0. If it appears that the food blogs selected here all
conform to suspiciously normative standards of middle-class whiteness, I would agree that that is
indeed the point and the problem.
Chapter Outline
These chapters are structured to first introduce the reader to the main characteristics of
food blogs, and the feminist and media landscape in which they are situated. I will then offer a
more in-depth exploration of the feminist issues that food blogs engage through a series of case
studies that focus on several subgenres of food blogs. Finally, I will direct this analysis of food
blogs – as one example of feminised digital media production – towards a more generalised
discussion of politics in digital culture.

16
In Chapter One, I describe the current political and cultural landscape within which
stylised femininity is strategically deployed. I situate the study of food blogs at the intersection
of postfeminism, third wave feminism and popular feminism. I also make explicit the symbolic
and material connections between femininity and food production, and provide an overview of
the food blog’s main characteristics. In Chapter Two, I provide a historical context for food
blogs by looking at the ways that women’s bodies, domestic labour and technologies have long
been entwined and implemented as practices of resistance. I offer a broad definition of
technology, examining cooking literature, Julia Child’s food television work, and convenience
foods as important precursors to the genre of food blogs. I then detail the stylistic conventions of
food porn and draw links between these and media representations of the female body to show
how this form of women’s digital media production might be interpreted as an act of resistance
in postfeminist, hypersexual culture.
In Chapter Three, I introduce the concept of ‘girlie entrepreneurialism’ to describe the
strategic deployment of stylised femininity that is used to both disguise and add value to the food
blog as a professional enterprise. I examine the structure of three financially successful food
blogs – The Pioneer Woman, Smitten Kitchen and Bakerella – to show how girlie content and
digital form are seamlessly merged to add value. I also discuss the ethical issues that should be
considered in light of the growing corporate sponsorship of lifestyle blogs. In Chapter Four, I
explore the use of motherhood as cultural shorthand for morality in the performance of
conspicuous non-consumption. I look at the elision between morality and class by looking at the
ways that the qualities of intensive mothering are publicly performed on two oppositional budget
blogs – the whole food blog 100 Days of Real Food by Lisa Leake and the famous UK austerity

17
blog A Girl Called Jack
1
by single mother and former welfare recipient Jack Monroe. Both
Monroe and Leake employ a form of scientific and planning-based nurturing that is required by
postfeminist mothering, but ultimately reveals the limits of overt political expression in the
current political climate. Finally, in Chapter Five I continue this attention to regimes of morality
and restriction through the examination of the rhetorics of healthism prevalent on contemporary
vegan food blogs. I discuss the pervasive anxiety of the neoliberal foodscape which drives this
new, obsessive desire for food and health knowledge. This market for food and health
information is gendered and facilitated through new technologies, as evidenced by the
quantification of self movement and the Virtual Vegan Potluck, which is the main focus of this
chapter. I examine the Virtual Vegan Potluck as an example of the knowledge exchange
communities that form around individual food blog endeavours. This case study leads to my
conclusion – that food blogs are resources that speak to the political value of technological
knowledge, and the significance of feminised knowledge communities. Ultimately, I use these
examples to conclude that the main political value of food blogs lies in their gift economy
structure and the community bonds which act as affective filters for the overabundance of
information available in the digital age.
This dissertation project is directed towards understanding the forces which have given
rise to girlie entrepreneurialism and its strategic use of hegemonic femininity, as a personal
quality and as a commodity. I am specifically focused on changes in the technological landscape
surrounding digital platforms, networks and media content, and the ways that these
developments have been theorized in relation to changing understandings of subjectivity and
embodiment. I see these technologies as integral to giving women the tools and ideologies that

1
In October 2015, this blog was renamed Jack at a Pinch and changed again in 2016 to Cooking on a Bootstrap by
Jack Monroe

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have fostered girlie entrepreneurialism and constitute a response to the ambivalence of
contemporary feminist culture. I am also interested in exploring how and why the designation of
a niche girlie market has fostered a self-referential but often powerful feminine online
community. Finally, I draw on the work of feminist food scholars to examine the ways that food,
food rituals, food work and food literature/media have reinforced and challenged these emerging
gender roles and their accompanying politics. It appears that through these rituals of the
quotidian, a digitised gender performativity is being enacted that is compelled to keep repeating
itself but at every iteration contains the potential for subversion.

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The Rise of Food Blogs: Documenting an Everyday, Pleasure-Based Resistance

I begin this feminist exploration of food blogs with a discussion of the contemporary
landscape of gender politics. I regard postfeminism, third wave feminism and popular feminism
to be the most relevant influences on current understandings of feminism, and I discuss their
shared characteristics – including an emphasis on consumption and popular culture texts, as well
as a fascination with nostalgic and exaggerated performances of normative femininity. I use this
chapter to discuss the symbiotic relationship between this political environment and the
development of the food blog genre. I also provide a brief overview of the characteristics of a
food blog in preparation for the analysis in the following chapters.

Producing Girlie Femininity
The cultural context that informs this project is a moment where representations of girlie
femininity are ubiquitous in popular culture. This includes the emergence of an ideal female
persona whose ambition and intelligence are taken for granted and allow her to cultivate the
infantile qualities of being cute, fun, helpless and romantic. The last ten years have witnessed a
slew of mainstream television shows which focus on schoolgirl cliques such as Pretty Little Liars
(King, 2010), Scream Queens (Brennan, Falchuk & Murphy, 2015), and Glee (Brennan, Falchuk
& Murphy, 2009) which build off the success of the film Mean Girls (Michaels, Rosner &
Waters, 2004) and centre their narratives around the behaviours of and relationships between
young women. The theme of girlhood is also emphasised in the titles of current television shows
such as Girls (Dunham, 2012), New Girl (Meriwether, 2011), Two Broke Girls (Cummings &
King, 2011), Supergirl (Adler, Berlanti & Kreisberg, 2015) and Younger (Star, 2015).
This ‘girl-ing’ of women is further expressed through popular personalities, such as
Zooey Deschanel’s character Jess in New Girl (Meriwether, 2011) whose romantic escapades

20
and wide-eyed naiveté have led to her being branded as ‘adorkable.’ From 2012-2015, New Girl
aired back-to-back with The Mindy Project (Kaling, 2012) in which Mindy Kaling portrays a
similarly girlie protagonist whose competence as a gynaecologist is countered by her
incompetence in daily life matters as she relies on a company of male colleagues to chivalrously
come to her aid to ensure she takes her birth control pills, untangle her from her own earbuds on
the subway, and console her through various relationship dramas. The girlie-ness of the
protagonists portrayed by Deschanel and Kaling is visually reinforced through their preference
for mismatching prints and bold colours and their wardrobes of skirts and dresses, soft blouses,
peter pan collars, and cardigans. The net effect of these television representations is to document
the girlie-fication of intelligent and ambitious women through a fixation on youth culture and
settings, the new fashionability of girlie clothes and aesthetics, and the idealisation of women
exaggerating their innocence and cuteness.
Girlie femininity also entails a fetishisation of the identities of being a wife and mother.
Motherhood has been re-envisioned as not only a resource intensive occupation – which has been
a growing trend for the past few decades (Hays, 1998) – but is now explicitly understood as a
profession complete with technical skillsets and external modes of assessment. This is indicated
by the rise of modern terminology that explicitly conjoins work with motherhood such as the
titles mompreneur, momager and mommy blogger. Reality television programs have further
fostered the perception that motherhood can constitute a paid enterprise in and of itself through
successful shows such as Teen Mom (Dolgen, 2009), Dance Moms (Collins Avenue
Entertainment, 2011) Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (Lexton, Rogan & Reddy, 2012), Kate Plus 8
(Hayes, 2008) and 19 Kids and Counting (Hayes, Wilcher & Streb, 2008). Moreover,
motherhood is increasingly being consciously incorporated into the public personae of

21
professional women, for instance in the ways that the motherhood of successful businesswomen
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer has been the focus of media
attention. Similarly, prominent female politicians including Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann,
Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton have in recent years found it profitable to elevate their
reputation by underlining their status as mothers and grandmothers.
Alternatively, wifedom as a profession is increasingly narrated through the ever-growing
interest in wedding culture in popular media with a host of television shows focused around
weddings and proposals with just a small sample including The Bachelor (Fleiss, 2002) and The
Bachelorette (Fleiss, 2003), Say Yes to the Dress (Park, 2007) and its various spin-offs, Married
at First Sight (Burns et al, 2015), Newlyweds: The First Year (Manning, 2012), Married by Mom
and Dad (TLC, 2016), Four Weddings (TLC, 2009) and the televised engagements and wedding
specials of reality television stars such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta (Claiborne, 2008) star
Kim Zociak, Vanderpump Rules (Baskin & Ross, 2013) cast members Scheana Shay and Katie
Maloney, and two of the Duggar children on 19 Kids and Counting (Hayes, Wilcher & Streb,
2008). The existence of a heterosexual marriage is also used to bluntly delineate between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ motherhood, a threat that is used to make clear the continued ideological importance of
marriage for women.
Finally, girlie femininity is represented through a rising interest in domestication as part
of a privileged DIY culture where labour-intensive private sphere activities such as crafting,
cooking from scratch, and homesteading are eagerly pursued as creative and sometimes
entrepreneurial ventures for educated women. The popular and feminocentric website Pinterest
promises the fantasies of home-made food, crafts, and fashion as self-actualising pleasures
worthy of women’s time. The equally popular website Etsy perpetuates the notion that women’s

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creative DIY endeavours can be not only self-actualising but viable business opportunities that
promise personal fulfillment and happiness.
These stylised performances of hyperbolically girlie femininity appear to reference
nostalgic yearnings for traditional gender roles which have been re-imagined as empowering and
self-actualising. This resurgent interest in neo-conservative femininity – which in previous
decades symbolised the crux of women’s oppression and includes the very behaviours that many
feminists fought to overturn – is regarded with dismay by some as evidence of regressive gender
politics for women. In this interpretation, the women who are joyfully complicit in this girlie
culture are regarded as dupes or participants in a contemporary feminist backlash. However,
concurrent with this rise of girlie femininity is an unprecedented attention to feminism in the
mainstream media – a popular portrayal of feminism which is superseding the postfeminist
context that has been predominant since the 1990s. I therefore argue that the recent popularity of
stylised girlie femininity does not amount to a feminist regression. This is particularly true when
conceptualising feminist politics as recursive and partial, in place of a linear, original or ideal
model of feminist progress. Accordingly, I seek out the complicated and meaningful
relationships which exist between these expressions of girlie femininity and contemporary
feminist politics.

Contemporary Feminisms: Post, Pop and Third Wave
Contemporary understandings of feminist politics are best understood through the
discourses of postfeminism, third wave feminism, and popular feminism. These three movements
share characteristics including an incorporation of political expression into consumer behaviour,
the pleasurable recuperation of normative femininity, and a personal understanding of feminist
politics that is subject to individual interpretation and experience.

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Postfeminism emerges in the 1990s as a term “used variously and contradictorily to
signal a theoretical position, a type of feminism after the second wave, or a regressive political
stance” (Gill, 2007, pp. 147-8). ‘Postfeminist’ is not an identity embraced by young women but
tends to describe a cultural trend that dictates certain consumption choices, behavioural
characteristics and social expectations as empowering for women. Indeed, the term has mostly
been circulated by feminist media scholars critical of these media/corporate appropriations of
feminism. Angela McRobbie describes postfeminism as “gently chiding the feminist past, while
also retrieving and reinstating some palatable elements, in this case sexual freedom, the right to
drink, smoke, have fun in the city, and be economically independent” (2009, p. 12). Yvonne
Tasker and Diane Negra articulate the neoliberal underpinnings of postfeminism as it “works to
commodify feminism via the figure of woman as empowered consumer…emphasizing
educational and professional opportunities for women and girls; freedom of choice with respect
to work, domesticity, and parenting; and physical and particularly sexual empowerment” (2007,
p. 2) adding that “postfeminism is white and middle class by default, anchored in consumption as
a strategy (and leisure as a site) for the production of the self” (2007, p. 2).
While these critiques have and should be taken seriously given the continuing struggle
for gender equality in culture and society, it is also important to note the more ambivalent
relationship with postfeminist tenets that is perceived by generational subjects who have grown
up wholly within the parameters of postfeminist culture. This summary dismissal of
postfeminism thus tends to perpetuate divides that are drawn through the generational
‘ownership’ and legitimacy of feminism. There is evidence that many young women seek to
reconcile a thoughtful inclusion of feminism within their postfeminist milieu and I believe there
is value to this work. Thus, I would disagree with the notion that the “only thing postfeminism

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has to do with authentic feminism…is to contradict it at every turn while disguising this agenda”
(Kinser, 2004, p. 124).
Third wave feminism emerges during the same time period as postfeminism, but can be
distinguished from the latter by its explicitly stated feminist intent and consideration of historical
feminist legacies and theory. The title third wave feminism is popularly attributed to Rebecca
Walker, daughter of feminist activist and writer Alice Walker, who seeks to articulate a lived
feminism that is in line with “the political, economic, technological, and cultural circumstances
that are unique to the current era” (Kinser, 2004, p. 124). As Walker writes, “[y]oung women
coming of age today wrestle with the term [feminism] because we have a very different vantage
point on the world than that of our foremothers. We shy from or modify the label in an attempt to
begin to articulate our differences while simultaneously avoiding meaningful confrontation”
(1995, p. xxxiii). Thus, third wave feminists are broadly categorised by a spirit of defiance in
their lustful embrace of second wave ‘taboos’ including sexuality, consumer feminine behaviours
and accoutrements, and popular culture. Another characteristic of third wave feminism is their
attention to the work of second wave feminists of colour. Accordingly, the third wave makes
explicit in their writing a spirit of sensitivity and inclusion within the term feminism, and many
key third wave feminist texts are published as collections of individual essays, including
Walker’s To Be Real (1995), Barbara Findlen’s (1995) Listen Up!, Eve Ensler’s (2001) Vagina
Monologues, Mitchell et al’s (2001) Turbo Chicks, Hernandez and Reman’s (2002) Colonize
This!, and Gillis et al’s (2007) Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration.
While I do not wish to conflate postfeminism with third wave feminism, their shared
popular culture and neoliberal context – including what Gill summarises as ‘postfeminist
sensibilities’ such as

25
the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to
subjectification; the emphasis upon self surveillance, monitoring and discipline; a focus
upon individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; a
resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked sexualisation of culture; and an
emphasis upon consumerism and the commodification of difference (2007, p. 149)
which has led to inevitable overlaps in their political expression. As Kinser writes, third
wave feminists “live feminism in constant tension with postfeminism, though such tension often
goes unnoticed as such” (2004, p. 133). Therefore, while the differences in stated intent between
these contemporary feminisms must be kept in mind, Munford convincingly argues that third
wave feminism is nevertheless prone to becoming “a ready site for postfeminist colonisation”
(2004, p. 149) particularly through the embrace of commodity-based, hyperfeminine activity
which often “emerges as the site of that dangerous and deceptive slippage between third wave
feminism and postfeminism” (2004, p. 150). That is, while the third wave may seek to make
feminism an explicit end goal – and generally evidences more awareness of feminist theory and
history – the means and actions of both ‘feminisms’ are curiously aligned.
Moreover, one of the defining features shared by these two contemporary feminist
movements is that they are articulated through their rejection of selected second wave tenets. In
the context of postfeminism, McRobbie considers second wave feminism to be “taken into
account, but only to be shown to be no longer necessary” (2009, p. 17). Similarly, third wave
feminists have modelled their movement on an explicit rejection of seemingly overbearing
second wave values. This is evidenced by Rebecca Walker’s description of the pressures
bestowed alongside politics by older feminists. She writes: “my desire to be a good feminist
was… not just a desire to change my behavior to change the world, but a deep desire to be

26
accepted, claimed, and loved by a feminist community that included my mothers, godmother,
aunts, and close friends” (1995, p. xxx).
Indeed, this generational rebellion of contemporary feminism relies literally and
figuratively on the language of maternalism, as Astrid Henry argues, “the mother-daughter
relationship is the central trope in depicting the relationship between the so-called second and
third waves of U.S. feminism” (2004, p. 2). From a cinematic perspective, Kathleen Karlyn
Rowe makes a similar observation in Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: “Some of the tension
within contemporary feminism has arisen from a perceived failure by the Second Wave – the
‘mothers’ of today’s young feminists – to listen to their daughters” (2011, p. 12). Finally,
Baumgardner and Richards devote an entire chapter of their foundational third wave text
Manifesta to this topic, with a brutal letter to addressed to imaginary second wave ‘mothers’:
“We let you off your mother trip. Now you have to stop treating us like daughters. You don’t
have the authority to treat us like babies or acolytes who need to be molded…If you feel you
don’t ‘get’ what Third Wave women are thinking you’re responsible for raising your own
consciousness” (2010, p. 233). Yet, this reliance on the mother-daughter dyad as an expression
of feminist logic is unproductive due to its tendency to “downplay or ignore the hostility that
may be involved in relationships between women” (Henry, 2004, p. 117), as well as for the
implication that “[b]ecause feminism is so bound up with morality and maternalism, a daughter’s
only choice is to rebel” (Henry, 2004, p. 126).
The ambivalence between postfeminism and third wave feminism is further complicated
through the more recent emergence of popular feminism. Headlines from the Huffington Post,
Slate, Times and The Guardian have variously declared 2014 “a good year for feminism”
(Marcotte, 2014), “a great year for feminism” (Kay, 2014), “a watershed” for feminism (The

27
Guardian, 2014) and “the best year for women since the dawn of time” (Alter, 2014) due to an
unprecedented uptake in the usage of ‘feminism’ as a label and identity by mainstream
celebrities and high profile women. I regard popular feminism as the conscious usage and
reclamation of the word feminism within mainstream media, in a manner that is not necessarily
dismissive but instead evidences an attention to its political meaning. Some of the most notable
examples of popular feminism include Beyonce’s dramatic performance in front of the word
‘Feminism’ spelt out in tall block letters at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, Emma
Watson’s speeches on feminism as part of her UN #heforshe campaign, and Taylor Swift
retracting her former renouncement of feminism. Outside of the celebrity sphere and during this
time period Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace prize, and
several girl empowerment product campaigns were launched and gained national attention
including CoverGirl’s #GirlsCan, Always’ #throwlikeagirl, and GoldieBlox’s range of science
and engineering toys for girls. These cultural moments amounted to an overwhelming interest in
and popular circulation of the word feminism to a degree previously unseen for several decades.
For this reason, I regard popular feminism as marking a key departure from postfeminism and a
significant shift in popular culture.
At the same time, popular feminist proclamations are rife with contradictions. Notably,
while this movement witnessed the hip reclamation of the feminist identity by celebrities, there
was little attention paid to the disjunct inherent to Beyonce outing herself as a feminist in a
routine where she was flanked by scantily clad female dancers performing stripper-inspired
dance moves. Consider also the public attention paid to feminist issues through widely-circulated
pieces like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ‘Women Can’t Have It All’ (2012) and Sheryl Sandberg’s
Lean In (2013), as evidence of increasing attention to women’s issues in the work force while

28
eliding the reality that the majority of women do not work for the State or in leadership positions
at billion-dollar technology corporations but rather labour under increasingly precarious and
tedious post-Fordist working conditions. Finally, popular feminist contradiction is evident in the
tremendous historical significance of the United States being on the verge of electing Hillary
Clinton as its first female President, at the same time that women’s reproductive rights are
arguably under more threat than they have been since Roe v. Wade.
I regard this fluidity and instability as an intrinsic feature of the current political
landscape, which is shaped by the imperatives of the information age and the normalisation of
consumer culture. These ambivalences demand a reconsideration of politics existing as a ‘pure’
sphere separate from consumer and popular culture. For instance, the nascent field of critical
consumption studies has emerged to reflect the increasingly nuanced intertwining of
consumption and politics. Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser use the term ‘commodity activism’ to
describe the “promise and perils of consumer-based modes of resistance as they take shape
within the dynamics of neoliberal power” (2012, p. 2). Their edited collection is a cornerstone to
the body of new literature which outlines the ambivalent and contradictory treatment of politics
within advanced capitalist logics (Littler, 2009; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Einstein, 2012; Klein,
2010). Critical consumption studies further builds upon historical recognition of the role of
consumer citizenship in the United States (Cohen, 2003; Glickman, 2009) and the long history of
market-based political actions (Cross, 2000). Similarly in this project I seek to explore the
political potential that is inherent to the consumption-oriented and pop culturally situated
practice of girlie femininity.

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Pursuing Feminist Pleasures in Girlie and DIY Culture
Within the milieu of contemporary feminism and consumer culture arises an interest in
reviving accoutrements of normative femininity as a feminist stance. Specific to third wave
feminism, consumption is part of the “everydayness of activism” (Baumgardner and Richards,
2010, p. 272) attributed to the individual. This is particularly evident within ‘girlie culture’,
which is the term used by Baumgardner and Richards to connote a reclamation of “girl culture,
which is made up of such formerly disparaged things as knitting, the color pink, nail polish, and
fun” (2010, p. 80) as an expression of third wave feminist activism. This interpretation of girlie
femininity as an expression of feminism is almost entirely predicated upon its perception as a
rebellion against the “antifeminine, antijoy emphasis that they perceive as the legacy of Second
Wave seriousness” (2010, p. 80). Thus, femininity becomes crucially linked to the project of
generational defiance that distinguishes contemporary feminism. Baumgardner and Richards
elaborate on this point:

Girlie encompasses the tabooed symbols of women’s magazines, high heels – and says
using them isn’t shorthand for ‘we’ve been duped.’ Using makeup isn’t a sign of our
sway to the marketplace and the male gaze; it can be sexy, campy, ironic, or simply
decorating ourselves without the loaded issues…Also, what we loved as girls was good
and, because of feminism, we know how to make girl stuff work for us” (2010, p. 136).

This quote alludes to the inherent polysemy of commodity objects and the importance of
not precluding political meanings that are attached to such consumption practices. I draw on this
description in my usage of the terms ‘girlie femininity’ and ‘girlie entrepreneurialism’ in this

30
project, and in doing so I also seek to take on the critiques that have been attached to the term
girlie.
One of the limitations of girlie culture, as Baumgardner and Richards acknowledge, is its
apparent triviality. For instance, girlie culture can lead to jarring results such as Baumgardner
and Richards’ insistence that “[w]hile it’s true that embracing the pink things of stereotypical
girlhood isn’t a radical gesture meant to overturn the way society is structured, it can be a
confident gesture” (2010, p. 136) and advocating ideas such as Debbie Stoller’s notion that
“painting one’s nails is a feminist act because it expands the notions of what a feminist is
allowed to do or how she may look” (2010, p. 140). Yet, at the same time, Baumgardner and
Richards are forced to acknowledge that “[c]ompared to the act of owning one’s body as a black
woman, nail-polish activism seems very silly. Or at least apolitical” (2010, p. 141). It is this
‘silliness’ that works to perpetuate the link between femininity, consumerism and triviality.
A second way in which femininity has been recuperated in popular culture is through
DIY culture. DIY culture references a nostalgia for traditional production practices and gender
roles. Emily Matchar describes DIY culture as a “longing for the handmade, the old-fashioned,
the authentic” (2013, p. 3) which manifests through an interest in labour intensive domestic
practices including cooking from scratch, craft activities such as knitting, quilting and sewing,
and eco-friendly, intensive parenting. In this manner, DIY culture operates as a safe haven within
a culture of high anxiety surrounding corporate and State production. As Matchar writes,
“[w]hen the government, schools, and the medical system aren’t trusted, the responsibility is
handed back to Mom” (2013, p 18). At the same time, this responsibility is viewed as a self-
actualising endeavour that is fulfilling for educated women. White describes how the rhetoric of
creative empowerment is used to downplay the labour involved in running home businesses on

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Etsy. Quoting stay-at-home mothers who run shops on Etsy, White writes “stay-at-home mothers
note that Etsy is ‘perfect’ for their needs and allows them to ‘happily’ create ‘swell and swanky’
things and ‘be at home with the ones that’ they ‘love’” (2015, p. 36). While this new domesticity
does not necessarily originate from feminist ideals, its links to online entrepreneurialism and
self-actualisation are often conflated with the ideals of postfeminist empowerment.
Girlie culture and DIY culture are therefore aligned in their interest in recuperating
normative femininity and taking for granted its alleged pleasures for women. This pleasure in the
girlie is situated oppositionally to the perceived guilt of second wave feminism, which becomes
simplistically (and wrongly) associated with denying feminine pleasures and shaming those who
would fall prey to their temptations. Baumgardner and Richards inadvertently illustrate this
positioning in their description of feminist activist Anastasia Higginbotham, who is “divided
against herself, worrying that her desire to wear sexy clothes or to have attention is the result of
brainwashing and destined to set her up for punishment…She shouldn’t have to starve herself of
these desires, but she does, in an attempt to be…typically feminist rather than typically feminine”
(2010, p. 163, emphasis mine). It is this pursuit of pleasure and refusal of shame, guilt or
embarrassment that is mistaken for politics in contemporary feminism. Pleasure is evident in
contemporary feminism’s insistence on consumer products and individualism, no longer
regarded as frivolous or selfish but justified as an important political action.
The issue of pleasure and its place within political movements has historically been
divisive for feminists. This is evidenced in the deeply polarizing discussions of female sexual
pleasure within the feminist movement which famously came to a head at the controversial 1982
Barnard Conference on Sexuality. In this debate, anti-porn activists considered porn to be an
inexcusable and inherently violent action against women. Their stance is distilled in militant

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statements such as Robin Morgan’s idea that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice
(1978, p. 169) and Catherine MacKinnon’s quote: “man fucks woman; subject verb object”
(1982, p. 541). While these sound bytes are reductive, they are somewhat reflective of the anti-
porn position that deprived women of any agentive sexual response, and interpreted women’s
pleasure as mere evidence of their complicity with ideological oppression. Alternatively, a key
part of the sex positive response was to foreground pleasure with the notion that women “should
reclaim control over female sexuality by demanding the right to practice whatever gives [them]
pleasure and satisfaction” (Ferguson, 1984, p. 109). The sex positive response was also largely
driven by the desire to expand definitions of sexual pleasure. For instance, Gayle Rubin argued
that “the moralism of the radical feminists stigmatizes sexual minorities such as butch/femme
couples, sadomasochists, and man/boy lovers, thereby legitimizing ‘vanilla sex’ lesbians and at
the same time encouraging a return to a narrow, conservative, ‘feminine’ vision of ideal
sexuality” (as cited in Ferguson, 1984, p. 107).
Yet, in the contemporary era, sex positivism has tended to morph into a normalisation of
porn-influenced sexual expression. Theorists such as Rosalind Gill (2007), Susan Douglas
(2010), Angela McRobbie (2009), and Ariel Levy (2005) have expressed their concern at the
hypersexualisation of postfeminist culture. In this ‘raunch culture,’ postfeminist subjects are
encouraged to conflate agency with a “tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality
[that] has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind
of sexual expression we now view as sexuality” (Levy, 2005, p. 5). In a manner reminiscent of
the sex wars, postfeminist theorists remain sceptical of the extent to which such expression is
truly empowering for women while third wave feminists have tended to fight for their right to
sexual expression. For example, while postfeminist theorist Susan Douglas argues that

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hypersexual culture amounts to an ironic, “in-your-face sexism, in which the attitudes about
women that infuriated feminists in the 1960s and 70s are pushed to new, even more degrading
levels, except that it’s all done with a wink – or, even better, for the girls’ own good” (2010, p.
13), Danzy Senna offers an alternative opinion that posits third wave sexual expression as “a fun,
playful aesthetic that acknowledges the erotic and narcissistic pleasure women receive” (1995, p.
16) from exercising the sexual power of their bodies.
Another important way in which a feminist politics of pleasure has been discussed is
through the work of feminist cultural studies scholars earlier referenced. In the mid-1980s, these
scholars performed crucial work that sought to interpret women’s pleasure in consuming
feminised popular culture as meaningful. This work constituted a feminist intervention into the
field of cultural studies, and a way of fighting for the political significance of texts traditionally
excluded from the cultural canon. These scholars performed crucial work in developing the fields
of audience studies and gaining an awareness of the critical and ironic ways in which women
consumed these devalued cultural texts. For example, Radway argues that romance reading is a
form of mild protest as it “buys time and privacy for women even as it addresses the corollary
consequences of their situation, the physical exhaustion and emotional depletion brought about
by the fact that no one within the patriarchal family is charged with their care” (1985, p. 12).
Similarly, Ang explains the feminist significance of these feminised cultural texts:

There are no words for the ordinary pain of living of ordinary people…By making that
ordinariness something special and meaningful in the imagination, that sense of loss can
– at least for a time – be removed. It is in this world of the imagination that watching
melodramatic soap operas like Dallas can be pleasurable: Dallas offers a starting point
for the melodramatic imagination, nourishes it, makes it concrete (1984, p. 80)

34

By closely examining and defending the feminised texts of romance novels and soap
operas, Radway and Ang offer research that challenges the notion that pleasure is “something
that concerns many feminists and that is often seen as a problem for feminist cultural politics”
(Ang, 1984, p. 131). Instead, they argue that “[w]omen fortunately no longer need feel ashamed
or guilty” (Ang, 1984, p. 132) for their consumption of feminised cultural forms as the pleasure
inherent to these texts “embodies a valid, if limited, protest” (Radway, 1985, p. 220).
Nevertheless, though, both scholars ultimately agree that “at the same time feminism must look
for a way of making such pleasures politically productive by situating them in a feminist plan of
action” (Ang, 1984, p. 132).
It is this instructive concept of everyday pleasure and subversion that has been
appropriated by feminist food scholars. Fighting back against the imaginary feminist’s disavowal
of cooking as unpaid, devalued and invisible reproductive labour, they propose that the feminist
utility of cooking might be read through its interpretation as a form of pleasurable self-care. In
this manner, Mary Drake McFeely meditates on the potentiality of cooking for women and
feminists: “cooking [can] be an act of renewal rather than depletion, an expression of personality
rather than suppression of identity…we may be able to acknowledge its pleasures without
fear…We do not need to lose our kitchens to keep our freedom” (2001, p. 169). Furthermore,
food scholars have pointed out the forms of resistance and subversion inherent to food work and
food media. Diane Tye – describing her late mother’s obligatory and extensive church baking
regimen – writes:

[o]n the most basic level, Banana Bread and Pineapple Squares were subversive in that
they helped to carve out precious social time for women...the sharing of baked goods

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increased the women’s pleasure, bringing together two indulgences: sweets, and time
away from one’s domestic role…Baking intended for their enjoyment and not their
family’s provisioning became a subversive treat. Time for themselves and with one
another was another indulgence (2010, pp. 162-3)

and affirms that “Baking can provide moments of solitude and reflection, creativity, and
peace; it can be a positive moment in women’s lives” (2010, p. 172). Finally, Carole Counihan
describes her influential method of ‘food-centered life histories’ as a disruptive action that
“thrust[s] the traditionally private sphere of cooking and feeding into the public arena and
show[s] the impact of women’s experiences on culture and history” (2013, p. 175). This work is
related to everyday protest, as Counihan references Chela Sandoval’s ‘differential
consciousness’ as “a key strategy used by dominated peoples to survive demeaning and
disempowering structures and ideologies. It is the ability to acknowledge and operate within
those structures and ideologies but at the same time to generate alternative beliefs and tactics that
resist domination” (2013, p. 175).
Yet, in many of these studies, the conclusion that pleasure is a feminist politics still stems
from its assumed position as a corollary to guilt. Radway goes into some detail in explaining
how many of her romance readers feel a great sense of guilt in indulging in and buying romance
novels for leisure. It is this key association with guilt that was revolutionary in allowing the
pleasure as politics mantra to evolve. But I question here the extent to which the same
conclusions can be drawn, given the different valence of pleasure in the current political context.
In the postfeminist era, pleasure is not just a means to a political end but the end in itself,
dictating what is considered feminist or good for the individual. Pleasure is no longer covertly
sought out by women, but actively and ambitiously pursued. Such an approach is

36
contraindicative of the arguments of subversive pleasure as originally articulated by Radway and
Ang, who – to recall – clearly argued that “the project of feminism as a whole is not and never
can be based on pleasure alone” (Ang, 1984, p. 133). It is these theoretical discussions of the
politics of pleasure in which food blogs are firmly situated, exploring as it does a hyperfeminised
text in which politics is not readily made visible. At the same time, the feminine and feminist
pleasures deduced from these texts is certainly different than those from the era in which
Radway and Ang were performing their critical studies. That is, when pleasure is ubiquitous, it
bears determining how and whether such pleasure can now be understood as political.

Feminism and Food
Food scholars have successfully argued for the social significance and symbolism of
food, which provides a rich and endlessly changing foundation for cultural analysis. Toby Miller
describes how “[f]ood is materially and symbolically crucial to life and its government. A key
site of subjectivity in every society, food is an index of power” (2007, p. 112). Arjun Appadurai
writes that food literature such as cookbooks “tell unusual cultural tales…They reflect shifts in
the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the
exigencies of the household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic
ideologies” (1988, p. 3). Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik conjecture that the burgeoning
field of food studies has exploded as “feminism and women’s studies have contributed
to…legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and
across cultures” (2013, p. 2). I have therefore chosen to focus on the topic of food in order to
draw on its broad application as an analytical tool: its ability to uncover the construction of
identity and relations of social power, its inherent interdisciplinarity, its association with both

37
quotidian life and grand cultural rituals, and its mediation through a variety of platforms, media
and technologies. Furthermore, in relation to other lifestyle texts, food blogs are particularly
illuminating in their appropriation of multiple iterations of consumption, including food, images,
ideologies and subjectivities in ways that are both privatised and publicly commodified.
As Counihan and Van Esterik have argued, recent food culture has led to an increased
“politicization of food and the expansion of social movements linked to food” (2013, p. 2). I
wish to briefly outline how these developments in food politics have been expressed in relation
to feminism and women’s labour, and through the alternative food movement. New
Domesticity’s labour-intensive, nostalgic attention to food production inherently interpellates
women who have traditionally been tasked with the biologically essentialist role of nurturing
through food (Bordo, 1993; Inness, 2001; DeVault, 1991). In the wake of the main thrust of
second wave feminism, women’s food labour was a main target for feminist activism concerned
with rejecting invisible, tedious, unpaid and undervalued domestic work. This had the effect of
teaching a generation of urban, feminist women that cooking was tantamount to oppression and
dining out with liberation, as neatly demonstrated by the glamorous protagonists of Sex and the
City whose frequent dining out in New York city was as hyperbolic as their multiple sexual
conquests in the city.
However, despite this depiction of feminist liberation of women from the kitchen,
evidence suggests that throughout the postfeminist 1990s, women continued to perform the
majority of food preparation labour for the household (DeVault, 1991; Inness, 2001; Matchar
2013). Moreover, it was this feminist disassociation with the kitchen that is seen as triggering the
rebellious embrace of New Domesticity, as Matchar writes: “My baby boomer mother does not
can jam. Or bake bread. Or knit. Or sew. Nor did my grandmother, a 1960s housewife of the

38
cigarette-in-one-hand-cocktail-in-the-other variety, who saw convenience food as a liberation
from her immigrant mother’s domestic burdens” (2011) before describing how these attitudes
shaped her own interest in domestic pursuits. Not only is domesticity being re-embraced, but it is
becoming increasingly time and labour intensive as Matchar continues: “The kinds of kitchen
work once associated with Depression-era farmwives-making curds and whey, preserving
sauerkraut, grinding flour – are now thoroughly unremarkable pastimes for young people flash
with today’s DIY back-to-basics spirit” (2013, p. 2). Accordingly, the kitchen is no longer
viewed as a site of oppression but a crucial realm of creative self-expression.
A secondary reason for the rise in DIY culture offered by Matchar is that, in response to
“an increasingly tech-oriented society, we’re hungry for hands-on work and hand-produced
products” (2013, p. 23). While I largely agree with this point, in the following examination of
food blogs I also seek to complicate this division between the ‘handmade’ and the ‘tech-
oriented.’ I am also interested in the ways that this contemporary re-embrace of the handmade
has highlighted not only women’s pleasures as producers but also women as consumers. This is a
development from what Bordo convincingly argues is the longstanding, socialised “notion that
women are most gratified by feeding and nourishing others, not themselves” (1993, p. 118)
while they simultaneously must learn to deny and curtail their own appetites. According to this
ideology, when women eat they do so shamefully, secretively and racked with guilt. I would not
go so far as to say that eating has become depathologised for women, but within the current
consumer context a number of ideological cues point us towards the increasing expectation that
women could and should take pleasure in the excesses of consumption. While the eating
disorders that most captivated scholars and the media in the 1990s – anorexia and bulimia – were
disorders of excessive restraint and denial, in the twenty-first century their focus has been

39
displaced by disorders of consumption, such as binge eating disorder and orthorexia, in which
undue attention is paid to the quality of food consumed. This change is also noted in the elision
from health to fitness, and thinspiration to fitspiration, which is to say although women are
permitted and at times even expected to visibly partake in pleasurable consumption, there is an
accompanying attention to increasingly gruelling fitness regimes that suggest that the ideological
demands for disciplining the female body remain as stringent as ever.
This shift can be seen through the development of the female food producer eating the
results of her labour as a logical coda to the instructional cooking format. Polan argues that Julia
Child’s The French Chef was influential in this regard, making clear the new possibilities of
cooking as a pleasurable and self-constituting for women:

one innovation of Child’s television series…was particularly consequential: namely, her
physical displacement in the last moments of the show from the kitchen, where she had
prepared the food, to a dining room, where she sampled it…While today it might seem
logical to end a cooking demonstration with the celebration of the act of eating…this sort
of culminating activity seems unprecedented for the history of the cooking show up to
The French Chef” (2011, p. 10)

Accordingly, contemporary food hosts have taken this aspect of the cooking show and
transformed it into an art-form of its own. Nigella Lawson comes to mind, in her gratuitous and
fully embodied employment of the tasting spoon, a climax to the verbal innuendo building up to
that moment throughout her food work and the soft-focus close-up camera work capturing her
visible pleasure. Similarly, contemporary food hosts tend to openly swoon during the production

40
and tasting of their food. It is this centring of the female subject, as both the producer and
consumer of food, from which food blogs derive much of their political potential.

What is a food blog?
Food blogs are part of a food media landscape that has exploded in recent years. Miller
offers evidence of an exponential interest in food media in the last half-century with the
following data: “In 1961, forty-nine cookbooks were published; in 2001, over one thousand and
seven hundred…Where fifty years ago, the United States had about twenty food magazines, in
2002, it had 145” (2007, p. 118). The longevity and success of the Food Network speaks to the
national appetite for food media as well as to its current profitability. Not only is there an
increase in the volume of food media currently being produced, but the intensity of this interest
has been equally stoked. Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann describe contemporary foodies as
“well-informed, discovery-minded, discerning consumers” (2010, p. 67) whose appetite for food
pedagogy spans class, cultures and entails an increasing interest in food production. While it has
been argued that as “Americans cook less and less, they seem compelled to watch people cook
more and more” (Ferdman, 2015), more recently a culture of anxiety that has shrouded the
contemporary foodscape has seemed to correlated with an increasing middle-class interest in
returning to the home to engage in traditional production. Food blogs have gained popularity in
this context, both documenting and providing a vital resource for this interest.
Food blogs also recall a long history of food production being linked to the performance
of ideal femininity. The increasing participation of women in digital media production further
complicates this relationship between women and food labour. The feminisation of this genre is
indicated by the fact that females comprise the majority of authors and readers of food blogs.
While hard data on the percentage of male versus female food bloggers is not readily available,

41
men’s minority status in this digital space can be inferred from figures that suggest that 18.9
million American women write blogs (Faw, 2012); the coalition of specifically gendered blogs
indicated by the influential BlogHer company and digital community; Technorati’s special
attention in 2010 to “the influence of women and mom bloggers on the blogosphere” as a digital
trend to pay attention to (Technorati, 2010); and comments on the continuing gender inequality
present in this predominantly female space, as one food blogger asks: “Why is it in the
blogosphere and at these food writing affairs, which, let’s face it, are afloat in a sea of estrogen,
do so many men seem to be disproportionately represented in the ranks of speakers and award
winners?...I can only surmise that they simply stand out in an overwhelmingly female world”
(Henry, 2011).
Furthermore, food blogs are a key component of the lifestyle blogosphere, and their
feminisation is apparent through their situation alongside the other categories nominated as
lifestyle blogs by BlogHer – Family, Style, Love and Sex, Work/Life, DIY (which typically
covers crafting rather than home renovations), Health, Entertainment and News. These blogs are
generally authored by individual women and offer glimpses into the private and mundane while
simultaneously revealing a digital prosumer (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) who empowers herself
through simultaneous media production and consumption. Food blogs nurture a nostalgic
recreation of mythical, comforting representations of domesticity, family and food while
concurrently transforming devalued and invisible feminine labour and subjectivity into a
commodity with value as an art form, a creative hobby and a profession. They therefore provide
an ideal stomping ground for exploring the expression, legitimacy and form of feminist politics
in a rapidly changing technological environment.

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As digital objects, it is first useful to situate food blogs through incongruity. I distinguish
food blogs from recipe aggregator sites such as AllRecipes.com, Food.com and Epicurious.com.
Recipe aggregators offer user-generated collections of recipes and evidence a pragmatic focus on
recipe quality. For instance, recipes on AllRecipes.com make prominent the user reviews of
contributed recipes. Comments are used to tweak these recipes and document how variations turn
out. I also distinguish food blogs from websites which are set up under corporate brand names.
For instance, Betty Crocker offers an extensive food website that includes recipes and high
quality food images, but are ultimately created as a marketing tool for Betty Crocker’s exclusive
products. Finally, while a number of individuals construct food blogs on the restaurant critic
format – as they eat out at and review local eating establishments – I focus primarily on food
blogs that centre on recipe creation and the home production of food. That is, the qualities that
are central to my definition of food blogs are that they are primarily authored by an individual or
household rather than a corporate entity, although corporations may be involved in cross-
marketing, the purposeful inclusion of traces of intimacy as well as an attempt to brand the site,
and the inclusion of narrative and images in addition to the typical features of a recipe.
The inclusion of personal content on a food blog – one of its defining features as a genre
– comes through embedding each recipe in a personal narrative that typically covers mundane
details of life events. Returning to Smith’s 300 Sandwiches blog, a recipe titled ‘Sandwich #294
– “Vive Le Frenchie” French Onion Soup Grilled Cheese’ (2015c) is somewhat tenuously tied to
a story about a French bulldog Smith used to own. She includes stories of the dog then writes:
“To remember that rambunctious puppy – and to feed the fiancé that despised her – I cooked up
a French onion soup grilled cheese for E and I over the weekend” (2015c). On a post titled
‘Snowstorm Sandwiches and Activities’ she recounts the quotidian details of her day for the

43
reader: “I had the day off yesterday and made good use of my spare time. I woke up, worked out,
dropped of dry cleaning and cooked some food” (2015d). These narratives are designed to give
insight into the personal lives, childhood memories and daily routines of bloggers and their
families, giving prominence to the girlie interests of the wife/mother identity and her domestic
pursuits.
The relative importance of threading personal content into these recipes is indicated by
the basic format of a food blog post. The food blog post is structured to begin with a title, date or
timestamp, and a large lead image. As the reader scrolls down the page, chunks of narrative are
interspersed with more images recursively, depending on how many images are included. The
recipe ingredients and procedure are positioned at the end of this text/image combination, which
usually requires a fair amount of scrolling, followed by the comments section at the bottom of
the page. This format gives an indication of the relative priorities of the blog – its emphasis on
visuals and personal narrative above the details of the recipe itself. Also, in contrast to the
comments section of AllRecipes.com which are featured prominently on the site page and focus
on qualitative improvements to the recipe, comments on popular blogs typically revolve around
affirming the work of the blogger rather than evidencing attempts to make the recipes
themselves.
The intimate narrative of the food blog is matched by the consistent branding of each site.
The name of the blog is often conflated with the identity of the blogger – Smith often (though not
exclusively) refers to herself as ‘300 Sandwiches’ and her partner as Mr. 300 Sandwiches, for
instance in a blog post titled ‘300 Sandwiches Does Jury Duty’ (2014b). The name of the brand
is featured prominently as the header of the blog, is used for affiliated merchandise such as
Smith’s cookbook 300 Sandwiches: A Multilayered Love Story…with Recipes (2015) and the

44
domain name. These blog brands are typically accompanied by taglines and often connote the
niche markets and themes around which bloggers base their work – such as sandwiches. This
conflation between the individual blogger and the brand will be further explored in Chapter
Three through a discussion of girlie entrepreneurialism.
Finally, the temporospatiality of the digital distinguishes food blogs from other food
media. Food blogs bring together layers of temporality that detail the opposing features of
currency and the archive that are common to digital culture. Food blogs are structured to favour
currency in the way they are chronologically ordered with the most recent posts featured at the
top of the home page. Scrolling through the pages of Smith’s blog gives a sense of ephemerality
marked through annual holidays – she includes posts about SuperBowl sandwiches, New Years
resolutions, Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween that indicate the passing of each year.
Many professional bloggers purposely schedule their content around these events. At the same
time, the information on the blog is arranged to be accessed non-contemporaneously with tags
that organise content by theme or keywords. For instance, Smith’s post for ‘Five Ingredient Fried
Chicken Sandwich’ (2015b) includes the tags ‘Chicken,’ ‘Dinner,’ ‘Easy,’ ‘Five Ingredient,’
‘Food,’ ‘Fried Chicken,’ ‘Lunch,’ ‘Recipe,’ and ‘Summer.’ Clicking on any one of these tags
takes the reader to a collection of content within the archive that disturb the chronological
arrangement of the posts. Yet this archival function of the digital is juxtaposed against the
thematic of fleeting daily routines that are the focus of food blogs. Smith’s posts revolve around
the breakfasts, lunches and dinners of her household – mundane and repetitive events that are not
typically recorded or made memorable. Smith also includes a series of thematic posts based on
days of the week, including ‘Throwback Thursday’ – a social media trend where users post
childhood or historical images from the personal archive – and ‘Wedding Wednesday’ – where

45
her wedding planning tips and experiences are shared. Thus, the content of food blog intersects
both memory and the present, life events with the mundane, storing and arranging the linear
processes of digestion into a lasting body of work.
The digital presents a similar bridging function in regard to space. The intimate content
of food blog narratives is reinforced through their emphasis on the personal homes and kitchens
of bloggers where meals are produced and photographed. Food bloggers are situated across the
country, in large metropolitan areas as well as rural locations, and this geographical specificity
often emerges in their writing, as Smith references uniquely New York-based stories of shopping
in SoHo with her mother-in-law (2015a) and lunching with her friend in the West Village
(2014a). At the same time, these blogs transcend the private and domestic spheres – Smith
describes her television appearances on the Food Network and Good Day New York, and
lunching with famous chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Again, it is this potential for bridging
private and public, global and local that has contributed to the rhetoric of digital media as tools
for liberation through entrepreneurialism.
While 300 Sandwiches is only one example of a food blog – and an exception in the
relative popularity and traction it has gained – it exemplifies many of the key features common
to food blogs. In fact, given the number and variety of food blogs that exist, what is surprising is
the relative uniformity of structure across the genre. At the same time, food blogs are numerous
and divided into many different subgenres, and the user-generated ethos of the platform
inevitably invites departures from the basic qualities listed above. While some of these variations
are merely cosmetic quirks, some of these differences warrant closer attention. For instance, food
blogs are generally focused on avoiding political discussion
2
in favour of reproducing
insinuations that the happiness and choice of female food bloggers speaks in and of itself to a de

2
Although religious beliefs are more often presented and included as part of the food blogger’s brand

46
facto correspondence with feminism. Smith refers to feminism only to defend the legitimacy and
profitability of her project, writing:

Some might say the idea [of 300 Sandwiches] is sexist. ‘A woman in the kitchen—how
Stepford Wife of you!’ a friend argued. I say come over for dinner, and watch E whip up
roasted duck breast with a balsamic and currant sauce with a roasted parsnip puree and
shaved pickled beets in no time, and you’ll see who spends more time in the kitchen
(2012).

At the same time, the food blogosphere allows Smith’s gender traditionalist logic to
coincide with a blog such as The Feminist Kitchen, where author Addie Broyles includes an
explicit feminist manifesto: “Food is an easier word than feminism to discuss at the dinner table.
People always say that food brings us together. But feminism, like politics, has long been
divisive, even among women” (2010). While Broyles’ approach is indeed rare, the fact that
Smith and Broyles’ oppositional gender politics coexist and are homogenised within this digital,
feminised space forms the basis for the productive potential of food blogs. In this project, I pay
attention to these contradictions, ambivalences and unexpected juxtapositions for the insights
they yield into contemporary feminist politics.

Conclusion
Girlie femininity is a central theme in discussions of contemporary feminism in digital
culture. It is pervasive and evidences a long and complex relationship with understandings of
feminist politics. In the following chapters I will look at the ways that girlie femininity has been
transcribed onto and through food blogs to explore feminism within a rapidly changing
technological, economic and political environment. While I do not necessarily champion food

47
blogs as feminist texts, I believe that they display important ties to expressions of feminist
politics that must be acknowledged and viewed as indications of the feminist potential within
feminised digital spaces.
Digital femininity further proves to be relevant at this time when postfeminism is
variously imagined as apolitical, regressive, and itself ‘over,’ third wave feminism is dismissed
for being too trivial, and popular feminism is nascent but already proving to be contradictory.
Within these political struggles to articulate feminism – and its relationship to femininity –
discussions of consumption, labour, pleasure and creativity take centre stage. These make food
blogs a rich site of inquiry for exploring these issues.
Food blogs help unpack the divide between a social movement politics – broadly based
on radical and politically-oriented action by collectives seeking justice – and lifestyle politics –
broadly based on the personal consumption choices of the individual and directed towards
affective states such as empowerment and pleasure. The negotiation of this binary by
postfeminist theorists has tended to devolve into a critique of the seemingly pallid politics of
commodity feminism alongside the implicit reification of and nostalgia for second wave feminist
social movements. This is evidenced in Susan Douglas’ conclusion to her insightful
characterisation of ‘enlightened sexism’:

Talking back to the media may seem inconsequential or fruitless – and indeed, it only has
a limited effect in bringing about change – but look at some of the great stuff we get to
see now that we never saw in, say, 1985…It’s a first step, and a not unimportant one.
More of us can get involved in issues we care about, learn about political organizing,
donate to organizations dedicated to improving the lot of women and children, even run
for office (2010, p. 306).

48

In many ways, this intergenerational binary works to destabilise feminism from within
and is subject to the same yearning for particular types of feminist activism that breeds the
traditionally feminine performances of DIY culture. I employ the bridging qualities of the digital
interface to complicate this pervasive, limited binary division between neoliberal lifestyle
politics as superficial and social movement politics as legitimate.
In many ways the recognition of food blogs as political is difficult to reconcile, as food
blogs typically emanate from spheres of social privilege and determinedly disavow mentions of
politics in favour of lifestyle-based pleasure and the maintenance of a cheerful and decidedly
non-controversial feminine affective space. At the same time, in their work they reference
multiple strands of feminist thought that argues that consumption and DIY culture are political,
the everyday is political, pleasure is political, media production is political, and knowledge is
power. Although individually authored, their logic requires a networked and by all accounts
tightly knit female community of fellow bloggers and readers. Although ostensibly engaging in
the hyperfeminine labour of food production and maternal nurturing, they simultaneously
showcase a considerable degree of technical and professional skill which contributes to their
positioning as influential media producers. Moreover, this transformation of labour certainly
leads to material rewards for some food bloggers, although the proportion of food bloggers who
are able to produce successful blogs and the proportion of profits they personally receive can and
will be interrogated in this project. Overall, then, this is a picture of emergent digital feminist
politics that demands further exploration.

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Posthuman Domesticity: Technology, Materiality and the Female Body

Food blogs enable the construction and visibility of certain postfeminist femininities, typically
manifesting as cheerful girlishness and aspirational portrayals of middle-class, heterosexual
motherhood. While in the previous chapter I sketched out ways that the genre and platform of
food blogging produced these exaggerated performances of heteronormative femininity, in this
chapter I explore the productivity of blogging as a feminised media production. In what ways is
blogging evidence of resistance against postfeminist discourse? How do food labour and digital
labour map new possibilities for women’s subversive deployment of technologies? What do
these feminised media productions say about gendered labour in digital culture?
I begin with a brief history of women’s food work as a set of mediated materialities
practiced through women’s engagement with various domestic technologies. As previously
noted, the definition of technology that I adopt is broad – the food technologies that I have
selected for examination here are cookbooks, food television, and convenience foods. While the
scope of this work does not allow for detailed historiographies of these technologies, within
these brief sketches I seek to explore the use and meaning of domestic technologies in ways that
are relevant to the ensuing discussion of food blogs and feminist resistance. My analysis focuses
on articulating the ways in which women’s labour practices have been shaped by these
technologies and, inversely, how these technologies bear the imprint of women’s embodiment in
their cultural value. This co-constitution of female materiality and technology continues through
the premise forwarded in this chapter that while food media and technologies were designed to
perpetuate traditional feminine roles, women dynamically engaged with their properties to reveal
the potential for resistance against gendered oppressions. The forms of feminist resistance to
which I refer here are everyday subversions, rather than more organised forms of explicit

50
political protest. This can make them difficult to identify and my analysis makes clear the
necessity of interpreting their potential with sensitivity to their specific sociohistorical context.
Moreover, and most importantly, throughout this discussion on identity and resistance through
technological embodiment, it is important to be mindful of the exclusions that prevent various
technologies’ adoption by or revolutionary potential for certain subjects. These discussions are
intended to contextualize the technology of food blogging as a production that creates both a new
form of food media and a particular female identity that foregrounds food work.
The second half of this chapter is devoted to the study of digital food porn, which is
integral to the food blog genre. I contextualise digital food porn in the circulation of
contradictory postfeminist bodily discourses that at once mandate the strict disciplining and
regimentation of bodily regimes for women at the same time that they urge hedonistic,
pleasurable consumption of commodities and food. I put forward the thesis that this inherent
contradiction is mediated creatively through the production of food porn. Specifically, I consider
the ways in which food porn inverts the male gaze, using food as a substitute for the sexual
objectification typically reserved for the female body and in turn unearths a reading of the
postfeminist blogger’s body as productive, labouring and creative.

Posthumanist Time and Feminist Histories
I wish to preface my discussion of the technological precursors to food blogs with a
contextualisation of why such discussion is useful from a political perspective. The digital
subject is a posthuman subject, and one aspect of posthumanist politics that is specifically
applicable to this project’s discussion of contemporary feminisms is its concern with revisionist
histories. In its challenge to binary categories of identity, posthumanism disrupts the concept of

51
discrete and linear progressions of time. Narratives of linear progress, for example, have
typically been used to fetishise new media and, consequently, obfuscate older technological
forms upon which such media are contingent (Gitelman, 2006; Chun, 2011; Manovich, 2002;
Kember & Zylinska, 2012). Gitelman argues that the “introduction of new media … is never
entirely revolutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially
embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such” (2006, p. 6). This can be seen in
the way that cookbooks are often presented as a medium whose form has been eclipsed by the
advent of ‘new’ media such as the food blog. However, not only does this perspective fail to
acknowledge that cookbooks are and have always been technologies, but it also ignores the fact
that food blogs have not supplanted but contributed to a new wave of cookbook publications
while also having a profound influence on older media formats such as magazines and television.
One of the most common partnerships between bottom-up and top-down media productions in
the food blogosphere takes place through cookbook deals that successful food bloggers are
offered. Ignoring these generative and recursive relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, in
favour of the fallacious understanding of new media as linear rather than generative, is
problematic for its tendency to support masculinist Western narratives of civilization and
progress.
In contrast, posthumanist methodologies allow for the accounting of a feminist food and
media history by viewing time and histories as recursive and intertwined. Vicki Kirby dismisses
the linear logic that separates old and new technology as “a logic that fetishizes differences as
something extraneous and detachable ... [where t]idy borders delimit time from space, origins
from ends, causes from effects, then from now, and one from two” (1997, p. 144). This iterative
time that Kirby defines might be understood as replacing a perpetual ‘folding out’ with a past,

52
present and future that are intrinsically integrated in a continual folding over. As a process, then,
iterativity still encompasses perpetual motion but without set direction, determination or
boundaries. This iterative understanding to technological history accounts for a broad definition
of technology that encompasses food, women’s bodies, books and media, alongside the digital
Internet spaces, logics and portals that dominate popular definitions of technology.
A posthumanist understanding of time might similarly be directed toward deconstructing
the temporality that has structured the problematic wave narratives of the feminist movement.
Specifically, I am interested in deconstructing the ways in which wave metaphors have been
used to describe and justify historical erasures in contemporary feminist movements, and to offer
a posthumanist alternative that reconciles newer iterations of feminism with a pervasive feminist
history and legacy. Astrid Henry (2004) discusses the use of the wave metaphor by the third
wave to signal an effacement of the problems of the second wave. This notion of cleansing
erasure of the past has been crucial in justifying the utility and superiority of third wave
feminism as a distinct feminist movement. Similarly, regressive postfeminism has relied on the
repudiation and rejection of the second wave to justify the depoliticisation of feminism and allow
its co-optation by corporations and popular culture.
The third wave has been critiqued for its reduction and misappropriation of the
complexity of second wave ideas, and the antagonistic, inter-generational divides it perpetuates
(Henry, 2004; Munford, 2004). Without reifying second wave feminism, it remains important to
fight for the continuity and legacy of feminist histories, politics and values to avoid their
appropriation by the vested interests of media, corporations and the religious far-right. As Amber
E. Kinser writes, “[s]ocial critique and advocacy are hardly ‘movement-‘ or even ‘wave-‘ bound,
but instead are a continuous cycle of living in the world comprised of many and diverse and

53
overlapping efforts” (2004, 131-132). Posthumanism offers a conceptual intervention to support
this need by using Barad’s articulation of diffraction, a quantum physics-based understanding of
waves, as methodology.
Diffraction is a reconceptualisation of boundary cuts that is generative, seeing new
‘wave’ phenomena as continuous – though necessarily different – iterations of the same wave. In
the language of physics, diffraction occurs when waves encounter obstacles, causing them to
bend and overlap. The pattern of wave overlap is called superposition, where “the resultant wave
is a sum of the effects of each individual component wave; that is, it is a combination of the
disturbances created by each wave individually” (Barad, 2007, p. 76). For Barad’s purposes,
diffraction is a heuristic for understanding the lack of objectivity, or even reflexivity, in scientific
accounts of matter. It also accounts for non-representationalist understandings of the world,
emphasising the lack of stasis in both matter and subject position, and indeed their inherent,
material entanglements. This builds upon the posthumanist concern with “understanding the
world from within and as a part of it” (2007, 88), a position from which I seek to consider
diffraction in the context of feminist genealogies. That is, diffraction works as a posthumanist,
political metaphor for the continuing connections drawn between feminist movements as new
articulations of feminism are conceptualised as inevitably coloured by the influence and
representation of earlier iterations of Western feminism.
The discourse and metaphors thus far relied upon to structure feminist histories are
crucial as they represent the various relationships by which feminism is expressed and performed
in different social contexts, including the popular repudiation of postfeminism, and the
overreliance on the mother-daughter dyad as expressed by third wave feminism. As Henry
(2004) points out, the unproductivity of these intergenerational feminist relationships between

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the second wave and third wave/postfeminism can be attributed to the binary framework in
which these movements are situated in discourse and the imagination. This indicates that
feminist wave imagery has been used to imply breaks, erasure and diametric opposition.
However, Barad’s (2007) approach to waves could offer an understanding of a feminist
genealogy that is continuous: an acknowledgement that the articulations Western feminist
variations are necessarily built upon a longer, historical expression of these values. Moreover,
each wave of feminism is necessarily partial and dependent on their relationship to past and
future waves of feminism for their form and meaning. This does not necessarily assume the
superiority of the past, or the present, as is the tendency in discourses of linear time and progress.
However, it does help contextualise the movement within a broader, more dynamic tapestry than
is possible with the reduction of feminism to one set of binary, generational antagonisms. I
regard this as a productive way to think through contemporary and digital feminisms.
Posthumanist methodology therefore speaks to politics, and a concern with the
articulation and imagination of social movements. This is inherently a project of the imagination
as well as practice, as feminism is articulated through certain core values and goals. It offers both
the framework and the direction for the examination of feminist meaning and politics within the
unique contexts of neoliberalism and the digital age.

Cooking Literature: Reading Food and Femininities

Cooking literature has taken many forms in Western history, including handwritten aides-
memoires scrawled in domestic manuals; scrappy home collections of clippings, marginalia and
recipe cards; collectively compiled community and church cookbooks; and, more recent
celebrity-chef offerings comprised of autobiographical intimacies and glossy, glamorously styled

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images. This codification of the standard Western recipe format provides one of the most
obvious generic precursors to the food blog.
My examination of cooking literature in the digital age serves to refute the tendency to
relegate print technologies to the shadows of the spotlight directed upon new media. I wish to
begin with evidence that cookbooks have continued to flourish and complement both food
television and digital food media. Despite the Food Network’s tremendous success in making
food television popular, the publication and sales of cookbooks have increased exponentially.
Rather than being eclipsed by food television, cookbooks have forged a symbiotic relationship
with contemporary food media platforms. As Miller documents, in “2004, half of the twenty-five
top sell[ing cookbooks] were ‘written’ by Food Network presenters” (2007, p. 118).
Consequently, food blogs reflect the recursivity of food media for rather than providing freely
accessible recipe content to displace printed cookbooks – in the manner that online news sources
have tended to make print newspapers obsolete – food blogs have forged a niche market for
cookbooks by food bloggers. For food bloggers, the publishing contract legitimates and offers a
potential revenue stream for their digital labour. Alternatively, for publishing houses, food
bloggers offer the advantages of a visible portfolio through which the quality of their content
may be assessed and, often, a loyal and preformed audience base. While hard data on the number
of food bloggers offered cookbook contracts is hard to ascertain, it is generally agreed that the
tipping point for this trend occurred around 2011 (Simpson, 2011; Jacob, 2011). As blogger
Nicky Simpson recounts: “The first signed book contracts by food bloggers were a small
sensation… nowadays publishing houses and agents are screening the food blogosphere quite
thoroughly for new talents – and the continuing success of food bloggers’ cookbooks proves
them just right” (2011). The multitude of publishing offers granted to bloggers reveals the

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continuing fetish for and value of the materiality of the printed word, despite cyberspace offering
more recipe information than could ever be published or organised in book format.
Cookbooks have long been recognised as key sites for circulating ideas by and about
gender roles and femininity. Cookbooks situate food preparation within the province of women’s
labour – aside from the occasional, hypermasculinised act of barbequing – and inversely have
presented men as unwilling and unable to cook (Neuhaus, 1999; DeVault, 1991). Historically,
cookbooks were integral objects in marking a woman’s coming of age through marriage and the
formal responsibility for a household’s cooking and domestic labour. Cookbooks were often
given as wedding presents and, due to “the cookbook’s long association with women and their
domestic roles in the kitchen, some people argue that such works are innately conservative”
(Inness, 2005, p. 3). Accordingly, historians generally agree that the majority of authors and
readers of cookbooks were women (Theophano, 2002; McFeely, 2001; Inness, 2005; Neuhaus,
1999) and that cookbooks have generally perpetuated the conflation of foodwork with ‘natural’
femininity.
Cookbooks also evidence the mutually constitutive entanglements between domestic
technologies and women’s embodied labour practices. As Theophano describes:

Cookbooks survived the women who used them, exposing the stresses of everyday
handling with their residues of grease and flecks of batter, frayed pages, and singed
edges...Alive with the personal traces of its owner, a woman’s cookbook became a
talisman for those who followed…‘handheld’ and handmade, recipe books might be seen
as ‘extensions of the body and of the maternal figure’ who created them (2002, p. 89)

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With this quote Theophano summarises the dynamism with which women engaged with
their cookbooks. Women were not only embodied within their personal cookbooks, but the
material specificities of the cookbook technology shaped how women physically approached
their kitchen labour: hunching over a cookbook on their counter, inadvertently smearing pages
with greasy fingers, storing personal notes and reflections with marginalia. In this way,
cookbook technologies lay the groundwork for establishing the textual archiving, circulation and
appropriation upon which the contemporary food blog is based.
Despite the cookbook’s reproduction of conservative gender ideologies many scholars
have pointed out evidence of women’s resistance that takes place through cooking literature. For
example, a feminist project has emerged around the recognition that cookbook technologies
uniquely record and produce women’s autobiographies, allowing historians and folklorists
seeking to read and recreate snapshots of women’s daily lives. As Theophano explains: “While
many women left precious little behind…often their cookbooks provide enough to catch a
glimpse of the person…After years of daily use, the cookbook becomes a memoir, a diary – a
record of life” (2002, p. 121). Cooking literature is a valuable primary source for this task,
particularly given the tendency for women and accounts of domesticity to be excluded from
official historical records. Women’s autobiographical inscriptions are not just made through text
but also materially, for instance through the “home-produced books [that] resemble a collage or a
scrapbook in which print and script were placed side by side” (Theophano, 2002, p. 183). This
pastiche and fragmentation directly linked to the “episodic, anecdotal, nonchronological and
disjunctive” (Tye, 2010, p. 33) qualities of women’s autobiographical writing and the temporal
structure of their daily routines. While printed recipes were, on the one hand, designed to
standardise food preparation, they were also “works-in-progress…added to, altered, and

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transformed to suit the idiosyncratic needs of each household” (Theophano, 2002, p. 187).
Through marginalia, clippings and adaptations, women imbued these recipes with personal
significance within the personal spheres of family and community whom they brought together
through their foodwork.
Cookbooks provided a legitimate platform for women’s authorship and personal
expression, both through their inadvertent recording of women’s autobiographies and their
explicit use by women to record and circulate political commentary. For example, Neuhaus
describes how cookbooks as a genre were reflective of the contradictions and ambivalence of the
post-war U.S. for, “although they may have urged their readers to pour their creative and
intellectual energies into baking the perfect layer cake, [they] simultaneously revealed the
tenuousness of the domestic ideal” (1999, p. 531). This sentiment was best captured in Peg
Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book, which was published in 1960 and quickly became a
bestseller. This reluctant book with a tongue-in-cheek tone “was written with a premise that was
then considered heretical: cooking is not joyful, and it should be done as quickly as possible,
preferably with ingredients readily available in the cupboard” and included recipes such as “Sole
Survivor (baked fish fillets with shrimp sprinkled on top), Saturday Chicken (chicken, paprika,
cream soup) and Fake Hollandaise sauce (mayonnaise, milk, salt, pepper and lemon juice,
accompanied by a chorus of “Gloomy Sunday” in the background)” (Bosman, 2010).
Theorists disagree on the political and subversive potential of this book. For example,
Neuhaus contends that the radical impact of this book was limited as it “did not fundamentally
nor overtly call gender norms into question. Even if you hate to cook, Bracken implied, as a
woman it would be your job to cook” (1999, p. 545). Nevertheless, Neuhaus acknowledges the
utility of Bracken’s reassurance that “it was okay to not find deep fulfillment in daily food

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preparation and offered limited solutions, such as avoiding elaborate canapes and desserts and
relying on processed foods” (1999, p. 545). Inness advocates more strongly for the feminist
potential within Bracken’s book. She contends that the I Hate to Cook Book is radical
specifically because it “suggested that women did not just tolerate cooking but hated it, a
revolutionary observation because generations of Americans have assumed that women enjoy
cooking or at least find it tolerable as one of their ‘natural’ gender roles” (2005, p. 62). Yet,
Inness probably overstates the importance of women’s ‘love’ for cooking as a leading factor in
their oppression by foodwork: traditional ideologies of obligatory domesticity were hardly
guided by such concerns as women’s affective response to their domestic labour, but were
ideologically imposed as intrinsic qualities of good and natural femininity.
Alternatively, Polan disparagingly describes Bracken’s cookbook as the reduction of
cooking “to mechanical, engineered solutions to empirical problems” (2011, p. 6). This rather
dismissive reading of Bracken’s work might be explained by Polan’s reference to the text as part
of his study of Julia Child – and her famed television show The French Chef which was released
during the same time period as Bracken’s book – whose quite different feminist response to the
dreary obligation of food labour was to envision such work as an opportunity for the mastery of
sophisticated French fare and the masculinist techniques of the professional chef, and to
permeate the entire venture with a sense of pleasure, adventurousness and fun. It is this
alternative approach that will be examined in the following section.
This brief exploration of cooking literature reveals a food technology that is diverse and
still evolving in conjunction with new media. Cooking literature provides many direct links to
the generic conventions seen in food blogs, and offers important clues for how women’s

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engagement with food media and technologies may be interpreted as an act of political
resistance.

Julia Child and Food Television

The I Hate to Cook Book emerges from a U.S. post-war period defined by modernity,
patriotism and consumerism. During this period, the nation witnessed and was culturally defined
by the rise of suburban living and the celebration of standardized mass-production. The
nationalist rhetoric of modernity also introduced many technological processes and gadgets into
the house that infused the private sphere and its activities with a sense of scientific progress and
national uniformity. Moreover, modernity and its concomitant consumerism were central to the
construction of the ideal female citizen as imagined in post-war America. As Cohen writes,
“[l]oyal female citizens were defined in consumerist ways, as keepers of the homefront fires
through their own disciplined, patriotic market behavior as well as through the enforcement of
high moral standards in others” (2003, p. 75).
At the same time that modernity demanded visible accoutrements of national progress, it
dictated that women’s place remained within the home. To this end, the post-war kitchen and its
technologies were inspired by “a masculine model, the chemist in the laboratory” (McFeely,
2001, pp. 41-42). While Inness argues that this pseudo-scientific domesticity “was especially
important for women since, in the past, they had been stereotyped as antimodern” (2005, p. 25),
Neuhaus counters that this domestic modernity reflected “a cultural need to reaffirm women’s
traditional roles. Reiterating that a woman’s place was in the kitchen was an effective
counterpoint to the challenge that women’s war-time employment presented to traditional gender
norms among white, middle-class families” (1999, p. 532). The modern revitalisation of the

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kitchen and the cooking woman therefore juxtaposed new values of precision and efficiency with
traditionally domestic femininity, modernising women’s roles without allowing women
themselves to be modernised.
One of the key U.S. technologies to emerge from this time period was the television,
which was prominently positioned within the new suburban home and an essential platform for
building and celebrating the institutions of the nation and the nuclear family. As Spigel writes,
“in postwar years the television set became a central figure in representations of family
relationships” (1992, p. 36). The liveness and uniformity of programming were key elements in
television’s construction of the national imaginary. Moreover, television proved an ideal medium
for bridging the geographical distance that threatened to disrupt the transmission of matrilineal
cooking pedagogies.
The spatial organisation of the suburbs, the individuation of the nuclear family as the
family unit, and the modern emphasis on mobility and transport contributed to the condition of
women “marrying young, moving away from their parents to new regions of the country, and
therefore lacking in the experience of basic cooking and fundamental household lore passed on
from generation to generation” (Polan, 2011, p. 48). Food media – primarily cookbooks, radio
and food television – therefore stepped in to fill these gaps of knowledge for young homemakers.
However, television clearly proved the superior medium for this purpose as unlike radio and
cooking literature it was able to return people to the methods by which they had learned “to cook
for generations, by watching their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, or the woman next door in
action. The medium overcame the limitations imposed by the printed page; the clumsiness of
explaining in words how physical tasks were done” (McFeely, 2001, p. 122).

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Not only did television provide an informative and reliable way to transmit food
pedagogies, but food television programming proved to be beneficial for television stations as
well. As Polan explains:

Cooking shows were an easy, generally cheap way to fill up airtime…they were indeed
among the first kinds of daytime offering to be added, to most TV stations’ programming.
In this regard, it is noteworthy how many manuals about the practice of television
production during the early years assumed that a kitchen set would be an inevitable,
permanent part of any studio setup (2011, p. 47).

These production-based motivations for food television shows generally resulted in a
flock of unmemorable, female food hosts concerned primarily with teaching the rigid processes
of home economics. Or, alternatively, when these food shows contained qualities that were
eminently unusual – as with the 1950s San Francisco program It’s Fun to Eat which was hosted
by blind, Latina chef Elena Zelayeta and her young son Billy – the program was nevertheless
characterised as “forgettable fare…planned for immediate consumption and assumed to possess
no enduring impact” (Polan, 2013, p. 347). However, this notion of food television as severe and
fleeting was permanently altered by the work of Julia Child.
Child’s television show The French Chef debuted in 1963 and built upon the extensive
instructional work of Child’s co-authored book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Arguably
her success on the television platform can be attributed to her “willingness to get physical with
food” (Polan, 2011, p. 15) which was readily captured by the screen. Child’s “strapping, six-
foot-two-inch bundle of vivacity and boundless energy and enthusiasm” (Polan, 2011, p. 2)
evoked a television presence that made her captivating to viewers and successfully demonstrated

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the transformative qualities of French cooking that she sought to express. Indeed, the highlights
of the show most immortalised in the public imaginary are visual and visceral: her handling of
several large and writhing lobsters and her failed potato pancake flip with its ironic teachable
moment: “You can always pick it up… You’re alone in the kitchen – who is going to see”
(Shapiro, 2007, p. 119). This skilful intertwining of Child’s physical embodiment and
television’s technological materiality were crucially linked to the sensory pleasures of cooking
and eating, and to the vitality and activity of modern America.
Moreover, Child was able to successfully use the medium of television to rejuvenate the
recipe narrative, creating suspense through the presentation of the completed dish as the teaser to
the show, conjuring up plot twists through her failures in the kitchen, and ending each episode in
the dining room with a shot of her eating the finished product at the dining table. This focus on
suspense and the ultimate pleasure of Child’s work helped distinguish her detailed cooking
tutorials from the banal and obligatory food labour of the housewife. Instead, her performative
food labour was aligned with the masculine tradition of professional French cooking. For
example, Child’s intrusion into the hypermasculine space of famous Parisian cooking school Le
Cordon Bleu is reinforced by details that after “a false start in a ‘housewife’ level class…she
[was] placed in a yearlong program for professional restaurateurs” (The Julia Child Foundation,
2014), a narrative that highlights the exuberance and ambition of modern American women. This
consumer-centred American modernity was reinforced by Child’s promotion of special
ingredients, her liberal use of specialised gizmos and gadgets, and her advocacy of “an
acquisitive encounter with another culture whose way of being one could approximate through
things, if not by making an actual trip to the place” (Polan, 2011, p. 136).

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The lifestyling of food labour that Child endorsed, undertaken with pleasure as a form of
worldly experience and cultural capital, rebranded domesticity as a way for the educated,
affluent woman to find creative fulfillment in her kitchen. This ideology was part of a broader
shift in gendered food work as “[w]omen no longer believed they should conceal their effort...If
they chose to cook, they wanted credit for it” (McFeely, 2001, p. 125). However, it is also clear
that such practices were delimited by privilege and socioeconomic status, as Florio notes “Julia
Child…ignited a competitive cooking frenzy among overeducated married couples, but … on a
daily basis, women needed quick and easy recipes that turned out right every time” (as cited in
Inness, 2005, p. 68).
Child’s investment in cooking as a lifestyle activity and creative investment has perhaps
contributed to her resurgent popularity in contemporary U.S. foodie discourse. The use of Child
as a nostalgic, cultural trope can be seen in the film Julie and Julia (Ephron et al, 2009). This
film is an adaptation of a book by Julie Powell – a blogger who cooks all the recipes listed in
Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year – that is interspersed with an autobiography of
Child’s life. Powell’s story is firmly embedded within the retreatist values of New Domesticity:
She is literally situated within the culture of anxiety in the aftermath of post-9/11 New York as
she holds down a precarious and emotionally draining day job as a call-centre operator managing
the insurance claims of 9/11 victims’ families. This unhappiness is the trigger for her
postfeminist makeover and retreat, as she seeks purpose within the creative and self-nurturing act
of cooking, challenge in the ambition to cook each one of Child’s recipes in the year, and
community in sharing these experiences on her blog. According to Thoma, this film reproduces
Julia Child’s “comfort narrative by depicting the non-threatening and circumscribed space of a

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conventionally feminized domestic sphere and dramatizing the rewards of discerning
consumption, both of food and of less perishable commodities” (Thoma, 2014, p. 108).
In many ways, Powell is figured in binary opposition to Child. Whereas Child’s culinary
knowledge was born of her experiences exploring and living in Europe, Powell’s journey takes
place metaphorically in her tiny New York apartment kitchen. While Child’s claim to authorship
is based on her personal acquisition of professional skills and knowledge, writing original French
recipes for American cooks, Powell uses her imitation of Child’s recipes as a foundation for her
own self-actualisation, which she uses to author and share her personal postfeminist makeover.
These oppositional contexts and purposes are reflected in the respective platforms of television
and social media. The French Chef heralded exciting new discourses about women and cooking,
and U.S. modernity more broadly. Using the trope of France – and its symbolism within
American culture – Child appealed to the newfound sense of leisure, mastery, education and
pleasure of cooking in modern times. This discourse, as well as Child’s expansive cultural
presence, were facilitated by the intimate and physical affordances of the television which
successfully brought to life her exuberant, physical and eccentric embodiment of food pedagogy
and broadcast it across the country as an example of the optimism and possibilities of American
modernity. In contrast, food blogging as demonstrated by Powell takes on a more broody tenor,
resulting from a somewhat narcissistic and self-soothing sense of desperation that is
inadvertently yet hopefully broadcast to a wider community. While television encourages
performative expression, blogging is conducted more on the scale of confessional asides and
presented as a casual and creative leisure activity.
Television has long captured and reflected the changing status of American femininity –
and its relationship to food labour – between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It offers a

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useful paradigm for thinking about blogging in the contemporary food and cultural context for,
as will be further discussed in the next section, post-war domestic and family ideals are often
referenced in food blogging while simultaneously evidencing significant differences in how
technologies and feminine labour bring about this ideal.

Convenience Foods

The modern imbrication of the television set with the American nuclear family was not
just due to its positioning within the central gathering space of the living room but also its
contribution to a quintessential snapshot of 1950s American life: the television dinner. I therefore
seek to focus on not simply the readily recognisable technologies of modernity – such as the
Cadillac, the television and kitchen appliances – but the less overt domestic technologies that
comprised canned, frozen and boxed convenience foods which were a key addition to the
modern kitchen. The popularity and prevalence of convenience foods was imbued with
nationalist pride, as Christopher Holmes Smith describes how pre-packaged dinners were
“conflated with TV in order to denote similarly modern notions of sophistication and
prosperity….[giving] material expression to the nation’s desire to celebrate the end of scarcity
through a postwar lifestyle of leisure” (2001, p. 175).
The convenience foods that flourished in the 1950s were a product of the increasing value
of the brand-name, mass-produced items upon which U.S. consumer-based nationalism was
founded. McFeely notes the predominance of convenience foods in the 1950s, writing:

To inspire and aid their cooking, women of the 1950s had frozen foods, canned goods,
packaged mixes – a host of products. Some of them were new: instant mashed potatoes,
aerosol whipped cream, Cheese Whiz, Bisquick, and Lipton’s dried onion soup (notice

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that it’s virtually impossible to talk about the fifties without mentioning brand names).
Others, like Jell-O (invented in 1897), were old-timers that achieved their crowning
moment (2001, p. 93).

While there is consensus on the general prevalence of convenience foods and their link to
nationalism, their political impact for women is more equivocal. For instance, scholars variously
defend and vilify convenience foods based on their impact on women’s creativity in the kitchen.
On the one hand, McFeely (2001) argues that convenience foods robbed home cooks of their
creativity, reducing them to automatons at the receiving end of precise and standardised
corporate instructions for food preparation. On the other hand, there is evidence that much
convenience food advertising was geared towards encouraging women to garnish packaged
products with additions. For instance, Inness argues that convenience foods

offered endless possibilities to decorate French fries, instant mashed potatoes, and a
variety of other plain foods. Such simple variations of convenience foods, whether by
tossing together a few cans or sprinkling a topping on a dish of instant mashed potatoes…
appealed to many busy women who lacked time (or desire) to cook more elaborate meals
(2005, p. 28)

not only allowing but in fact demanding women apply creativity to their use. Smith affirms this
point, writing that “women’s magazines, rather than bemoaning frozen foods as the end of the
amateur chef’s ability to infuse her culinary creations with individuality, instead advised their
readers to consider the relatively bland seasonings of most frozen foods as their opportunity to
express their unique sense of taste” (2001, p. 188).

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Similarly to Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book, then, convenience foods did not challenge
the notion that women should remain in charge of the family’s food labour. Inness states that
“convenience food literature conveyed the radical notion that cooks should speed up their work
as much as possible, and it was acceptable not to cook from scratch” (2005, p. 19) and, while the
national pride in efficiency and modernity dictated that such work should be accelerated through
the employment of whitegoods and standardised pre-prepared food items, what remained
ambiguous from convenience food rhetoric was what women could or should do with any
surplus of time generated through their usage. While Inness contends that convenience food
technologies created the time for women to sow the seeds of the second wave feminist
movement, I suggest that these claims falter when we consider the ways that convenience foods
were interlaced with women’s material labour practices and the gendered obligations which
structured their daily lives.
While convenience foods did in fact perpetuate ideologies of women’s blissful and
impressively efficient return to the home, the reality of the post-war period was that women were
spending “more hours working outside of the home than they ever had before” (Smith, 2001, p.
190). Convenience foods might then be regarded as a necessity given the overall reduction in
time women had to complete their standard domestic tasks. Moreover, it seemed that
convenience foods themselves did little to challenge the associations of femininity with food
labour. In fact, evidence from industry magazines suggests that convenience foods were
purposely modified in order to appease the “nostalgic yearning in every woman’s heart to retain
that home made, fresh touch” (Smith, 2001, p. 188). In my opinion, this industry editorial makes
clear the ways that women were, if not deceived then at least sensitive to the ideological
manipulation of corporations who were at once encouraged to adapt their domestic routines to

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these incorporate modern food products while maintaining the illusion of traditional home
cooking.
Convenience foods were targeted towards women, but were really paraded as national
symbols of the modernity and progress achieved by masculinist corporations and science. In fact,
convenience foods worked to make further invisible and devalue women’s domestic labour in the
modernist kitchen. Polan describes convenience foods as representative of “the sort of wondrous
scientific discovery in which postwar America had a deep investment, as a magical
transformative power” (2011, p. 21). The invisibility of women’s materiality in this process is
confirmed by McFeely who writes that in “cold war America, the effort of cooking was supposed
to be concealed. The hot kitchen, the greasy or floury fingers, the sweaty brow were not meant to
be seen” (2001, p. 101). Accordingly, women’s labour was rendered invisible and undervalued,
with the success of convenience food dinners largely attributed to the innovativeness of food
corporations and the male food scientists and engineers that had designed these products.
Women’s food labour could be further taken for granted, and while the time it took to produce
dinner from convenience foods might be reduced, the existence of these ‘creative flourishes’
suggests that women could still not easily or guiltlessly refuse this gendered labour.
Convenience foods were of themselves unable to disturb the gendered associations
between food labour, femininity and morality. If anything, this association between women’s
food work and morality has only intensified in the current era. Ironically, while new feminine
traditionalists in the blogosphere reference the cheery aesthetic of post-war modernism – with
the contemporary re-creation of suburban bliss, the nostalgic performance of raising young
children in the nuclear family, and the un-ironic adoption of a Stepford-wife aesthetic – their
approach to food work really belongs in the pre-modern era. The conveniences of modernity are

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proudly shunned in favour of rediscovering labour and time intensive cooking methods such as
canning vegetables, preserving jams and baking bread from scratch, all undertaken in the spirit of
hands-on, creative self-actualisation. While the suburban nuclear family is referenced, it arises
not as a result of appliances and convenience foods but rather through ever-more backbreaking
efforts of women in the kitchen. The ‘magically transformative’ qualities of modernity are no
longer produced through technological gadgets, science or national optimism. Rather, these
performances of effortless but abundant mass food production that take place on food blogs are
the result of women’s embodied labour. While the digital platform allows some bloggers to reap
benefits and recognition for their work, digital technologies are generally used to disguise the
true inputs of women’s embodied labour practices.
These brief discussions of different domestic technologies lay out a trajectory of
women’s material labour practices and the construction of ideal femininities that have been
wrought through food work. These discussions set the groundwork for the analysis of food blogs
as female media productions that prescribe particular forms of feminine food labour in a
mutually constitutive relationship between technology and women’s material embodiment.

Digital Food Porn and the Postfeminist Body
Food blogs might be interpreted as forms of feminine resistance in several ways. As has
been discussed, they do enact traditional feminine identities but they do so on a platform that
enables individual women to profit financially from this labour. Furthermore, although food
blogs depict food work that is performed using traditional, labour-intensive methods, it is
combined with digital and creative labour that signals their proficiency in modern technological
processes. While all of these paradoxes offer interesting contradictions for thinking through
feminism and the digital postfeminist subject, the analysis in this section maintains a specific

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focus on the role of digital food porn as a response to the postfeminist discourses that constrain
the female body.
Food blogs, as with most feminized digital spaces, place a premium on the visual.
Alongside the attention to website design and the aesthetic theme of their brand, food blogs
include extensive collections of digital images that accompany each recipe post. Continuing the
narrative of women’s historical engagement with food labour technologies, I examine the ways
that various food blog technologies – including cameras, blogging platforms, social media and
laptops – shape women’s material practices and their representations of the female body in
cyberspace. This analysis leads to an acknowledgement of women’s digital media production as
a response to contradictory postfeminist discourses surrounding the female body.

A Brief History of Food Porn Across Media

The term ‘food porn’ was first reported in print in 1979 when it was juxtaposed against
the term ‘right stuff’ by Michael Jacobson, the founder and executive director of the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, to connote the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods
(McBride, 2010, p. 38). Its counterpart, gastro-porn, emerged two years earlier in a New York
Times review of books that noted the “curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques
and manuals on the preparation of food” (Cockburn, 1977). Although food porn is not a new
term, its current circulation is tied to changes in the food media landscape that have occurred
since the 1990s such as the exponential rise in food print media and advertising (Miller, 2007;
Johnston & Baumann, 2010) and the encroaching dominance of the Food Network since its
launch in 1993.
After achieving mediocre ratings through the 1990s, the Food Network reversed its
fortunes at the turn of the century with a visual rebranding focused on evocative food styling and

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shot selections that were readily analogised with pornographic conventions. Newman describes
the camera’s use of vivid imagery and close-ups as the “food equivalent of pornography’s
graphic depictions of isolated body parts and sexual acts” (2013, p. 333). These images were
accompanied by a shift from hosts who were professional chefs to hosts deemed television
‘personalities’ – “usually women, who lick their fingers or use sensual terms” (McBride, 2010, p.
38) – which has aided current food television’s “obvious and usually facile comparisons with
sex” (McBride, 2010, p. 38). Bill Buford uses the example of Giada De Laurentiis to characterise
this tactical shift: “Giada De Laurentiis…is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise…
[she] is lithe and young and pretty, a prettiness that no Food Network executive is going to allow
her to hide behind an apron…She has, in effect, replaced the forty-six-year-old Mario Batali”
(2006). Such changes lead Chan to aptly note that “TV cooking shows today are, in a word,
pornography” (2003, p. 47).
This conception of food porn has at once been modified and exaggerated by digital
media. Ibrahim suggests that the “term ‘food porn’ is increasingly used to describe the act of
styling and capturing food on mobile gadgets, eliciting an invitation to gaze and vicariously
consume, and to tag images of food through digital platforms” (2015, p. 2). I would add that the
significance of digital food porn lies in its deployment by female food bloggers as a playful,
creative and entrepreneurial response to the prevalent representation of hypersexualised and self-
disciplined female bodies in postfeminist culture. That is, digital food porn’s status as a form of
user-generated content distinguishes it from food porn produced and circulated on other media
platforms. Tied as it is to the social media accounts of individual ‘amateur’ females, and taking
place within a project of self-branding (Banet-Weiser, 2012), digital food porn is a symbol of
agency and digital identity play by postfeminist subjects.

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The potential of food porn as an expression of female resistance is dependent upon
understanding food porn as a response to postfeminist subjectivity and dominant discourses on
the postfeminist body. Food porn is inextricable from postfeminism in three primary ways. First
and foremost, food porn speaks to the centrality of hypersexualisation to postfeminist media and
subjectivity. Hypersexual postfeminist subjects “brazenly enjoy their sexuality, without fear of
the sexual double standard” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 21). This is expressed through concepts earlier
described such as Susan Douglas’ ‘ironic sexism’ (2010) and Ariel Levy’s ‘raunch culture’
(2005). However, hypersexuality manifests in multiple contradictions that the postfeminist
subject must navigate, such as the normalisation of hook-up culture and casual sex alongside
concomitant attention to the threats of college rape culture, the alleged increase in women’s
sexual freedom that coexists alongside abstinence only education and the repeal of access to
abortion facilities (Banet-Weiser, 2014), and the increased scrutiny of both young girls and older
women as sexual objects (Negra, 2009).
In this sex-saturated context where “all women’s bodies are available to be coded
sexually” (Gill, 2007, p. 150), sexuality loses much of its utility as a tool for feminist analysis. At
the same time, it is difficult to critique this “new regime of sexual meanings based on female
consent, equality, participation and pleasure” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 18) without attracting
suspicion and fears of perhaps repeating the deeply divisive feminist antagonisms of the anti-
porn/pro-sex factions which came to a head at the Barnard Conference on Women and Sexuality
in 1982. For these reasons, I draw on Elspeth Probyn’s use of eating as an analytical construct
that counters this social sex fatigue. Writing in the aftermath of the HIV pandemic, Probyn notes:
“Faced with…the sheer banality of sexual representation, the domain of eating is, I think,
reintroducing concepts of pleasure into the realm of the popular” (2000, p. 6). That is, by

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exploring the metaphors long forged between eating and sex – as presented in food porn – it is
possible to revisit questions and critiques of female sexual agency and embodiment in an age of
pervasive hypersexuality and pleasure-based subjectivity.
Secondly, food porn is intertwined with postfeminism’s “obsessive preoccupation with
the body” (Gill, 2007, p. 149) which is presented “simultaneously as women’s source of power
and as always unruly, requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and re-modelling”
(Gill, 2007, p. 149). Food porn at once describes hedonistic corporeal pleasures all the while it is
paired with performances of conservative, girlie femininity. While this might superficially be
understood as a newfound freedom from the fraught, socialised relationship between women and
food, I would argue that food porn represents a false liberation, celebrating these contemporary
consumption disorders while doing little to challenge the overwhelmingly rigid standards to
which women’s bodies continue to be held, despite the increasing hype around ‘plus-size’
models and ‘real’ women circulated within mainstream media and the beauty industry.
Thirdly, food porn offers interesting commentary on women’s consumption practices,
literally concerning consumption while also part of a movement from empowering consumption
to empowering production that takes place through fetishising feminised DIY activities in the
private sphere. This encompasses DIY culture’s “180-degree turnaround from the consumerist
fantasies of the late 1990s and early 2000s” (Matchar, 2013, p. 5) that is driven by “longing for a
more authentic, meaningful life in an economically and environmentally uncertain world”
(Matchar, 2013, p. 5). For these reasons, digital food porn may be read as a feminised though
limited user-generated response to the multiple contradictions surrounding the consumption,
production, objectification and sexualisation of the postfeminist body.

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Bodies On and Behind the Screen

Although food porn has been practiced in many iterations on other media platforms in the
last few decades, digital food porn offers new and important perspectives on food photography
and media due to its reliance on the logics of user-generated content. As the platforms on which
food can be captured, recorded and circulated have multiplied, food photography has
increasingly become a mundane amateur activity that has become commonplace for diners at
home and in restaurants. While I wish to temper the heady rhetoric of user-generated content and
empowering entrepreneurialism that surrounds the feminine blogosphere and social media/Web
2.0, I also acknowledge that social media content generation clearly offers the technological
capacity for individuals to respond to mainstream media and to widely circulate these
productions. This linkage of media production to the individual obviously differs qualitatively
from the agency implicit in de Laurentiis and Nigella Lawson’s strategically performed sexuality
as their mediation through the channels of media conglomerates are always accompanied by
vested corporate interests. This corporate underwriting undercuts the reading that these female
food hosts might be personally empowered by their individual performances of sexy cooking.
Alternatively, while the work of food blogging is similarly underwritten by corporations and
technology firms, bloggers generally exhibit more personal control over their digital brand and
identity. Indeed, it is this very fact that renders significant the choice taken by most food
bloggers to forego sexually explicit presentations of self or visual representations of their own
bodies.
At the base level, female food bloggers’ digital food porn serves to the fulfil the
scopophilia traditionally occupied by the female body on screen (Mulvey, 1992), sublimating
this objectification of the body with sensually evocative images of food. While women may not

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be intentionally or consciously styling these images as parodies of the female body in
pornography, they must be aware that images of food serve as acceptable substitutes for their
own bodies in meeting the requirements of visual interest in feminised social media, and offering
a ‘body’ upon which female subjectivity and authority are predicated. For example, unlike
female-authored fashion blogs which iteratively and prominently depict the blogger’s body in
various clothes and poses, food blogging platforms commonly erase all traces of the blogger’s
body.
Food porn does not challenge the notion that women’s subjectivity remains tied to the
body. However, the authorial voice and influence of female food bloggers is no longer strictly
tied to literal, visual representations of their bodies. While the blogger’s body or face may be
depicted on the biographical About page, the visual interest of food blogs relies on images of
food. Food porn therefore acts as a digital avatar for the food blogger, possessing the
advantageous qualities of endless transformation and the guilt-free evocation of hedonistic
pleasures. Moreover, in drawing the viewer’s attention to food porn as a media production food
bloggers force attention to the creative and productivity capacity of the female body. This
subverts the typical position of women’s sexual objectification in visual media. In this sense,
food porn is successful in relieving some of the stresses of regulating the postfeminist body by
allowing subjects to evade the disciplinary gaze while nevertheless adhering to prescribed
performances of successful, heteronormative femininity. Moreover, as the hypersexual
expectations of the postfeminist subject are transferred onto food, food bloggers are freed to
perform a comparatively asexual femininity evoked through the pairing of food porn with
mundane recollections of domesticity, wholesome girlie pleasures and heteronormative family
life. This erasure amounts to a subversion of the male gaze, as food bloggers sublimate the

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sexualising and objectifying qualities of this gaze from the female body onto the depiction of
food and thus allow their female embodiment to be invoked for its active and agentive creative
labour behind the camera and the screen. Food merely constitutes a placeholder or pleasurably
generative avatar, liberating women from postfeminism’s oppressive and disciplinary
surveillance regimes.
My argument that food porn effectively stands in as a placeholder for the female body is
based upon long-established semiotic links between women’s bodies and food, as well as the
specificities of contemporary food porn conventions that reference representations of the female
body in pornographic and fashion media. The semiotic connection is derived from Carol J.
Adams’ work in articulating the connections between the violence and power inherent to the
consumption of animals and the sexualisation of the female body. Adams (2010) outlines the
systematic, patriarchal connections between eating and sex in The Sexual Politics of Meat. Using
Margaret Homans’ term ‘absent referent,’ Adams describes the process of objectification
necessary to socially sanctify the violent practices of eating animals and sexualising women:

Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was
killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the
animal)...Animals are the absent referent in the act of meat eating; they also become the
absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable (2010, p. 13)

Adams supports this argument in her follow-up book, The Pornography of Meat (2003)
which offers an extensive visual collection of the feminisation and sexualisation of meat, and the
animalisation of sexualised women. This link between food and the female body, and the
object/subject power relationships connoted by eating and sexualisation, are integral to

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contextualising food porn within a history of the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, the
substitutability of food and the female body, and the significance of women’s agentive, creative
and potentially parodic deployment of these pornographic visual conventions. In reference to the
stylistic conventions of food porn, evidence will be provided to show the preference for qualities
of immediacy, action, intimacy and warmth in current food photography. These qualities are
designed to rupture the smooth and unpunctuated surface of the digital screen and evoke a
visceral response. They also purposefully reference aspects of the sexual and sexualised female
body through the motifs of leaky food/bodies, the depth of food/bodies, and the styling of
food/bodies.
I here provide an analysis of food porn to document the main stylistic conventions
currently circulating in the blogosphere, as well as to underscore the ways that food porn
metaphorically and semiotically references the sexualised female body. I use these examples to
explore the notion that food porn has been formulated as a response to the contradictions and
ambivalences that shape the postfeminist body.

Leaky Bodies

Food porn frequently alludes to the fluidity, messiness and merged positions of the
sexualized female body through the styling and positioning of food. This point is most clearly
demonstrated through the strong aesthetic preference for food oozing in various manifestations.
Oozing is present in the popped soft yolks of poached eggs which dribble onto a bed of sharp
green asparagus, the molten centres bursting out of chocolate lava cakes, and the creamy frosting
and sauces drooling down multi-layered cakes.

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Figure 1. Asparagus, Bacon and Strawberry Salad with Poached Egg (Rusev, 2015)

This image by blogger Nora Rušev captures the current popularity of poached and soft-
boiled eggs in the blogosphere to enact the dramatic visual effect of oozing. This image of the
popped yolk dribbling over the salad is featured as the lead image while a similarly composed
image with the yolk intact appears at the very end of the blog post, indicating the relative visual
preference for oozing. The composition of this image centres the runny egg yolk, with its vivid
yellow contrasting with the predominantly green and red salad. Drawing on fact that the “most
obvious association…between sex and food is the shape of the dish in question [for] even in
elementary school, we knew about bananas” (Crumpacker, 2006, p. 23) the image
metaphorically evokes the female body, through its focus on the egg, the neat slit cut to reveal
the runny yolk, the curly fringes of the lettuce garden bed, and the sweet and soft ripeness of
vivid red strawberries.

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Helen Grace Ventura traces the use of oozing in food photography to a successful 2004
Marks & Spencer ad campaign where “movement and texture became the key aspects of interest.
Seductive voice-overs accompanied oozing, chocolate puddings, drizzled sauces and meat being
craved. Juices trickled in slow motion, intensifying the portrayal” (2012). The immediacy and
warmth of these viscous sauces were seen as an important departure from the precision and
perfectionism in the detailed images published by Martha Stewart’s early food media – driven by
the ethos that “[p]resentation must be attended to with care and precision” (McFeely, 2001, pp.
156-157) – and the static, still life representations of overladen tables and ornate dishes that were
popular in the second half of the twentieth century.
The demand for oozing can perhaps be attached to the need for food media audiences to
consume food through external visual and auditory cues. The moment of anticipation before the
chocolate lava cake or soft-boiled egg is split open is a now tired trope for dramatic tension on
food competition shows, with the presence or absence of a sufficiently gooey filling used to
judge the technical skill of the cook and success or failure of the dish. Moreover, successfully
capturing oozing demands planning, action and urgency on the part of food photographers. As
food photographer Jonathan Gayman recounts, “I recently shot a soufflé for a magazine…we
built the set right next to the oven, so I could shoot as soon as the soufflé came out... Got the
money shot in three takes” (2012). Gayman’s recollection of this task establishes the active and
masculinised subject position of the photographer. Indeed, oozing literally recalls the ‘money
shot’ of pornography as chocolate sauces and yolks burst to life in a manner that speaks to what
Susan Faludi described as the “on command male (erection) orgasm [that] is the central
convention of the industry: all porn scenes should end with a visible ejaculation” (as cited in
Chan, 2003, p. 52).

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Despite the inherent masculinity of the pornographic money shot, the oozing portrayed
here is feminised in many respects. The visual appeal of oozing is the way it engulfs and unifies
separate elements on a plate, recalling a maternal, oceanic plenitude that binds the viewer to the
screen and the image. Oozing recalls the stickiness and lubricated mergings of sex, but also the
leakiness and fluidity particular to “the female body, which bleeds, gives birth, and produces
milk” (Mizejewski 2014, p. 99). Oozing is a visual representation of the creamy textures of
typical comfort foods – mac and cheese, sticky toffee pudding and mashed potatoes with gravy –
and it is this sense of comfort and desire for both food and the female body that is purposefully
elicited by mouth-watering food porn.

Depth and the Body

Food porn styling tips generally promote compositions and angles that emphasise height,
surface, texture and depth (Arias, 2014) literally giving food ‘body.’ Accordingly, digital food
porn has popularised the motif of stacking and layering food. This is evidenced in the multi-
layered cakes, overstuffed burgers and extravagantly topped cupcakes that flourish in the food
blogosphere. I see this emphasis on depth as a response to four related phenomena in regard to
women, food, bodies and technology: counteracting the flattening qualities of the digital screen,
showcasing the increasing number of specialised baking techniques which emphasise dramatic
visual effects, alluding to the positioning of the female centrefold, and mirroring the intimate
interiority of bloggers that is shared in their confessional narratives.
Stacking gives food ‘body’ and visual interest, but this trend has also been shaped by the
affordances of digital platforms. Stacking leads to portrait orientation of images, which is
conducive to the vertical-bias of Pinterest, a crucial cross-platform marketing tool for food
bloggers. Pinterest visually arranges images according to an algorithm that favours portrait-

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oriented images that blogger Tessa Arias notes “are popular across food blogs because they are
larger and better for Pinterest” (2014).

Figure 2. Purple Ombre Sprinkles Cake (Michaelis, 2011)

Stacking also draws visual attention to the depth and texture of food, which is
exemplified in the common presentation of layer cakes with one ready slice removed. In
Stephanie Michaelis’s Purple Ombre Sprinkles Cake recipe, the striking cake is composed with
one neat triangular slice facing the viewer, plated and ready for consumption. This view makes

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apparent the contrast between the chaos suggested by the rainbow-coloured sprinkles and the
meticulously cut and shaded purple layers. The gravity-defying quality of this five-layer cake is
further emphasised through its positioning on a cake stand which allows it to tower over the
plated slice. This composition, with its ready slice and accompanying fork, invites the viewer to
participate in the fantasy that food porn is presented for their personal consumption and
participation. The waiting slice also contributes to the sense of immediacy favoured by food
porn.
The cross sections opened up by these strategically removed slices are necessary to
showcase the new array of elaborate baking techniques and effects that have gripped the food
blogosphere including chequerboard cakes; ombre and rainbow tinting; and intricate, excessive
layers. To fully appreciate these skills, the viewer is forced to glance inside via a cheeky and
engaging photographic angle that mimics the strategic poses of the playboy centrefold who
offers a thrilling, voyeuristic peek into the ‘flesh’ of the cake. However, in food porn the erotic
intimacy evoked by the centrefold is channelled through the ways that bloggers open up their
private lives and domestic spaces for public scrutiny. Moreover, in the postfeminist context, the
notion that creative skill and detailed attention must be applied not only to the superficial
appearance of a cake but also to its internal structure parallels the increasing penetration of self-
disciplinary and self-surveillance regimes into the postfeminist subject’s body and intimate life.
For instance, the fashion for Brazilian waxes and labiaplasty – the surgical reduction of
the labia minor and majora – exemplifies this increasingly penetrative, postfeminist disciplinary
gaze and its notion that bodily discipline should extend to the vagina. As Negra writes, Brazilian
waxes fall under the realm of the postfeminist popularisation of painful and intimate
pornographic aesthetics and regimes, as a procedure that “not only stylizes the female genitalia

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so as to appear pre-pubescent, [but] also reflects a misogynist belief that female genitalia are
excessively complex and need to be simplified…for the comfort and pleasure of a male sexual
partner” (2009, p. 119). If these layered cakes and oozing soft-boiled eggs are accepted as
metaphorical representations of intimate feminine parts, then this process of simplification and
sweetening becomes literally applicable.
I also wish to extend these representations of dissected cakes to Butler’s arguments about
corporeal surface and depth. Butler describes “the inner truth of gender” (2007, p. 186) as a
fabrication that emerges “as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (2007,
p. 186). This idea that binary gender is contained ‘inside’ the body is baked to realisation through
the Surprise Inside Cake
TM
, which blogger Amanda Rettke describes as “very simply a cake that
has been decorated on the inside, and offers up a surprise when you cut into it!” (n.d.). These
surprises include colours and patterns that are imprinted in cake batter, and cakes carved out and
filled with candy and cream. In this example by the Betty Crocker website, a white butter cake is
hollowed out to reveal a cache of cascading blue candies.
3

3
These tall filled cakes are also reminiscent of the stacked diaper cakes that have a long been a feature at baby
showers

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Figure 3. Surprise on the Inside Gender Reveal Cake (Betty Crocker, n.d.)

These cakes are commonly adapted for gender reveal parties which have become
prevalent in the blogosphere and widely circulated in feminised social media including Pinterest,
Etsy and Instagram. These parties serve as a celebration that takes place after a pregnant woman
has had the sex of her baby revealed by sonogram and, in the postfeminist context, can be read as
evidence of the further fetishisation of the hyperfeminine state of pregnancy. The party seeks out
creative ways to surprise guests and sometimes the parents with the announcement of the unborn
child’s gender. As in the example above, a cake may be filled with pink or blue batter or candy,
with the gendered colour revealed when the first slice is taken. Or, in a slightly more disturbing
iteration, a piñata may be filled with pink or blue candy and confetti and smashed open by guests
and the mother-to-be.
Gender reveal parties evidence what Gill describes as the postfeminist “resurgence in
ideas of natural sexual difference” (2007, p. 149) as gender is represented through cute binary
stereotypes – pistols or pearls? Ties or tutus? Cupcake or stud muffin? – that are reinforced
through ancillary circulation via social media. These whimsical objects become visual cues that

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serve to celebrate a conservative and uncomplicated understanding of gender as innate and
binary in the same way that the digital object is reduced to zeroes and ones. Moreover, this
symbolic smashing and slicing – reminiscent of the female body’s long history of penetration
and invasion through medical technologies – reveals the discursive truth of gender ‘in’ the body
as narrated whimsically through cakes, candy and the celebratory atmosphere of a surprise party.
These various baked treats are used to evoke the sexual female body – through the
centrefold, the pregnant body and the innately sexed body – at the same time that they render
same innocuous through the hyperfeminine decoration and excessive sweetness of elaborate
cakes. This selective visibility is also applicable to the female food blogger who publishes
manifold iterations these appealing images while strategically making absent her own body in
these digital texts.

Fashioning the Food Body

Food blogger Stephanie Shih uses the phrase ‘bright and propped’ to describe the food
blogosphere’s prevalent use of shallow depth of field and light-flooded settings to produce “a
style that evokes a bucolic and idyllic atmosphere by using brighter but softer light…and by
incorporating elements beyond the food in a variety of props, more background details, and
staging” (2012). Such staging characteristically employs “colors and patterns,” “precise, delicate
staging,” “full framing, with foreground and background elements,” and “vintage, rustic props”
(Shih, 2012). This detailed, meticulous styling recalls the traditional positioning of the female
body within fashion photography.

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Figure 4. Ruffles and Roses Tea Party (Alyea, 2011)

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In this example by Alyea, a pink tea cake is embedded within props that intensify the
romantic, feminine decoration of the cake. The table setting is predominantly white with pink
accents, complementing the girlie qualities of the ruffled buttercream frosting; the rose motif;
and, the garden tea party theme. This setting exudes femininity, particularly with the central
positioning of the round pink cake, which is somewhat violently and unexpectedly pierced with a
large, phallic antique silver fork as a reminder of the visceral nature of both sex and eating.
Food porn’s elaborate settings and mood building allude to the treatment of the female
body in fashion magazines. As Ray writes, “cuisine has a lot in common with haute couture.
Cuisine happens when food enters the fashion cycle, where its fluctuations are described,
debated, contested, predicted, and awaited in magazines, on television, on the Web” (2007, p.
58). As with fashion cycles, food styling replicates and circulates similar props and aesthetics,
with current trends including antique silverware and distressed wooden backgrounds, bunting
banners and paper straws, brightly coloured and patterned napery, and white minimalist
tableware, giving an indication of the close networks of influence created by the food
blogosphere as well as adjacent, influential sites such as Pinterest and Etsy. Moreover, food porn
generally evidences the excess, “superfluous and beautiful” (Ray, 2007, p. 58) qualities of
fashion which also “bring with it obsession, waste, and playfulness” (Ray, 2007, p. 58).
Returning to Alyea’s tea party setting, a sense of abundance and extravagance is indicated
through the busy and full table setting, replete with ornate tea pots, tea cups and saucers, cake
stands and cupcake stands, creamers and sugar bowls, all with delicate and antique floral
designs. The table brims with cake, cupcakes and fairycakes which fill tiered cake stands and are
stuffed into tea cups. It is this excess that distinguishes couture from pret-a-porter, erotic art from
pornography, and food porn from home cooking.

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The fashionably styled female body adopts the passive object position. However, when
this object position is transferred onto food and embedded into food blogs, it is possible to
recognise the female body for its active and productive creative labouring, the fruits of which
include digital food porn. Digital food porn does not speak in and of itself of resistance against
postfeminist discourse. Food porn is rarely overtly political, and more commonly professed as a
project of family archiving, a personal journey, or a creative passion. However, the very presence
of these food styling conventions circulating through the blogosphere offer an insight into
alternative ways of presenting the female body, not simply as a passive object of visual or sexual
consumption but as an active, creative site of productive labour. As with all forms of everyday
resistance or mild protest, these food blogs hardly constitute tokens of revolutionary politics.
However, the fact that individual women can profit from their production of the image – as
opposed to disciplined representations of their own bodies – offers a sense of the creative power
and real benefits to be derived from the labours of the female body.
Of course, as with all of the mild domestic, technological protest examined so far, there
are limitations to the impact of such work. Moreover, it is worth considering whether or not this
‘liberation’ of the female body simply acts as a substitute for oppression through the necessity of
engaging in laborious acts of food work and creative, digital labour. More troublingly, as will be
discussed in the final section, the women who are able to profit from food blogging – which is
purposefully mapped to intricately onto real-life identities and lifestyles – is limited to those who
occupy positions of pre-existing social privilege.

Conclusion: Exclusions of Technological Form
I have thus far presented a case for the ways in which feminised food practices –
expressed through domestic technologies – may be seen as vehicles for resistance against

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gendered and national expectations. This exploration is central to my arguments for the potential
of technology to construct and subvert expressions of women’s gendered identities. However, it
is equally important to consider the ways that various technologies have exclusions encoded into
their design, which limit their deployment as tools for subversion by certain subjects. That is, the
deployment of these technologies as subversive is not a universal avenue for women, but carries
class and race connotations. The domestic technologies discussed in this chapter, with the
notable exception of convenience foods, have tended to originate in and perpetuate a mythical
but ideal white, middle-class femininity. While this demographic was used to unify the nation
and perpetuate democratic ideals through modernism, it is also true that these technologies have
tended to systematically exclude women of colour, immigrants and lower-class women.
For instance, convenience foods were purposefully designed and marketed as innovations
that would democratise home cooking by making fresh produce available to consumers year
round and – with the increasingly affordable inclusion of freezers within the home – available to
most households. As Smith writes, “home freezing advocates maintained their original
proposition that mass culture was a democratic force because it offered more individuals more
freedom of choice, rather than limiting such options to the privileged few” (2001, p. 187).
However, it was also the case that by the start of World War II, “[n]ot enough families outside of
the rural regions had access to home freezing equipment to make frozen foods a fact of everyday
life” (Smith, 2001, p. 185).
In more modern times, convenience foods’ failure to live up to democratic ideals is a
product of cultural capital and the divisive U.S. food landscape. Inness writes that “people from
[the middle and upper] classes commonly look askance at convenience foods, since they have the
resources, education, and time required to purchase other foods” (2005, p. 21). This has led to

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staunchly divisive opinions about the role of convenience food within the food blogosphere. For
example, blogger Amanda Rettke writes “I cant even tell you the number of times I have heard
that my blog sucks and is not worth reading because I have (and will continue to) use box cake
mix” (2012). Part of this backlash against convenience foods is rooted in contemporary middle
class discourses on food, health and morality where the ubiquity of processed foods in the U.S.
has become synonymous with lower-class choices in the bifurcated food system that Julie
Guthman describes as the “cheap, standardized, and nutritionally vacuous food for the masses”
(2011, p. 139). As fast food and pre-prepared food has become associated with an unhealthy,
lower-class foodscape, meals prepared ‘from scratch’ at home have become symbolic of healthy,
virtuous and self-actualising domesticity that is promulgated on food blogs.
The problem with this definition of morality is that it not only compels women to forego
‘easy’ food options, it demands their additional labor in preparing food from scratch on threat of
dire health consequences for their families. Furthermore, the technologies of food blogs celebrate
and normalise this discourse while simultaneously rendering invisible the additional layers of
labour required by the generic conventions of the food blog – not only the planning, preparing,
cooking and cleaning labour already expected of women, but also the creative and digital labour
required to package this work into a profitable and idealised performance of digital domesticity.
This obfuscation of women’s labour is pertinent in the ways that the material labour of
the female body is erased by digital technologies and their tendency for “time-space
compression” (Harvey, 1989, p. 240) which – in the blogosphere – is designed to evoke pleasure
for the viewer. This erasure is particularly evident in what Rettke names the ‘side by side’ style
of photography that is ubiquitous on Pinterest. This style references the sequential images
produced by a photobooth. However, unlike the images of the photobooth – which are snapped

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in a matter of seconds – the side by side food shot is carefully curated and selectively conjoined
over a number of hours or even days. The pleasure of this style is described as “[t]he beauty
of…instant gratification. Your eyes are typically met with a larger shot that encompasses all the
elements of the food” (2013).

Figure 5. Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake (Perelman, 2008)

In blogger Deb Perelman’s post on chocolate peanut butter cake she includes the above
side-by-side sequence. The layout of these images compresses the temporality of glazing this
elaborate cake, nostalgically referencing the process of magical transformation that was
celebrated by convenience foods (Polan, 2011). While the instruments of cooking are visible – a
measuring cup and an offset spatula – the images crop any evidence of the human body or the
hands presumably directing them. The result is a cake that seemingly frosts itself, pairing the
abundance and excess of food blogs with a seemingly effortless, immaterial productivity. With

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this representation, ‘new’ media adopt ‘old’ values and in doing so repeat a long history of
erasing the material investments and tedious feminised labour of food preparation.
In the context of digital food porn, the blogging platform and the stylistic conventions of
the genre give women a forum to creatively inscribe performances of femininity and the body in
response to postfeminist contradictions. At the same time, the rhetoric of postfeminist
empowerment that is so quickly drawn upon in the entrepreneurial blogosphere must be
questioned in an environment when the postfeminist subject does not just freely engage in a
pleasurable performance of self but increasingly exists within a compulsory “neoliberal moral
framework, where each of us has a duty to ourselves to cultivate a self-brand” (Banet-Weiser,
2012, p. 56). Not only do food bloggers rarely evidence overt political or radical feminist
positions, but food blogs are typically only granted the success of visibility when bloggers
willingly adopt the brand of the ideal postfeminist subject, performing femininity in the tradition
of the white, upper-middle class nuclear family whose lifestyle is most fetishised in the
blogosphere, and affirming their fulfillment in these traditional, domesticated roles. This has led
to the tendency for food blogs to perpetuate non-ironic and hyperbolic reproductions of
conservative, hegemonic femininity.
While on the one hand the user-generated logics of social media allow the discourse of
meritocracy to flourish – with the notion that any motivated individual can create a food blog,
and that hard work and a touch of talent are all that is required to succeed – in reality, food blogs
disguise many indications that food blogging is a genre that excludes rather than includes certain
subjects. While bloggers rarely disclose the financial aspects of their blogs – as this would lie
somewhat at odds with the stylised performance of casual domesticity – it is clear that the
financial and temporal resources required to undertake quality food blogging are immense. For

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example, baking bloggers Stephanie Michaelis and Rosie Alyea each discuss recipes that take
several days to cook and put together. Michaelis participates in a styling challenge, in which
several food bloggers design a recipe post whose styling and props must be purchased for under
$25. Michaelis describes the difficulty of keeping to the constraints of this budget, writing “it
took a bit of digging around, but I managed to find some gems in one of my favourite antique
stores; a gorgeous silver serving platter for $20, plus a $5 cake server and a vintage lace doily for
$2. It was totally worth the effort” (2013). This cost does not include ingredients or overheads
and, while props are evidently re-used, taking into account the number of posts published each
year and the description of $25 as a meagre budget gives an indication of the financial and
temporal resources required to voluntarily participate in this ‘leisure’ activity.
Food blogging is therefore predicated on middle-class resources as well as the need to
successfully approximate a performance of this ideal heterosexual, white lifestyle. Of course,
there are numerous examples of food bloggers who do not fit this ideal, as social media have
indeed lowered barriers to publication. However, content filtering now effectively takes place
through the hierarchical visibility accorded to blogs, which is a product of the algorithms and
design of social media content. This hierarchical structure of the blogosphere can be surmised
from the fact that although thousands of women participate in food blogging, “only 18 percent of
bloggers make any nonsalary money off their blogs. And of those, the average yearly earnings
are less than $10,000” (Matchar, 2013, p. 62). Even fewer are known to the general community
for their blogging work. In this context, the successful food bloggers whose work is
disproportionately circulated – and who stand in as the key tastemakers for the genre as a whole
– exclusively present white, middle-class, heteronormative lifestyles. Therefore, the
opportunities for participation by women of colour and lower-class women, among other

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minorities groups, are hindered by a combined lack of resources, ‘appropriate’ cultural capital,
and technologically-determined visibility in the blogosphere.
This example raises the importance of interrogating the limitations of and exclusions
embedded within various technologies, which is present to varying extents in all of the food
media examined in this chapter. For example, Theophano (2002) acknowledges that while
cooking literature are useful for providing detailed records of the under-documented historical
lives of women these historical inquiries only reveal information on the lives of women
privileged enough to have access to cookbooks, namely, literate upper-class women who had the
means to turn the valuable commodity of bound paper books into personal housekeeping
manuals. Similarly, Raffia Zafar asks the provocative question, originally posed by Quandra
Prettyman, of why so few Black cooks have produced cookbooks, concluding that “[t]he
beginnings of an answer lie in the difficulty of writing a book that engages simultaneously with
the shadows of Black slavery, servitude, and oppression, the persistence of stereotypes, and the
practicalities of cooking” (1999, pp. 449-450). In fact, most common pre-modern and non-
Western methods of transferring cooking pedagogies came from a “gerontocratic authority
passed [down] a female line” (Sutton, 2013, p. 299), leading to a sensory-based, embodied
transmission of cooking knowledge. However, such knowledge practices were all but obliterated
by the scientification of cooking and its emphasis on the use of standardised measurements. It is
this same unifying process upon which the logic of cookbooks are based.
While cookbooks have not been singularly used by white, middle-class cooks since their
development – in fact as a contrasting though problematic opinion Inness argues that modern
cookbooks are inherently democratic as “numerous ways exist to publish them, from an
inexpensive community cookbook printed by a church or school to a slick, expensive hardback

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produced by a major publishing house” (2005, pp. 40-41) – there has been a relative
underrepresentation of minority groups in cooking literature throughout a longer period of
history. This was historically due to differences in literacy and access to publishing houses as
well as cultural differences in the production and circulation of written versus oral histories.
Therefore, even though social media removes some barriers to access they put in place new ones.
Food media reveal the selective illuminations of technology, acting to simultaneously
cast light on – and, inversely, cast into the shadows – certain social groups and practices in a
manner that shifts over time. As with all cultural texts, then, the insight that cooking literature
offers is partial and fragmentary, and must be adequately contextualized in order to provide
accurate readings of the use of cooking literature as a form of feminist politics or female
subversion. An important aspect of this contextualization entails understanding the specific
materialities of various food media and technologies, and how they empower and oppress,
highlight and obfuscate, different feminine materialities and possibilities.

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Girlie Entrepreneurialism: Femininity as Digital Labour

In this chapter, I use the term ‘girlie entrepreneurialism’ as shorthand for a phenomenon
where women position themselves as intimate confidantes and perform a fantasy of exaggerated
femininity as a digital entrepreneurial opportunity. That is, stylised girlie femininity is deployed
as a digital veneer that effectively adds material value to food blogs while obfuscating the
professional intent of blogging labour. While girlie entrepreneurialism is present across digital
spaces, I explore its particular relevance on food blogs, within the history of women’s food
production and domestic labour. I argue that digital entrepreneurialism offers the tantalising
possibility of solving the postfeminist work-life balance crisis, allowing women to immerse
themselves in traditional and presumably pleasurable domestic pursuits while orienting these
activities towards profitable business opportunities.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, I derive my usage of the term ‘girlie’ from Baumgardner and
Richards’ (2010) description of third wave girlie culture. While the term ‘girlie’ has historically
been considered a derogatory way to refer to women, its current recuperation by third wave
feminists references a provocative response to second wave feminism’s perceived rejection of
heteronormative femininity. In a similar vein, third wave feminist Inga Muscio argues for the
political reclamation of the word ‘cunt,’ writing “we’re free to seize a word that was kidnapped
and co-opted in a pain-filled, distant past…we’ve paid the ransom, but now, everybody long
done forgot ‘cunt’ was ours in the first place” (2002, p. 9). Yet, as Baumgardner and Richards
(2010) acknowledge, this third wave approach attracts critique by those who see such action as
trivial and too likely to make visible the commodities rather than the politics underlying
consumer choices.

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I purposefully draw on this ambivalence in my use of the term, and I find this controversy
over nomenclature a fruitful starting point for discussing and analysing the emergence of girlie
entrepreneurialism in this neoliberal, postfeminist climate. I use food blogs to explore questions
of what constitutes feminist politics in a rapidly changing technological, economic and social
environment. While I do not necessarily champion food blogs as feminist texts, I believe that
they display important ties to feminist politics that must be acknowledged as indications of the
feminist potential within feminised digital spaces. In this chapter, I explore these themes as they
appear on three highly successful food blogs – The Pioneer Woman, Smitten Kitchen and
Bakerella.
I argue that girlie entrepreneurialism is characterised by the performance of stylised
normative femininity. Traditionalism is connoted by the subject embedding herself within the
nuclear family in order to emphasise that being a wife and mother is her primary identity.
Traditionalism is also present in the way food bloggers organise their selfhood around the
practice of domesticity, which is naturalised as central to feminine identity. I regard these
performances as stylised in their exaggerated embrace of girlie stereotypes – for instance, the
Bakerella blog highlights femininity in the choice of pink for the main header and as a theme for
the site, the reference to the children’s fairytale character Cinderella that is alluded to in the title
of the blog, and the use of feminising adjectives ‘sweet’ and ‘fun.’

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Figure 6. Bakerella front page [Screenshot].

At the same time, traditionalism is eschewed through a sense that the revival of these
feminine identities and activities is ironic. Domesticity is portrayed as a creative and invigorating
personal passion that leads to self-actualisation. Finally, one of the most significant features of
girlie entrepreneurialism is the way that it is presented as an amateur production undertaken by
the ‘ordinary’ woman. In this chapter, I wish to explore the ways in which girlie performances
have been theorised within the postfeminist and third wave contexts. Ultimately, I use platform
analysis to argue that the deployment of stylised, girlie femininity by food bloggers is not merely
evidence of regressive feminist politics, but is used to add value to the online brand and
underline their potential as entrepreneurial ventures. Thus, I would argue that this performance
of femininity is deployed strategically. Of course, this strategy is only profitable to a few,
privileged women, which ultimately speaks to its limitations as a politics.
Work-Life Balance and the Crisis of Contemporary Feminism

Work-life balance has gained cultural cachet as a discourse that is used to pit the feminist
demands for opportunity in the workforce and the feminised aspiration for motherhood against

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each other, as mutually exclusive desires. This dilemma has reached crisis status for middle-class
women who are bound by postfeminist ideologies of womanhood. On the one hand, there is an
expectation that postfeminist subjects draw their liberation through the new emphasis on
“educational and professional opportunities for women and girls” (Tasker & Negra, 2007, p. 2).
On the other hand, postfeminist culture demands continued attention to the spheres of romance,
motherhood and domesticity. For instance, the increased demands of motherhood in the last few
decades are indicated through the concepts of ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays, 1998) and ‘new
momism’ (Douglas & Michaels, 2004) which will be discussed in Chapter Four. These
oppositional discourses result in glamorous postfeminist careerism competing alongside “an
accumulation of postfeminist cultural material [in] the reinforcement of conservative norms as
the ultimate ‘best choices’ in women’s lives” (Negra, 2009, p. 4). Increasingly, it is up to
individual women to navigate these irreconcilable burdens.
Current cultural texts have contributed to the characterisation of this issue as a crisis for
women. In popular culture, the film I Don’t Know How She Does It (McGrath, 2011) starring
Sarah Jessica Parker and based on the book of the same name, and the final season of Tina Fey’s
30 Rock (2006-2013) portray protagonists with highly successful careers who are on the verge of
breaking down due to the ways that their professional obligations hampers their maternalism.
These texts both use high-paced editing and physical comedy to convey the emotional toll of
their turbulent attempts to balance their work and family obligations. These themes are also
played out in a string of retreatist movies including Raising Helen (2004), Life As We Know It
(2010) and Knocked Up (2007) which are all built around plotlines where children are foisted
upon ambitious female protagonists, which make clear that these women’s focus on their careers

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has amounted to evading ‘true’ happiness. Once this is made clear to them in the climax of the
films, they willingly submit to romance and an instant family.
In the realm of non-fiction, work-life balance was addressed in two recent popular texts.
Firstly, Anne Marie Slaughter’s The Atlantic article ‘Why Women Can’t Have It All’ (2012) laid
out a feminist backlash that outlined how women were doomed to fail in their attempts to pursue
the professional and personal ambitions promised by postfeminist discourse. The popularity of
Slaughter’s article made disturbingly clear the extent to which this perspective resonated with
women. Secondly, Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In (2013) – written as a feminist handbook for
corporate women – was equally popular, offering proscriptions for work-life balance suited to
the specific needs of straight, white, upper-class working woman. While both of these texts made
clear the importance of marrying feminist husbands who would help with childcare, it is still
clear that work-life balance is not a primary concern for men. Moreover, the reader could infer
that in both these scenarios, paid labour – that is, the reserve army of lower class, racially marked
women – would inevitably be used to take care of remaining housework.
Thus, even though I would critique these texts for their failure to address the fact that the
majority of women labour under increasingly precarious and tedious working conditions –
without the heteronormative, upper-class luxury of ‘choosing’ to opt out – I regard their
popularity as evidence of the ways work-life balance has been institutionalised and currently
operates as an anxiety-generating discourse crippling the female imaginary. This anxiety is
heightened by the conditions of what Negra (2009) calls ‘time crisis and the postfeminist
lifecycle,’ which ushers the postfeminist subject through the normative feminine needs to date,
get married, fall pregnant, and dedicate oneself to motherhood – with urgency, and in that
specific order – and compels her to ambitiously manage her career while maintaining an

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attention to the insistent biological clock that seemingly justifies a fear of the ever-atrophying
female body.
Given this culture of pervasive anxiety around women’s career choices, one solution has
emerged through the romanticisation of new domesticity. As Matchar explains: “For a generation
of young women…disenchanted with or displaced from the workplace, New Domesticity offers
a new sense of purpose…This new style of home-focused, sustainability-minded living seems to
offer an answer to the opt-out question for creative, educated women” (2013, pp. 160-161). This
embrace of traditionalism is coded as the route to female self-actualisation and, in conjunction
with the pervasive negative representations of work-life crisis, has the effect of “operating as a
powerful device for shepherding women out of the public spheres” (Negra, 2009, p. 5).

Digital Purveyors of the Entrepreneurial Dream

While contemporary women’s performance of domesticity is nostalgic and traditional, it
is also coded as ‘new’ as women apply professional skills to this labour and seek to generate
value and public acknowledgement of this work. This attention to new ways of developing
domesticity into a purpose and a profession has been facilitated by the potentialities of digital
media. Girlie entrepreneurialism has flourished in the wake of a digital culture where users are
encouraged to empower themselves by leveraging the entrepreneurial undercurrent inherent to
Web 2.0. This fantasy of entrepreneurial labour promises the individual flexibility and control
over their work, the ability to pursue creative passions, and to be rewarded meritocratically based
on their skill and dedication. Particularly for women, digital tools apparently offer solutions to
the time bind that holds subjects hostage within the chasm between ‘work’ and ‘life’ by
promising the ability to work flexibly, outside of the 9-5 routine. The promise of digital media

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extends to a spatial freedom, encompassed by the concepts of telecommuting and teleworking, a
way of bridging the private and public spheres and seemingly generating value at this interface.
While an entrepreneurial revolution has been transforming the United States economy
since the 1970s (Bygrave & Zacharakis, 2014) its calibre has shifted in the twenty-first century,
where “[c]entral to [the entrepreneurial] revolution is information technology, especially
personal computers and the Internet” (Bygrave & Zacharakis, 2014). Bygrave and Zacharakis
credit Joseph Schumpeter as inventing the term entrepreneur early in the 20
th
century to describe
“a person who destroys the existing economic order by introducing new products and services,
by introducing new methods of production, by creating new forms of organization, or by
exploiting new raw materials” (2014). In this conventional description of entrepreneurialism, the
concept of innovation is intertwined with a home-based/small business model that “give[s] rise
to new products and services, fresh applications for existing products and services, and new ways
of doing business” (2014). Alternatively, the contemporary tenor of this concept is indicated in
the ‘Entrepreneurs Issue’ of specialty magazine Kinfolk. Twelve entrepreneurs, including the
founder of Toms and the CEO of Etsy, are asked to define entrepreneurialism. Their answers –
depicted here in a word cloud – recurrently point to the mediation of creativity and risk:

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Figure 7. Defining the entrepreneur [Word cloud]. Kinfolk: The entrepreneurs issue.

These qualities of innovation and mediation work to centre the popular model of successful
entrepreneurialism around tech personalities such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and, more recently,
young ‘self-made’ tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and the
founders of Twitter. Their highly visible successes have led to the notion that the individual
mastery of technological platforms offer quicker and far more lucrative rewards than those
offered by traditional institutions such as universities and corporations. Another characteristic of
Web 2.0 entrepreneurialism has been the shift from the models of pre-twenty-first century
American entrepreneurial ventures as offering innovative products and services – such as FedEx,
The Home Depot and Microsoft (Bygrave & Zacharakis, 2014) – to businesses built around the
personality of the individual founder and deriving their logic from personal experience. For
instance, Zuckerberg’s invention of Facebook as a result of his awkward college relationship
experiences is codified as an origin story in the film The Social Network (2010) and Jessica
Alba’s eco-friendly baby product line The Honest Company publicly circulates the narrative that

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this billion dollar company arose from her desire to source natural baby products after becoming
a first-time mother.
Building on these foundations, girlie entrepreneurialism might thus be seen as the
application of new media tools to commoditising the postfeminist subject as an entrepreneurial
product. The ideal postfeminist subject – the ‘can do’ girl described by Anita Harris (2004) –
already embodies the ideal qualities of a digital entrepreneur, being “flexible, individualized,
resilient, self-driven, and self-made and who easily follows nonlinear trajectories to fulfillment
and success” (Harris, 2004, p. 16). Moreover, postfeminist discourse has long encouraged the
phenomenon of ‘intimate entrepreneurship’ where aspects of personal life “are cast as work,
using analogies from finance, management, science, marketing and military campaigns” (Gill,
2009, p. 351). Examples of the successful execution of platform-based feminised identities
include YouTube make-up vlogger Michelle Phan (2006), lifecaster Justine Ezarik also known as
iJustine (n.d.), and fashion blogging prodigy and feminist website Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson
(2011), with their digital personae fashioned as virtual commodities that generate value and
profit.
The work of these can-do digital entrepreneurs is highly publicised and works to
perpetuate the myth that digital entrepreneurialism is a viable and easy way to make a profit from
self-directed and self-actualising labour. Digital entrepreneurialism is marketed as a panacea for
women willing to work hard and smart enough, offering the independence to be one’s own boss,
the temporal and spatial freedoms to multi-task private and public sphere responsibilities, and the
creative freedom to fulfil a ‘follow-your-passion’ ethos around work. This is a particularly easy
dream to sell to the postfeminist subject facing external pressures from the work-life balance
demands and time crises outlined above. However, it is all too easy for this promise of flexibility

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to devolve into precarity. Julie Wilson and Emily Yochim point out that for working-class
women seeking to make money through ecommerce, such work takes on the tenor of a ‘fourth
shift,’ “[s]nuck in during naptimes or late at night, multitasked with the use of mobile
technologies during brief moments at the playground or while waiting in the carpool
line…labour performed in the interstices of family life” (2015, p. 677). It is this promise and
potential of digital liberation from the postfeminist time bind and work-life dilemma that is
explored through the work of food bloggers in this chapter.

Strategic Femininity as Business Plan

The girlie entrepreneurialism I describe builds upon the stylised performance of certain
feminised interests including charming representations of traditional and infantile femininity, the
quaint pleasures of home and family life, and the creative satisfaction stoked in the service of
domesticity. These texts are targeted towards other women, and the most successful food
bloggers are those who most perfectly and correctly execute the ideals of the postfeminist subject
and hegemonic citizenship. I wish to briefly explore this stylised femininity, within a history of
using ‘girlie’ in the service of feminist politics as well as within the context of commodity
feminism.
In the postfeminist context, commodity feminism has become less and less
distinguishable from commoditised femininity. Marketers have jumped upon the girl power
bandwagon with sophisticated postfeminist marketing campaigns including ads which link Dove
beauty products to women’s self-esteem and body image (Banet-Weiser, 2012), make-up brand
CoverGirl’s #GirlsCan campaign which uses female celebrities as examples of women’s
potential when they reject gendered social limitations, the #LikeAGirl ads produced by Always
which seeks to transform the phrase from an insult to a mantra of power, and even cable

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company AT&T who hitched a ride on the girl empowerment train with a television ad that
provocatively asked: “When the first woman pitches in the majors, where will you be?” In this
way, a variety of feminine products (and cable services) are made compatible with a broadly
empowering postfeminist message. These seductive messages have generally disturbed
postfeminist theorists. McRobbie lists some of the problematic aspects of postfeminist consumer
culture, including: “the recent, extraordinary, prominence of young women in consumer
culture;…the making and shaping of new markets for very young girls; …[and] the
encroachment by commercial forces on the role and authority of the various institutions which
have, in the past, presided over the lives and conduct of young women and girls” (2009, p. 532).
Similarly, Susan Douglas rues the apparent state of affairs where, “For ‘millenials’…the bill of
goods they are repeatedly sold is that power comes from shopping, having the right logos, and
being ‘hot’” (2010, p. 6). This concern appears to stem from the paternalistic desire to protect
young women from being duped by these commercialised renditions of feminist politics.
However, food blogs offer alternate possibilities for theorising women’s consumer practices,
particularly as their gratuitous representation of consumption is tied to women’s media
production and in many ways can be considered anti-consumerist, appearing as objects in a free
digital gift economy and espousing the home-based production methods of DIY culture. As I
outlined above, part of the unspoken promise of food blogs is their potential profitability for
individual women who employ digital media to find creative and flexible ways to navigate the
precarious labour market and achieve work-life balance.
Moreover, it should be remembered that female entrepreneurs have long drawn upon the
space of conventional femininity as avenues of business possibility. Recent successful female
entrepreneurs whose businesses specifically target the women’s market include Sara Blakely, the

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inventor of Spanx, and Natalie Messinet, the founder of Net-A-Porter, Ariana Huffington,
founder of the Huffington Post news/blog platform, and Alexandra Chong, founder of website
LuluVise where women are able to judge and write posts about men they have dated. These
businesses have been built upon successfully anticipating and catering to the needs of a female
demographic. Other female entrepreneurs who have recently dominated the popular culture
imaginary include Candace Nelson, the founder of successful cupcake chain Sprinkles, and
Katherine Kallinis Berman and Sophie Kallinis LaMontagne, sisters who opened the
Georgetown Cupcake bakery. These women were all former corporate professionals who cashed
in on the hyperfeminine cupcake craze in the early 2000s and whose success has been secured by
lucrative television appearances, selling the fantasy of traditional femininity as a path to personal
and material riches.
On the one hand, these female entrepreneurs have built their success upon reinforcing
spaces, objects and ideas that have traditionally contributed to the oppression of women and are
central to the reproduction of hegemonic femininity as they underline conceptions of what
appropriate women’s interests and work should be, the emphasis on the continuing importance of
women’s bodies and appearance, and the notion that women’s success is only viable to a market
of other women. On the other hand, they reveal the potential for transforming these oppressive
gender ideologies into personally profitable business opportunities. For this reason, I believe that
it is too simplistic to decry the ways that postfeminist media are deceiving women, and it is
necessary to instead look at ways that women are responding to these limiting discourses about
femininity in strategic and sometimes subversive ways.
Of course, exploring the deployment of femininity as a subversive feminist tactic requires
a contextualisation of the political antecedents set by Riot Grrrls and third wave girlie culture. As

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part of 1990s feminist culture, femininity was appropriated by Riot Grrrls as central to the punk
politics this movement embodied. Riot Grrrls were considered to “breathe new life into feminism
by marrying it with their own milieu, the youth movement known as punk rock” (Baumgardner
and Richards, 2010, p. 80). The use of the word “‘girl’ came from a desire to focus on childhood,
a time when girls have the strongest self-esteem and belief in themselves (White 397). The
rewriting of the word as ‘grrrl’ represented the anger behind the movement; it sounded like a
growl (Carlip 9)” (Schilt, 2003, p. 6). By juxtaposing symbols of femininity with angry
screaming vocals and the high-energy presence of punk rock, Riot Grrrls offered “a performative
recontextualisation of girlhood which reveals the inauthenticity of normative gender roles
(Munford, 2004, p. 146). Their politics was linked to the visual impact of “yoking together thrift-
store dresses with heavy combat boots, luminescent red lipstick with Hello Kitty hairclips and
backpacks, and emblazoning the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ across their bodies” (Munford, 2004,
p. 146), evidencing their early embrace of the complicated relationship between feminist politics
and consumer culture.
Building upon this influential movement, the girlie culture that Baumgardner and
Richards describe references similar concerns with recuperating hegemonic femininity as
political action. However, girlie culture remains somewhat more concerned with reinforcing the
gender binary, as evidenced by their quote that “when Girlies claim Barbies, pink, eye shadow,
and knitting to be as valid as trucks, blue, combat boots, and sports, that’s all part of the
resistance, too. Both are attempting to put girls’ ‘voices’ – broadly defined as what girls like,
think about, talk about, and what moves them – into the human conversation” (Baumgardner &
Richards, 2010, p. 176). The employment of feminine accoutrements in girlie culture is less
politically directed or coherent as the meaning of such feminine expression is ultimately up to

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the individual – girlie culture “can be sexy, campy, ironic, or simply decorating ourselves
without the loaded issues” (2010, p. 136). Moreover, girlie culture exists in an everyday context
that does not readily make visible its political intent, unlike Riot Grrrls whose strategic
femininity was paired with explicitly feminist lyrics. Instead, the “lipgloss, high heels, Barbies
and vibrators are more visible than a body of politics” (Munford, 2004, p. 149), obfuscating
feminist intent in favour of a childish, hedonistic rebellion against the imagined restrictions of
second wave feminism.
I draw on these examples to explore the political and commercial value that women have
drawn from socialised femininity. In relation to food blogs, my articulation of girlie
entrepreneurialism is inspired by accepting the compromised political and production values that
arise from postfeminist femininity, and having faith that the women who are reproducing stylised
femininity on food blogs are not simply cultural dupes but perform such work as a considered
response to the political and economic conditions in which they are situated. That is, the user-
generated qualities of food blogs offer a new understanding of representations of stylised,
normative femininity in popular culture. The postfeminist description of femininity as a
manifestation of the patriarchal culture industry preying on the vulnerabilities of women is no
longer sufficient. Instead, we must look at stylised femininity as a commodity that has value
through its circulation in digital space.
The strategic femininity I describe as a key part of girlie entrepreneurialism is a digital
masquerade used to disguise the professional orientation of the food blogger and her online
brand. That is, strategic femininity is often employed to naturalise the food bloggers’
performance of domesticity – her feats in the kitchen are conveyed as intuitive and ordinary.
Moreover, this normative femininity makes hypervisible the affects of pleasure and abundance

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while simultaneously erasing traces of postfeminist anxiety and contradiction. In turn, this makes
invisible the excessive precarious labour, financial resources and temporality required to produce
a professional quality food blog. This digital masquerade also removes much of the logic for
presenting real expressions of negative emotion or admissions of true struggle, while everywhere
presenting tokens of authenticity such as intimate snapshots of family and a confessional, diary-
like writing tone. Strategic femininity adds value to the digital product by perpetuating the
commoditisation of a feminine fantasy.
I use the term strategic to indicate the ways in which food bloggers knowingly deploy
these stylised performances of femininity, as a way to generate personal profit. This strategic
deployment evidences a parody that may be interpreted as resistance against the expectations of
the postfeminist subject and a response to the ambivalent cultural and economic conditions in
which she is expected to thrive.
Girlie Entrepreneurialism on The Pioneer Woman, Smitten Kitchen and Bakerella

I outline above the ways that the performance of femininity on food blogs might be
considered a masquerade that digitally disguises the technical skills and resources that go into the
production of these media. Femininity as masquerade has been discussed by postfeminist
theorists as a way of minimising the threat of women’s ambition. In The Aftermath of Feminism,
McRobbie engages a lengthy discussion on the ‘luminosities of femininity’ which broadly
encompass the fashion and beauty industrial complex. McRobbie’s argument is that postfeminist
subjects are compelled to participate wholeheartedly in these spheres “to collude with the re-
stabilisation of gender norms so as to undo the gains of feminism, and dissociate themselves
from this now discredited political identity” (2009, p. 64). McRobbie continues that women’s
choice to adopt this hyperfeminine masquerade is emphasised, while the real function of this

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masquerade is to re-secure the social structures of patriarchal authority. She writes: “a key
containment strategy on the part of the Symbolic, faced with possible disruption to the stable
binaries of sexual difference…is then to delegate a good deal of its power to the fashion-beauty
complex where, as a ‘grand luminosity’, a post-feminist masquerade emerges as the new cultural
dominant” (2009, p. 63). Similarly, Tasker and Negra (2007) argue that emphasising the girlie
and feminine qualities of postfeminist subjects has the effect of reducing the threat of this
professionally skilled and economically empowered female subject.
In this section, I use platform analysis to rupture this girlie masquerade by exposing the
disjunct between form and content on the blog. Specifically I analyse components of the digital
structure of blogging platforms and how these work to accrue value for the brand. I also explore
the mechanisms by which domesticity is digitised and commoditised online and the ways that
value is generated and circulated on these texts. What I find from such analysis is that while the
aesthetic of food blogs often references a joyful and nostalgic recuperation of suburban,
glamorous domesticity, their technical form belies deep professional and entrepreneurial
considerations.
The food blogs I use to illustrate these arguments are three successfully branded and
monetised examples: The Pioneer Woman (TPW), Smitten Kitchen (SK) and Bakerella. TPW is
written by Ree Drummond, a 45-year-old farmer’s wife and mother of four who lives on an
isolated cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma. She began her blog in 2006, writing about her lifestyle
on the ranch, and was awarded Weblog of the Year in 2009 and 2010 at the prestigious
Bloggies.
4
Drummond began hosting a cooking show on The Food Network in 2011 and that
same year was estimated to be amassing 23.3 million unique page views per month (Fortini,
2011). Drummond is known for cooking hearty, Midwestern ‘cowboy food’ which typically

4
The Weblog Awards, or Bloggies, are annual, non-profit awards determined by online voters

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relies upon the staples of meat, dairy and potatoes. It is suggested that her annual ad revenue is
over one million dollars (Fortini, 2011). Her 2015 net worth, according to the website Celebrity
Net Worth (n.d.) – a source whose information should obviously be taken with a grain of salt – is
$8 million.
SK is written by Deb Perelman, a married mother of two living in and blogging from a
small Manhattan apartment. She was named top food blogger by Saveur magazine in 2011, and
as of 2012 her site was receiving 8 million page views per month (Ammeson, 2012). Perelman
began blogging at the Smitten Kitchen domain name in 2006, previously maintaining a personal
blog titled The Smitten through which she met her husband who was one of the first commenters
on her post. Perelman’s brand takes the perspective of a pragmatic but passionate food lover and
home cook – she writes that she is wary of “[e]xcessively fussy foods and/or pretentious
ingredients. I don’t do truffle oil, Himalayan pink salt at $10 per quarter-ounce or single-origin
chocolate that can only be found through Posh Nosh-approved purveyors” (2006). It has been
estimated by the New York Times that “one ad running continuously on the site would be worth
about $20,000 a month” (Kaufman, 2012).
Finally, Bakerella is authored by Angie Dudley, a Georgian graphic designer who has
been blogging since 2007. The site is populated with cutely decorated desserts, and Dudley is
credited with inventing the ‘cake pop’ (a bite-sized ball of cake that is frosted/decorated and then
placed on top of a lollipop stick) in 2008 and facilitating its popularity as a food craze through
her intricate and cute designs. Dudley has made an appearance on the Martha Stewart show,
published a New York Times bestseller cookbook, and her blog averages around 650,000 page
views per month (Federated Media, n.d.). As will be discussed in this chapter, Dudley often
incorporates sponsored content onto her blog.

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From this introductory information, it can be seen that in general it is difficult to ascertain
the precise financial information of food blogs. This information is rarely published or
acknowledged by the bloggers themselves and must be surmised through estimates and analytics.
Additionally, these three sites are outliers in that they exemplify the small minority of bloggers
who have managed to successfully turn their digital blogging labour into highly visible and
profitable multimedia brands. However, I find this extra-ordinary status to be informative of the
hierarchies that are perpetuated within the blogosphere, as these highly successful examples are
disproportionately circulated and come to stand in as representative of the genre and the fantasy
that this work can be transformed into a lucrative business.
Postfeminism and the Digital Labour of Self-Branding

Sarah Banet-Weiser describes branding as a corporate marketing strategy that exceeds the
tangible qualities of the product or service in question and serves to structure cultural
relationships. She writes: “In the contemporary US, building a brand is about building an
affective, authentic relationship with a consumer, one based – just like a relationship between
two people – on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives, and expectations”
(2012, p. 8). Food blogs are engaged in this project of branding, which is central to their
monetisability, and takes place through technological features of the blog platform including the
domain name, the blog header, tagline and the site design and aesthetics. Additionally, branding
encompasses not only the work of food bloggers but also their digital personae, which takes
place in a social media environment described above where entrepreneurial ventures are
understood as an extension of the individual’s personal experiences. Food bloggers are thus what
Banet-Weiser calls ‘interactive subjects,’ bound by the dual logics of postfeminism and digital
media that “make self-branding seem not only logical but perhaps necessary” (2012, p. 56,

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emphasis in original). The interactivity of the food blogger has the effect of collapsing the blog
name, the domain name and the blogger. Fewer people know the names of Drummond, Perelman
and Dudley than know their brand names, and they often refer to themselves by their blog names.
This attention to creating a coherent brand lends a personal touch that distinguishes the
food blog from mere online recipes – as discussed in Chapter One, food blogs embed their
recipes within intimate autobiographical details and the way food blogs are consumed by an
audience is indicated by the comments generated which are often targeted toward empty praise
of the blogger and her work whereas the comments on aggregators offer detailed, quantitative
evaluations of the recipes themselves. For instance, Drummond posts a recipe for ‘Pecan Pie
Bites’ (2015), which attracts comments on her personal grooming – as Louise H writes “They
look AMAZING! Lovin' the festive red nailvarnish” – her kitchen appliances – Donna writes
“Oh My Goodness! I could eat every one of them, I so love Pecan Pie! I see you're using your
faithful first mixer in preparing these heavenly bites of Pecan Pie!” – and personal compliments
– as Bonnie Miner writes “These look heavenly! I didn't know that Land O'Lakes had angels
writing recipes?! That's what I consider the person who came up with these! Oh. My. Such
deliciousness!” Alternatively, a comparable recipe for ‘Pecan Cups’ by user HAYCO (n.d.) on
online recipe aggregator AllRecipes.com yields comments that focus specifically on qualitative
improvements to the recipe rather than the recipe author herself. For example, Ester Fraser writes
“These are wonderful! The only thing I had to change was to use about 1.5 cups of chopped
pecans because otherwise the filling was too runny and didn't puff up during baking” and
KATERINAJB writes: “They taste great, but I recommend using actual muffin tins (with the
paper muffin cups for easy serving) so the mixture doesn't spread so much in the oven.” These
differences illustrate the ways online recipe sites serve a much more pragmatic purpose in

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comparison to food blogs, which are often read for voyeuristic glimpses into the lifestyle and
personal experiences of the blogger. These differences highlight the importance of personal
branding within the food blog genre.
The resulting personal brands of food bloggers are centred around stylised femininity that
speaks to the nostalgic recreation of gender traditionalism through an emphasis on being a wife
and mother and an elevation of the details of domestic routine. Drummond’s sophisticated
transmedia brand is built around the postfeminist narrative of ‘accidentally’ falling into country
life, through which she is able to give an intimate insight into the nostalgic and isolated lifestyle
of a family farm in the agricultural Midwest from the perspective of an urban outsider. In her
autobiography, Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, Drummond describes her sophisticated,
cosmopolitan life in Los Angeles as an independent and ambitious woman en route to law school
when she is unexpectedly whisked off her feet and onto a remote ranch by a seventh-generation
cattle farmer. Her romanticised account of country life leads her to draw on cowboy tropes – she
refers to her husband as The Marlboro Man on her blog and categorises the recipes on her blog
into ‘cowboy’ and ‘cowgirl’ food. Moreover, Drummond uses this narrative to justify an
exaggerated performance of newfound domestic contentment, for as the farmer’s wife she is
obliged to take on traditional feminine labour, homeschooling her four children and cooking to
feed an endless stream of hungry cowboy labourers, children and extended family.
This brand is translated onto the blog platform through several ways. The header of a
food blog is a synecdoche for the brand, acting as the central identifying and navigating feature
of a food blog. Visually, it serves the main focal point of the site and is positioned to always
appears above the webpage fold. Functionally, the header represents a portal for the viewer to
quickly return to the home page of a blog. As the symbolic and navigational heart of a food blog,

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then, the header is tasked with expressing the ethos of the blogging brand. Drummond selects a
vintage floral aesthetic to visually unify and identify her brand. Her header includes spring
flowers and ornate script that complements her custom-painted, $1350 KitchenAid mixer. She
juxtaposes this reference to golden-age femininity with the tagline ‘Plowing through life in the
country one calf nut at a time’ (2007), which marks the centrality of rural life and self-
deprecating femininity to her brand.

Figure 8. The Pioneer Woman blog header [Screenshot]. (Drummond, 2016)

The branding of the food blogger also takes place through the ‘About’ page, which is a core
feature of the blog platform and has the function of giving the reader more information about the
author behind a blog. Drummond includes a small section underneath her header that is visible
on the main page of her blog where she includes a personal snapshot, writing: “My name is Ree.
Howdy! I’m a desperate housewife. I live in the country. I’m obsessed with butter, Basset
Hounds, and Ethel Merman. Welcome to my frontier!” (2007). This is supplemented by a more
detailed ‘About’ page that the reader can click through to using a link on the header. Food
bloggers typically use these pages to offer biographical information that emphasises their
heteronormative femininity and ‘ordinariness.’ For instance, Drummond describes herself as a
“moderately agoraphobic ranch wife and mother of four” who loves “blogging…waking up,
taking photos, and writing about what pops into my head as I continue chronicle this bizarre,
beautiful, and often very weird journey I’m on” (n.d.). This self-depiction as a cheerful, quirky
and down-to-earth wife and mother is central to her broad appeal.

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Similarly, Dudley’s ‘About’ page on Bakerella is used to brand her impressive site as an
amateur production inspired by a personal, creative passion. She writes: “I started this website to
help keep track of my baking and decorating attempts. I got the bug after taking an introductory
cake decorating class and just haven’t stopped. The site focuses on fun and easy baking…You
may even find yourself smiling from all the sweetness” (2007). Her description of her elaborate
cake-pops as ‘baking and decorating attempts’ is humble and her description of this work as ‘fun
and easy baking’ downplays the skill and resources that are invested in the production of her
baked goods and her blog. This diminishes the appearance of the blog as a professional, for-
profit production, a key component of girlie entrepreneurialism’s use of femininity as
masquerade.
However, the blogging platform evidences the conflation of the blogger and the brand,
and her creative passionate labour with a valuable digital resource. The same ‘About’ page that
stands as a testament to the blogger’s everyday and domestic feminine subjectivity is situated
alongside sections that belie the commercial interests of the blog brand. For instance, Dudley’s
personal ‘About’ page is situated alongside pages titled ‘Press,’ ‘Shop’ and ‘Contact’ which
respectively evidence the mainstream circulation of her work, the commoditisation of her
Bakerella brand, and her desire to foster future corporate partnerships. This placement situates
Dudley as a can-do subject, at once adhering to normative femininity while seeking out
professional opportunities, and this collapse between private and public is fostered by the blog
platform and social networking site logic.
The hyperfemininity and domesticity of food blogs stand as evidence of what Negra
(2009) describes as the postfeminist retreatist narrative – the return to and celebration of
conservatism, through traditional gender roles and the glamorization of feminine traditions such

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as motherhood, wedding culture and domesticity. A central part of this retreatist narrative entails
representing the postfeminist subject “as having lost herself but then (re)achieving stability
through romance, de-aging, a makeover, by giving up paid work, or by ‘coming home’…[for
which she is] rewarded with a more authentic, intact, and achieved self” (2009, p. 5). Negra sees
retreatism as a way of allowing regressive gender roles to flourish through nebulous discourses
of self-actualisation and the widespread celebration of this traditionalism in popular culture.
While I agree with Negra’s characterisation of postfeminist retreatism and its prevalence in
postfeminist media, I argue that food blogs not only reflect but also respond to these values.
For instance, Drummond’s brand is a hyperbolic rendition of the retreatist narrative. She
plays on the binaries between her student life in Los Angeles and being a wife and mother in
rural Oklahoma, and her dream of going to law school versus her contented acceptance of ranch
life. Her traditionally gendered labour – the full-time job of cooking and taking care of her
children – is understood as necessary in the context of ranch life, but is also represented as
fulfilling and pleasurable. However, her representation of this retreatist identity is stylised and
exaggerated, not simply ‘being’ but ‘knowing’ the conditions under which traditional femininity
is produced. This serves as evidence that her TPW brand is less a documentation of her intimate
life and more a performance strategically positioned to capitalise on the cultural nostalgia for
simplicity and security that is yearned for by anxiety-ridden urbanites. Her brand correctly
gauges and soothes the postfeminist melancholy for simplicity and traditionalism that is
expressed through conservative femininity, and is rewarded financially for doing so. In the same
ways that Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima were personae constructed to soften the corporate
production of their products, the amateur posturing and self-deprecating stance of the food

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blogger is used to sell the fantasy of food blogs – that domestic femininity is a natural and
effortless condition, and that hyperbolic femininity is the path to happiness and self-actualisation.
I argue that ultimately the commodity value of food blogs centres around both their
production of an amateur, authentic female subject as well as specifically feminine DIY
pedagogies. This production of femininity as commodity contributes to the folksy charm of these
artefacts, as girlie entrepreneurialism is predicated upon the unlikely success of the ordinary
mother or housewife, rather than the diversification of existing celebrity brands into lifestyle
media, as recently practiced by Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively
5
, Alicia Silverstone and Reese
Witherspoon. That is, with the girlie entrepreneurialism I describe, there is a far less tangible
relationship between the entrepreneur and the sale of actual goods or even services. Instead, what
is offered for the virtual consumer is a fantasised digital performance of femininity, alongside a
creative but amateur production of food. The work of self-branding, required to transcribe and
commoditise one’s digital identity, is an inherently entrepreneurial practice. This makes clear
how, in the era of social networking, selling oneself online is a viable business opportunity.

What’s on the Menu? Temporality, Organisational Systems and Added Value

Menus have a dual meaning in English, used both to connote the list of items available
for sale in a restaurant as well as the list of commands displayed on screen in computing. The
former arranges potential combinations of ingredients into consumable commodities and stands
as a permanent record that outlives the production and consumption of the food it details. The
latter works as a directive, interfacing the desires of the computer user with a store of organised
commands. The menu systems that structure food blogs draw on both of these qualities to add
value to the text.

5
Lively’s lifestyle website, Preserve, was ultimately short-lived

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Food blogs are organised through elaborate menu systems, parsing content into discrete
modular units that evidence the database logic of these new media texts. Lev Manovich states
that new media objects are “on the level of material organisation…all databases” (2002, p. 201),
and that the database can be defined as “a structured collection of data…organized for fast search
and retrieval by a computer” (p. 194). On food blogs, database ontology is visible through the
existence of overlapping horizontal and vertical menu systems, with these different menus
accruing value in different ways. Conventionally, the prominent header on the blog’s home page
is cushioned by a horizontal menu bar that sits above or below the title. The meta-categories
featured on the horizontal menu bar give an overview of the blogger’s purview and purpose. For
example, TPW’s horizontal menu bar includes the categories Home, Confessions, Cooking,
Home & Garden, Homeschooling and Entertainment, reflecting her blog’s encroachment from a
food blog into a lifestyle media empire (2007). Bakerella’s horizontal menu bar – which appears
above the header – includes Home, About, Archives, FAQ, Press, Links, Shop and Contact
(2007). As touched on above, these sections hint at the ways that these blogs can be seamlessly
interfaced with the marketing campaigns of media conglomerates and corporations.
While horizontal menu bars reflect the professional orientation and scope of the blog,
secondary vertical menus are used to organize and navigate the abundance of content produced
on food blogs. Secondary menu bars – typically arranged down a vertical column of the screen –
arrange posts into a searchable, indexed database. For example, Bakerella’s vertical menu
includes the categories Breakfast, Brownies, Cakes, Cheesecake, Cookies, Cupcakes, Desserts
and Pie (Figure 9.), affirming her specialisation in baking and sweet goods. TPW’s vertical menu
bar for recipes includes 16 Minute Meals, Appetizers, Breads, Breakfast, Cowboy Food, Cowgirl
Food, Desserts, Freezer Food, Holidays, Main Courses, Sides and Soups.

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Figure 9. Bakerella main menu detail [Screenshot].
Vertical menus add value through organising and archiving the typically fleeting acts of
domesticity, food production and consumption into a body of work that stands as a portfolio of
the creative, technical and domestic labour of food bloggers. It is this output that generates value
through attracting search engine hits, views and advertisers to the blog. The archiving imperative
of the blog lends the qualities of gravity and memory to women’s quotidian domestic routines.
This drive is evident in cooking literature and its tendency to consciously and unconsciously
record women’s autobiographies. Moreover, archiving as a process allows for the symbiosis of
experience and its mediation which, as Amelie Hastie explains in the context of the souvenirs
and collections of female film stars, “not only can coexist but can also inform one another. Each
gives the other a new context – through memory, through narrative, through history – rather than
destroys or erases the context of the other” (2007, p. 27).
In the food blog context, digital renditions of daily life serve to calibrate new realities and
contexts for the existence of the postfeminist subject. The format of the blog archives content by

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month and year, building a material, digital corpus. In its default mode, the generic Blogger
platform includes a calendar on the vertical menu that arranges content by publication date, that
is broken down by month and by year. The visibility of this calendar – and its physical, spatial
expansion as the blog ages and becomes bloated with content – serves to mark the aging and
growth of the blog as a material entity. This archival function serves an important feminist
purpose, serving as a rare autobiographical record of both women’s daily domestic lives as well
as the prominent life events that mark their progression through the lifecycle. On her blog,
Perelman publicly documents her engagement, her wedding, her son’s birth, his first day of
kindergarten, moving house, and the birth of her daughter. These milestone events mark socially
significant rites of passage for women and suggest a maturity into womanhood that is grand and
temporally progressive. At the same time, food blogs equally record a celebration of the trivial
details of everyday life. In a New Yorker article, TPW is described as “a gallery of quotidian
moments. Drummond blogs about cleaning out her closet, buying an organizer for her jewelry,
getting a metal ice-cream scoop stuck to her lip” (Fortini, 2011). These diary-like entries are a
paean to the banalities and intricacies of routine, domestic life and the value ascribed to these
details as they are circulated in digital space.
The archive is also used to track the cyclical movement of women’s time. This concept of
women’s time arises from Julia Kristeva’s description of “two types of temporality (cyclical and
monumental) [that] are traditionally linked to female subjectivity” (1981, p. 17). Women’s time
is marked on food blogs through references to the seasons. For instance, SK organises her
vertical menu seasonally, breaking down her recipes into the categories Spring, Summer, Fall
and Winter. This organisation creates a link between women’s labour and the changing seasons,
and foreshadows this brand’s emphasis on the sensual pleasures of seasonal, fresh produce.

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Overlaid on the seasonal cycles are markers of the passing years, as the bottom of each post
includes links to recipes Perelman has posted on the same date for preceding years of the blog.
For her 2014 post on ‘Strawberries and Cream with Graham Crumbles’ (2014b) she includes
links to “Key Lime Popsicles (One Year Ago); Fig, Olive Oil and Sea Salt Challah (Two Years
Ago); Roasted Tomato Soup with Broiled Cheddar (Three Years Ago); Eggplant Salad Toasts
and Perfect Blueberry Muffins (Four Years Ago); Grilled Eggplant and Olive Pizza (Five Years
Ago); Slow-Roasted Tomatoes (Six Years Ago); and Double Chocolate Torte (Seven Years
Ago)”. While cyclical time has traditionally been associated with mundane domesticity, what
Shapiro describes as the work of “day-to-day maintenance: feeding and cleaning and mending
and feeding and cleaning…distinctly monotonous and in a tangible sense unproductive” (2001,
p. 13), using the evocative qualities of food to mark these anniversaries illustrates both the
passing of time and the repetitive character of the seasons: posted in the early Fall, these recipes
mark the seasonality of eggplant and tomatoes, and the possibility of firing up the oven again as
the humid summer weather dissipates in New York.
Yet the digital qualities that allow for the archiving and the representation of cyclical
time are set against markers of linear progress and novelty in the content and narrative of blogs.
In opposition to the continuity and weighty presence suggested by the archive is the insatiable
demand for novel content sought out by the structure of social networking sites and the up-to-
date currency for which the Internet has been celebrated as a media form. All blogs situate the
most recent content within the prime real estate of the blog’s front page and it is generally
expected that food blogs will have new posts published at least once per week: SK posts two to
three times per week; TPW writes every day or every other day; and, Bakerella posts around
once a week. Posting regularly is considered an important goal as the qualities of liveness and

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professionalism are crucial to a food blog’s success. As Drummond writes in a post titled ‘Ten
Important Things I’ve Learned About Blogging’ she advises readers: “Blog often. Whether you
write a sixteen-paragraph essay about the cosmic implications of a free market system, a one-
paragraph description of what happens to your soul when you walk into your godforsaken
laundry room, or a simple photo and caption, consider your blog a precious bloom that requires
daily nurturing” (2010). As it maps onto the temporal crisis and lifecycle of the postfeminist
subject’s life, the food blog represents a real-time narrative that exists in an endless state of
suspense, surprise and becoming.
The importance of the menu as a value adding component of the food blog is indicated by
its visual prominence. As blog designer Melissa Culbertson notes, readers tend to “spend more
time looking at the left side of a page than the right” (2013) leading to the convention of vertical
menu bars being positioned within the right side column of a blog. This positioning is also the
default setting for standard templates on the Blogger and WordPress platforms that have been
integral to solidifying the conventions of the blog genre (Siles, 2011). Thus, visually and
logically, food blog menus are used to scaffold the latest content, which is centred around the
blog’s most visible web space.
Food blog menu systems are prominent and hierarchical, scaffolding the blog’s form and
content, and making visible the database logic of the blog. Menus reveal and contribute to the
compulsion for the successful blogger to prolifically produce blog posts, as they are catalogued
as commodities of value in the digital economy. It is this database that successfully archives the
transient routines of women’s domestic labour, encoding this work into digital objects that are
visible and permanent. In turn, these digital objects accrue value through their circulation in

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online space. These qualities of the archive and the database thus transcribe domesticity and
intimacy into commodities that are quantifiable and profitable in the digital economy.

Tags and Hyperlinks: Spaces of Resistance

I have above outlined the qualities of the database that add value to women’s food
blogging labour, namely their ability to store and index digital information. However, new media
databases also allude to the ever present threat of unruliness as a continuous glut of digital
information must somehow be contained within the discrete, indexed categories of the database.
Database logic stands for the discreteness and unambiguous nature of contained and
impermeable boundaries. Thus, it is a masculinist logic at odds with the ways that the boundaries
of women’s bodies have been theorised as inherently fluid and leaky (Kirby, 1997; Grosz, 1994;
Irigaray, 1985).
In this section, I seek to disturb the binary logics that structure the discreteness of the
database, as well as Manovich’s conceptualisation of the database as oppositional to narrative.
Manovich offers an easy distinction between the database and narrative, which maps on to the
divide between new and old media. He writes:

Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or end; in fact,
they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would
organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items,
where every item has the same significance as any other (2002, p. 194)

Although I have above argued the ways in which food blogs, as new media objects, contain and
are guided by the database, I also seek to challenge Manovich’s notion that narrative is absent
from or only superficially masks the database. I do this by examining the ways in which food

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bloggers use tags and hyperlinks to create connections between content, platforms and
corporations. The multiple and sometimes contradictory ways that temporality is embedded into
blogs guide an unfolding of the content in a narrative format – one that is certainly guided by the
selections of the viewer, but nevertheless unfolds as a sequence that speaks of narrative
progression. For this reason, I take on Hayles’ suggestion that, “rather than being natural
enemies, narrative and database are more appropriately seen as natural symbionts” (2007, p.
1603) – different species bound together in a mutually beneficial relation.
The archival and hyperlinked logic of blogs allows narratives to unfold across
increasingly non-linear and recursive trajectories while their attachment to the real-time
chronology of the blogger’s life gives the database direction and contours beyond that imagined
by a simple encyclopaedic information store. These digital qualities add value to the food
blogger’s brand, and facilitate the easy corporatisation of this work. Alongside these complex
temporalities, food blogs play with space to reveal their resistance against the neat and easy
categorization of content requested by the database. While I have detailed the complex menu
systems through which blog information is ordered as a database, the blog platform also works to
disturb the assumptions of discreteness within the categories of the database through the
additional organizational and navigational systems that are embedded within the content of the
food blog. This collapse of database and narrative mirrors the coalescence of private and public
spaces within the female labour economy. In this section, I examine tags and hyperlinks as
examples of such embedded navigational systems.
While the process of eating is considered disappointingly governed by “the linear order
of indigestion, digestion and excrement” (Probyn, 2000, p. 33), the digestion of digital content is
purposefully partial, recursive and frenetic. If the multiple menu categories act to visibly and

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ostentatiously scaffold blog content, embedded organisational systems such as tags and
hyperlinks are the passageways, escalators and corridors that direct the user’s navigation through
a course plotted as an afterthought by the bloggers. It is this mutual action between the reader
and the blogger that constitutes the narrative of the food blog, fostering feminised intimacy in its
exploration of fragmentary female subjectivity.
Tags are keywords attached to blog posts and operate by collating information across
categories. For example, tags might collect recipes by main ingredient or meal type, similarly to
the work of the secondary menu. However, there is much more fluidity and overlap possible with
tags. For instance, Perelman’s recipe for ‘Herbed Tomato and Roasted Garlic Tart’ is attached to
a grab bag of tags including Appetizer, Lunch, Photo, Summer, Tarts/Quiche, Tomatoes,
Vegetarian (2014a). Tagging offers a fluidity to the categorisation of content that reveals the
ambiguities often overlooked by the database – is this tart an Appetizer or a Lunch meal? – as
well as the blogger’s desire to anticipate the navigational desires of the audience – searching for
a recipe to utilise extra tomatoes, or looking for vegetarian recipe ideas. Unlike the relatively
rigid and permanent structures of the menu categories, multiple tags are added to blog posts and
can result in inefficient outcomes when taken as categories in and of themselves. Some of the
main problems of tags are redundancies, for example when the plural or singular form is used
inconsistently, and the inclusion of tags which are only applicable to a single post. While menus
predate the addition of new content, tags are often added to content after the fact. This allows
them to be used to recategorise the content within a database.
Similarly, hyperlinks are central to fostering the multi-directional connectivity of the
network structure. They are also often embedded into the content of text or image, punctuating
the categorical boundaries of the database and fluidly traversing discrete informational nodes.

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Perelman uses hyperlinks in her ‘Herbed Tomato and Roast Garlic Tart’ post to mimic the
structures of intimacy and memory. She writes: “I had so many recipes I was overdue to test out
— a lemonade, a salad, a tart and I’d been promising my son I’d make chocolate pudding for
weeks, not to mention the daily grind of breakfast, lunchbox and dinner” (2014a). The words
‘salad’, ‘chocolate pudding’ and ‘lunchbox’ are hyperlinked, the first taking the reader to an
avocado and cucumber salad on SK’s Instagram feed, the second leading to an old chocolate
pudding recipe on her blog, the third leading to an image of her son holding his lunchbox on her
Flickr feed. These appended references offer intimate insights into the everyday and ‘authentic’
life of the blogger while also revealing the distributed digital life of the blogger across multiple
platforms. In this way, hyperlinks seem well suited to the fragmented autobiographies of
women’s life writing in cooking literature (Tye, 2010; Theophano, 2002) – as mentioned in the
previous chapter – and the multi-tasking required of the ideal postfeminist subject. Thus, they are
reminiscent of what Sherry Turkle (1995) described as the concrete function of computers in the
early days of cyberspace which were useful for, among other things, understanding the bricolage
of the postmodern subject
6
, or what Hayles describes as technogenesis, “the idea that humans
and technics have coevolved together” (2012, p. 10). As tabs are useful for toggling or cycling
through postmodern identities, hyperlinks reflect the more integrated and embedded status of
human cognition and its digital expression in the blogosphere.
Tags and hyperlinks thus speak to the fact that when the chronological life of the blogger
is mapped onto the blog database, content is populated according to a series of hierarchies and
flows that mirror the subjective interpretation of life experiences as interrelated, partial and
complex. Tags and hyperlinks acknowledge this complexity, resisting that database’s imperative

6
Despite Turkle’s reversal of her optimistic position on the psychological impacts of new media in Alone, Together
I believe that her observations on the ontological relationships between humans and technology remain useful

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to containment as they reveal the desire and necessity for cross-categorical connectivities.
Crucially, however, these embedded navigational objects also provide portals for the individual’s
personal content to be interfaced with corporate sponsorship for profit.
One of the easiest and most common ways for bloggers to add a monetising component
to their blog platform is through the addition of Google’s AdSense or similar advertising
platforms. With AdSense, Google provides a widget that is incorporated into the space of the
blog, and the blog owner profits from renting out this space with a nominal fee for each click-
through. This revenue structure builds on the meritocratic notion that rewards should be
commensurate with the blogger’s success in attracting an audience. The actual ads seen by
readers are determined by algorithms based on their personal viewing histories, and thus appeal
to the ideal of individual customisation prevalent in digital media. As SK writes “many ads are
targeted either by region or browsing history (i.e. people who go to any political sites are likely
see political ads; I, predictably, see ones for cookware) so I actually don’t see what you’re
seeing” (Perelman, 2006). In this way, hyperlinks offer a way to spatially merge the individual’s
intimate expression with a profit-driven corporate agenda. It is not usually possible for the reader
to know when a hyperlink will take them to another blog post, a secondary social media platform
by the blogger, or to an affiliate corporate site due to the flattening qualities of the hyperlink
structure.
Similarly, blogger-corporate partnerships take place through the Amazon Affiliate Store,
which are ideally suited to the economic purposes of food bloggers. Affiliate Stores work by
linking products and merchandise used by or mentioned on a food blog to a webpage where these
same items can be bought on Amazon. When a reader clicks through to Amazon using an
affiliate link, and when they purchase a product from this link, the blogger hosting this link

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receives a small commission. For example, Bakerella has an Amazon Affiliate Store to which
she links from the main menu, without using the name Amazon but instead integrating Amazon’s
products with her own branded merchandise. The merchandise selected for sale is curated and
often annotated in line with the crafting of the blogger’s online identity and work – Dudley
includes a wide range of baking books, tools and decorations in her online shop.
The function of hyperlinks and tags operates to digitally distribute the life and work of
female food bloggers across cyberspace and across the private/public spheres. This opens up
opportunities for relations of intimacy to be created as the reader and writer generate a
relationship through unique narrative permutations. It also allows for the optimal monetisation of
the food blogger’s online persona through corporate sponsorships and affiliations.
Cashing in on Intimacy: Corporate Underwriters of the Personal Brand

As products that have been developed within the logic of the sharing economy, AdSense
and the Amazon Affiliate Store are marketed as tools that facilitate the dream of entrepreneurial
empowerment. Anyone can opt into these schemes, and it is easy to incorporate these links and
widgets onto a personal blog in order to access the revenue-raising opportunities that seem to
meritocratically reward blogging talent and hard work. However, it is clear that the profit
margins allocated by these tools are miniscule given the value of Google and Amazon, and very
few bloggers are able to make significant income from employing these tools. Instead, these
tools are primarily useful for technology corporations, who are given permission to skim from
the value of each transaction between the content producer and her reader. In this section, I
explore the ways in which corporations embed themselves omnisciently within the interpersonal
relationships fostered in the blogosphere while simultaneously rendering invisible their
involvement in underwriting the food blogger’s personal platform and brand.

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Corporate underwriting offers for most bloggers the only possibility of compensation for
their digital projects. For instance, Drummond has incorporated sponsored relationships with
large corporations including Wal-Mart, The Food Network and Land O’ Lakes butter into her
TPW brand. These partnerships are indicative of the value that has been generated off the free
digital, creative and domestic labour of female bloggers, and the authentic personae and online
reputations they have painstakingly crafted. To begin with, the blogger provides an interesting
case study in the articulation of convergence culture, which is traditionally understood in the
context of the relationship between media industries and audiences. Henry Jenkins expresses
convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences” (2006, p. 3). With
bloggers, it can be seen that not only audiences but amateur media producers are circulated
across media platforms, as new technologies provide new opportunities for amateur media
productions to be created and circulated, although the savvy of the individual is rarely able to
compete with the profitability of established brands until and unless they sacrifice their
autonomy for the sake of partnering with media industries. Even if they forsake such official
sponsorships and partnerships, their success is profitable to and exploited by these same
industries. However, I wish to challenge the notion that the savvy and entrepreneurial individual
is able to experience brand success without tapping into the pre-formed, top-down resources of
media monopolies. Such opportunities are only available to bloggers who have expended
substantial free labour into their individual brand and informational product. Corporate
partnerships thus amplify the visibility and value of a minority of bloggers, while disguising the
failure rate of many bloggers whose efforts fade into oblivion without ever coming close to fairly
compensating the free labour expended by the blogger into this creative documentation. These

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failures are disguised by the same feminised rhetorics used to justify oppressive domestic and
private-sphere labour for decades – that women find it pleasurable and fulfilling, that it is part of
a sacrifice for the family, and that it is part of the necessary labour of being female.
Exploring this subject quickly raises theories about the ways that digital labour – and
particularly the feminised practice of food blogging – is inadequately valued. Digital labour is at
once exploitative and enjoyable, passionate and professional. Digital content is user-generated
but undoubtedly hierarchical, understood both as a gift economy and as a space where
individuals and businesses attempt to profit at every turn. As Tiziana Terranova writes,
cyberspace and its monetisation thrive on the free, daily labour of millions of participants which
she describes as “[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited”
(2004, p. 74) and operates as added value in the cybernetic realm. Similarly, Maurizio Lazzarato
coins the term immaterial labour to describe digital labour in terms of the “informational and
cultural content of the commodity” produced (1996, p. 132) and its characterisation as “a series
of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’” (p. 132). I therefore regard digital labour
as drawing on many of the same issues raised by feminist theories on women’s work as variously
pleasurable and exploitative, invisible and devalued, and governed by social power structures.
I first wish to discuss the ways in which food bloggers derive corporate value through
their distinction from corporate products, highlighting their qualities as down-to-earth and honest
individuals. As I have argued above, the value of the blogger’s brand is strongly predicated upon
their willingness to trade intimacies with their online audience. This intimacy plays an important
role in imparting a sense of authenticity, which fosters a connection between the blogger and her
invisible, networked audience. Authenticity and amateurism are regarded as indications of the
blogger’s trustworthiness, in preference to formal experience or qualifications. For instance,

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Perelman connotes the amateurism of her food blog by juxtaposing it to paid jobs, writing (in
third person): “In previous iterations of her so-called career, she’s been a record store shift
supervisor, a scrawler of “happy birthday” on bakery cakes, an art therapist and a technology
reporter. She likes her current gig – the one where she wakes up and cooks whatever she feels
like that day – the best” (2006). Amateurism has the effect of perpetuating the fantasy that food
blogging is a whimsical, pleasure-driven extension of innate femininity. Perelman’s food
blogging is described as motivated by her passion for food, as she self-deprecatingly describes
herself as “the kind of person you might innocently ask what the difference is between summer
and winter squash and she’ll go on for about twenty minutes before coming up for air to a
cleared room and you soundly snoring” (2006).
This charming self-effacement is a further contributor to the relatability of the food
blogger, and is peppered throughout Perelman’s writing. In a post for ‘Cold Noodles with Miso
Lime and Ginger,’ she situates this impressive recipe with a conspiratorial confession of the
seeming failures of her domestic life:

I’m sorry if this shatters your misplaced image of me as some sort of domestic goddess,
but my signature move is shoving something into a closet and slamming the door before
anything falls out and then willfully ignoring its pleas for mercy — come on, you do it
too, right? anyone? Sigh. (2014c).

These claims to ordinariness are contraindicated by the professional skills and high-quality
production of food, photos and writing that are regularly evidenced on food blog. However, the
narrative that such work is self-taught and driven by passion simply affirms the entrepreneurial
imperative of the can-do subject (Harris, 2004).

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Similarly, the blogger adopts a tone of familiarity despite the often unknown and unseen
status of the collapsed audience. Marwick and boyd discuss how “variable self-presentation is
complicated by increasingly mainstream social media technologies that collapse multiple
contexts and bring together commonly distinct audiences” (2010, p. 2). However, the solution
typically adopted by food bloggers – akin to that discussed by boyd (2014) in the context of
teenagers – is to imagine the intimate audience, as bloggers adopt the tone and assumed
knowledge expected of family and friends. For instance, Drummond maintains a warm and
cheerful tone with her unseen audience – she perkily signs off a post: “Love you guys! My
posting will pick up again next week. Thank you for sticking with me during this trying time”
(2014) – and balances her saccharine portrayal of life on the farm with quirky jokes and self-
dismissive humour. She uses self-deprecation to minimise her significant weight loss and avoid
this intimate detail from being construed as boastful: “I’ve now lost 22.533029 pounds. I would
have lost 23 pounds if I hadn’t had that doughnut yesterday. And okay, I had two doughnuts. But
I have to be me” (2014). This tone of familiarity and feminised self-deprecation contrasts with
the marketing rhetoric of corporations, which is what makes the food blogosphere such a
lucrative arena for selling products to do with women’s interests, food and lifestyle.
The ordinariness of food blogs works to connote an authenticity that is longed for in the
context of media-saturation and ubiquitous advertising. Food blogs fit in neatly within the
phenomenon that Michael Serazio describes as the “bottom-up, ‘cool’ sell of guerilla marketing”
(2013, p. 15) where covert, word of mouth and surprise messaging is valued by advertisers,
exemplified by street art, flash mobs, viral videos and product placement. These increasingly
sophisticated “techniques of commercial self-effacement” (Serazio, 2013, p. 2) are required to
break through to the savvy and marketing-fatigued consumer. Food blogs align with these

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qualities through their intimate depiction of a trustworthy individual – as Matchar writes,
“bloggers are supposed to be our friends, our sisters, our neighbors” (2013, p. 63) – and their
dissemination through digital media, which offers many qualities that allow interpersonal
relationships to flourish. Matchar quotes a BlogHer study that suggests that “women are more
than twice as likely to have bought a beauty product recommended by a trusted blogger (63
percent) in the past six months than a product recommended by a magazine (26 percent)” (2013,
p. 59). Consequently, bloggers have been eagerly sought out by corporations for their utility as
guerrilla marketing agents.
Inversely, many food bloggers include a Press Kit or ‘Work With Me’ section that allows
advertisers to reach out to them and create digital partnerships that typically take the form of
advertising, merchandise, sponsorship, product placements, giveaways and reviews. Bakerella
has negotiated multiple corporate partnerships through her blog, which typically manifest in
sponsored posts such as the recipe she writes for the new caramel apple flavoured Oreos, which
is cross-posted on Target’s lifestyle blog, A Bullseye View:
I’m thrilled to be back on A Bullseye View again to share a sweet little treat. I’ve made
cute Bullseye Cake Pops and Beach Ball Cake Pops for Target already, and today I’m
sharing cute cookie pops.
They are made with the new, limited edition Caramel Apple Flavored Oreo
Cookies at Target. So of course, it only made sense that I had to make them look like
little caramel apples, too. (Dudley, 2014).

The language of this post reflects Bakerella’s ingratiating endorsement of these
companies, and she features similarly-written blog posts that showcase new products by Nestle
Tollhouse, KitchenAid, Got Milk? and Reese’s, among others. These posts are often sponsored

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directly or in-kind. Although FCC regulations require directly sponsored posts to by clearly
disclosed, Matchar notes that while “paid reviews must, by law, be clearly marked, there’s no
law that says a blogger must give her honest opinion of a product” (2013, p. 61). These
sponsorships allow the blogger to build and spread her brand, despite the returns being somewhat
nebulous.
Part of this grey area between the work of the individual and the corporation, and the
opinion versus the product placement, takes place due to what Terranova describes as the
conflicting forces of capitalism and the gift economy. She writes that “the market economy is
always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift economy” (2004, p. 77), while
the free labour of the gift economy remains integrated within the “larger informational economy”
(p. 77) that is part of the operation of advanced capitalism, as the demise of blue collar
occupations in overdeveloped countries stimulates “excess productive activities that are
pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (p. 78). This
exploitation takes place through the unsustainability of this free labour – Terranova describes it
as under-compensated and exhausting – which is definitely applicable to the work of food
bloggers, who are generally self-driven only by the pervasive can do discourse of postfeminism.
For this reason, it is important to interrogate the true cost of trading intimacies on blogs,
particularly when those intimacies are exploited by corporations for their novel and surely
transient present-day value. As the jaded audience has gravitated towards accepting these
individual, authentic representations as authoritative – spurred on by the “rising sense of distrust
toward government, corporations” in neoliberal society (Matchar, 2013, p. 15) – corporations
have adjusted their profit-seeking trajectory. Through guerrilla marketing tactics such as blog
partnerships, corporations use individuals as human shields and cash in on their digital

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reputations: their very qualities of ‘humanness’ in the posthumanist, advanced capitalist
environment. As authenticity is co-opted to serve corporate ends, it is possible to foresee the
ethical complications that arise as a jaded consumer audience begins to warily associate human
intimacy with the aggressive and insidious messaging of corporate slogans, or begin to find one
indistinguishable from the other.
The effect of selling intimacy is politically problematic from the viewpoint that the
invasive quality of digitisation – and the new value placed on such self-surveillance – increases
the oppressive pressure for women to not only discipline themselves superficially, as women
have always been expected to do through fashion and the body, but to open up their homes, their
family relationships, and their lifestyle for the scrutiny and approval of strangers. As authenticity
becomes a tradable commodity, previously private aspects of life are opened up to the
panopticon – for admiration but also, and inevitably, regulation. Again, this movement confirms
the existing privileges of the already socially privileged who have the material resources to
observe and practise this form of self- and social regulation. This effect is exaggerated by the
popular rhetoric that digital media is accessible and everyday, suggesting that such
representations of ideal and carefully curated femininity are the norm and contributing to the
postfeminist culture of oppression of women by other women. As Matchar argues:
when we see what looks like an organized, stylish picture of domestic bliss portrayed on
their blogs, there’s a natural tendency to hold ourselves up against that…This is one of
the most insidious effects of lifestyle-blog culture (2013, p. 63).

More worrying is the long-term effect of training consumers to view bloggers not as
individual extensions of the corporate mouthpiece. By commoditising and trading intimacies so
freely and easily in the blogosphere, we must question the ways in which we are inadvertently

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eroding the potentialities of digitally mediated intimacies for short-term, unequally-distributed
profits.

Empowering for Whom? The Limitations of Girlie Entrepreneurialism

Although I have argued for a recognition that the hyperfemininity on food blogs is
strategically deployed, this does not mean that the potential benefits of this performance are
equally distributed. Instead, the limitations of normative femininity and the blogging platform
tend to reinforce socialised identity hierarchies. This happens through the discourse of
entrepreneurialism as a creative risk, the current emphasis of anchoring digital identities to real
life, and the myths of meritocracy and individualism that flourish on this genre.
Taking Risks and Making Good Choices

In the definition of contemporary entrepreneurialism that was presented earlier, taking
risks was considered a positive quality crucial to realising the dream of entrepreneurial labour.
The digital age proposes a different model of business risk than was true with brick-and-mortar
business ventures. For example, the costs involved in running a small business would have
included at a minimum an initial outlay of capital for rent, fixtures, inventory and branding.
These often significant and non-flexible portions of the small business’ expenses generated an
immediate financial risk that was borne directly by the small business owner. In contrast, the
online environment offers opportunities for significantly reducing such risks. Digital platforms
are easily transformed into potential sites of entrepreneurial activity with no ongoing costs
except for the individual’s labour, which is often discounted as creative leisure. Individuals can
take advantage of multiple user-friendly blogging, vlogging and image platforms; online buyers
and sellers are able to easily interact through online market facilitators such as Etsy, E-Bay and

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Amazon; and there are numerous tools designed to assist individuals to create their own
websites, domain names, marketing, advertising and online communication and transaction
channels. With this dramatically reduced risk-return equation, digital culture fosters the ‘can do’
spirit of entrepreneurialism.
However, these liberating entrepreneurial rhetorics demand scrutiny. One of the key
definitions of entrepreneurialism entails the individual’s initial assumption of risk, with the
anticipation of future opportunity (and profit). This notion of risk is cast as heroic, with an
apparently guaranteed return dependent simple on the individual’s ability to dream big and work
hard enough. Yet, women continue to face a burden in this regard as, despite the increasing entry
of women into the entrepreneurial organizational space, start-up ventures are generally only
available to those with established financial capital or ideas that affirm the dominant social
interests of angel investors. The gendered disadvantage that is perpetuated through the culture of
online start-ups is evident in stories of women seeking seed funding to develop female-friendly
dating apps. A Marie Claire article details the difficulties Susie Lee, the founder of dating app
Siren, faced in convincing predominantly male investors to understand the need for and premise
of such female-friendly services:

In pitching the apps to Silicon Valley investors, these founders discovered that many
guys, at first, just didn't get it. ‘The assumption that women needed a different dating
experience was challenged pretty hard by men,’ Lee says. Siren's idea of women
controlling the reveal of their photo was a head-scratcher. The standard venture-capitalist
response, Lee says, was: ‘This isn't going to work, because women have always been the
hunted and men have always been the hunter.’ VCs also told her, ‘I don't know why
women have to obscure their photos. Are they all fat and ugly?’ (Ricapito, 2016).

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This disadvantage is also classed. For many mompreneurs with children to support, the
financial investments required to execute an entrepreneurial idea are assumed to come materially
and in kind from a male partner with financial responsibility for the household, allowing the
mompreneur to dedicate financial, temporal and capital resources into their business idea. On the
other hand, if one is devoid of the appropriate financial safety net – as many of those in the
working and working-poor classes are – devoting such resources to a risky entrepreneurial
venture would be considered a unacceptable gamble. Furthermore, ‘good’ entrepreneurial ideas
are typically aligned with the reproduction of middle-class, heteronormative values such as
Etsy’s market for handmade, unique baby clothes or Alba’s eco-friendly and organic products,
which sell at a premium designed by and for middle-class women. Through these examples, we
begin to see the ways that ‘good choices’ and ‘creative risks’ are those decisions that are taken
by privileged subjects in the reproduction of normative values, and that digital
entrepreneurialism is a middle-class privilege rather than an accessible and empowering
possibility.

Digital Role Play in an Age of Anchored Identity

The second way in which the limitations of digital entrepreneurialism can be usefully
interrogated is through the new prescription to conflate digital identity with ecommerce, as I
argue that the logics of anchored identity construction, amateurism and self-branding are integral
to girlie entrepreneurialism. Given Web 2.0’s culture of digital prosumption, many scholars have
examined the role of women and girls in producing media as a central component of an
empowered and political feminism. Mary Celeste Kearney argues that

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girls often use the creative and communicative practices of media production to give
voice to and work through such difficulties [of female adolescence and
oppression]…many girl media producers rely on the practices of appropriation and
detournement to reconfigure commercial cultural artifacts into personalized creations that
speak more directly to their concerns, needs, fantasies, and pleasures (2006, p. 13)

and this approach is evident in key case studies such as Banet-Weiser’s work on self-
branding and the interactive subject (2012), Jessica Ringrose et. al.’s work on sexting as media
production (2013), Amy Hasinoff’s work on sexting panics (2012), and the large bodies of work
on youth culture and digital identity by danah boyd (2007, 2014). The rise of such female-
authored and distinctly feminised digital spaces represents an important platform for the
expression and experimentation of female subjectivity. At the same time, my enthusiasm for the
possibilities of female-produced media is tempered by my observation of the limited identity
productions proscribed by digital platforms and genres, and their tendency to reproduce and reify
normative online identity performances.
In order to challenge these digital limits, I begin with a brief chronology of online
identity play, which might usefully be divided into the pre- and post-social networking site
(SNS) eras. Pre-social networking identity is characterised by the utopic potential of text-based
cyber-identity play, for example in the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) most famously documented
by Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen (1995). Turkle saw this online gaming as postmodernism
realised, gushing that:
[o]n MUDs, one’s body is represented by one’s own textual description, so the obese can
be slender, the beautiful plain, the ‘nerdy’ sophisticated…The anonymity of

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MUDs…gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the
self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones (1995, p. 12).

It was this online identity play – at once freeing the subject from physical constraints
while still occasioning a visceral response – which also made cybersex such a fashionable topic
of inquiry by scholars in the pre-SNS era (Springer, 1996; Stone, 1995).
Alternatively, as danah boyd and others argue, in the post-SNS era the “identity work
taking place on social media sites like Facebook is very different from what Turkle initially
imagined. Many teens today go online to socialize with friends they know…in online contexts
that are more tightly wedded to unmediated social communities” (2014, p. 38). This post-SNS
era is also indicated by Turkle’s abrupt about-turn in her latest assessment of cyberspace in
Alone, Together where she writes that “with a mobile device as portal…it is easier to use our
lives as avatars to manage the tensions of everyday existence” (2011, p. 160) suggesting that the
MUD’s utopic fantasy space has morphed into a permanent and troubling digital masquerade that
permanently prevents truly intimate human interaction. While Turkle’s extremely critical
position is not the predominant one within the community of digital scholars, it does shed light
on the distinct change that has characterised the post-SNS era.
I am particularly interested in the ways that socially networked identities have become
more tightly anchored to the physical in recent times. According to Zhao et al., the “most
important identity information includes a person’s legal name, residential location, and
institutional affiliations” (2008, p. 1818) and it is these details that are used to ‘anchor’ the online
identity. This emphasis on anchoring can be seen through the types of information that are
requested as standard by SNSs, including geographical markers such as birthplace and current
city of residence, institutional profiles including places of education and work, and the more

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personal implicit or explicit requests for age, gender, sexuality and the tagging of images which
have greatly developed facial recognition technologies. Food blogs explicitly build on this
anchoring information to create their brands. To summarise, Drummond’s retreatist cowboy
brand narrative on TPW is consistently presented across her transmedia brand. SK is centred
around Perelman cooking in her tiny 42-square foot kitchen in New York City, where she lives
with her young family.
7
The brands created by food bloggers therefore tie directly into their
performances of normative femininity.
Returning to my argument about girlie entrepreneurialism – that the virtual commodity
arising from a food blog is the authentic performance of an intimate and cheerful, hyperbolically
feminine subject – the requisite anchoring of digital identity suggests that the only participants
that are rewarded in the blogosphere are those who already have access to the ‘desired’ social
lifestyle in this realm. This includes identifying as white, middle-class, straight and ensconced
within a nuclear family structure. Clearly, then, the rewards of food blogging more easily accrue
not to those who take the best risks or produce the most skilled recipes or most cheerful domestic
tales, but those who can most consistently and correctly perform hegemonic femininity.

Conclusion: Individualism as Politics

In this chapter I have outlined the ways that the ordinariness of food bloggers is an
important aspect of the digital fantasy and value of this genre. Ironically, professional credentials
are typically devalued in this space. Part of the reason for this may be that the proven
‘ordinariness’ of food bloggers helps perpetuate the meritocratic myth that the ideal ‘can do’
postfeminist subject is empowered by her ‘correct’ choices and is thereby responsible for her

7
Perelman has since moved house to a place with a slightly larger kitchen, which is documented on the blog

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own success. Ultimately, what I particularly want to flag throughout this dissertation are the
ways that the individual is highlighted and made supreme through discourses of neoliberalism
and Web 2.0, all the while the majority of profits and tangible benefits still accrue to large, but
now less visible, corporations whose power has only been multiplied by trends towards
individual, entrepreneurial business models. I therefore raise concerns about the mining of not
just personal data (Andrejevic, 2013), but the individual’s capital and self-brand which is
willingly loaned to corporate underwriters in the blogosphere.
In many ways this focus on individualism has been written into contemporary
expressions of politics. As earlier described, hyper-individualism has been drawn on by third
wave feminists to address the critiques of second wave universalism. As Kinser writes, third
wavers “embrace pluralistic thinking within feminism and work to undermine narrow visions of
feminism and their consequent confinements, through in large part the significantly more
prominent voice of women of color and global feminism” (2004, p. 133). While the critiques of
monolithic definitions of womanhood, and resulting homogeneity of political feminist goals, that
afflicted second wave feminism cannot be denied it is also disingenuous to classify such
awareness as the work of third-wave feminists, as this appropriates and denies the fundamental
work of feminists of color and second wave feminists – including bell hooks, Audre Lorde,
Cherrie Moraga and Chela Sandoval – for whom the initial impetus towards an expanded,
inclusionary and intersectionally- and transnationally-aware definition of feminism is more
accurately attributed (Kinser, 2004). In any case, this third-wave reversion to individual essays is
relied upon as representative of diverse, authentic experience.
Feminist theorists have grappled with the legitimacy of such autonomous expressions of
self as political as it marks a structural departure from the collectivity of former social

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movements, indicated by historical feminist practices of consciousness raising, the frequent
(although not unproblematic) use of the term ‘sisterhood,’ and political lesbianism. Moreover,
these themes of user-generated individualism must be evaluated for the ways that they present
new challenges for feminist media scholars. I above outlined the potential for a troubling erasure
of coherent political goals in the ‘diverse individual experiences as theory’ approach. A
secondary issue with this method arises through the inability to criticise individual ‘choice’ even
when it is directed towards anti-feminist action. One of the interesting aspects of food blogs as
texts is the challenge they present to feminist media scholars, for whom critique has long been
directed towards mainstream media representations and their powerful corporate creators.
Alternatively, when directed towards individual, everyday women such as food bloggers, the
ethics of such critique seems much more fraught.
To reiterate a previous point, the question of individual authorship also reinforces the
boundaries of who is able to access these fantastical, rewarding productions of gendered
performance. It becomes clear that these performances of hegemonic femininity are not simply
fabrications or forms of gendered or lifestyle tourism but, rather, are deployed strategically by
subjects who typically occupy positions of similar privilege in society. In this light, the lifestyle
blogosphere becomes an effective way to police and reward adherence to hegemonic femininity
under the guise of individual meritocracy. The femininity that is being discussed here is not a
matter of cultural preference or personal choice – despite the feminist rhetoric often used to
justify its existence – but conforms to an historical model of white, middle-class girlhood that
emphasises the gender roles of being a submissive wife and nurturing mother; taking joy in
domesticity; and celebrating the self-fulfillment of traditional gender roles.

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While I am not an apologist for the privilege inherent to food blogs, audience studies and
feminist theory has not yet adequately grappled with how to respond to texts which do not
identify as feminist but are created by a distinct and predominantly female community, and for
whom personal gains and creative control lie more in the hands of the individual than ever
before. While I think it is necessary to highlight the silent role of tech companies and
corporations which continue to receive a disproportionate amount of the profits of these
individual women’s authorial and creative labour, the ideologies are presented by women
themselves. This deserves a more nuanced feminist analysis that avoids dismissing bloggers as
‘cultural dupes’ or accusing them of failing to live up to a feminist political standard that, by and
large, is practiced ambivalently within popular culture.

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Mamas on a Budget: Class and Conspicuous Non-Consumption

In this chapter I introduce two budget food blogs written by mothers that allow us to
think through two issues: firstly, the performance of motherhood in the blogosphere and its
significance as a feminine identity in the contemporary moment and secondly, the ways that the
public performance of accounting encouraged within the budget subgenre format makes clear the
investments of class and morality that are perpetuated within popular alternative food movement
discourse. I am concerned with the ways that the necessary desire to intervene into the
conventional food system – for example, through the promotion of eating local, organic and
seasonal food – has evolved into an alternative food movement that conflates ‘good’ food with
an implicit moral virtue that is only available to middle- and upper-class consumers who can
afford to incorporate these premium food products into their consumption routines. This is an
argument that I adapt from the influential work of Julie Guthman (2011), whose insights are a
response to the momentum spurred by Michael Pollan and other alternative food movement
proponents. While Guthman writes that she is not defending the conventional food system, she
argues that the neoliberal foundations of alternative food movement discourse have transformed
into a system that rewards only those who are already privileged enough to participate in the
premium food spaces celebrated by the movement.
I find that these rhetorical limitations are part of the reason why it is so difficult to enact
politics within the neoliberal framework. It is not because political action is inherently
incompatible with market choices, or that the political and economic spheres were ever fully
separate. Rather, it is because the discourse of neoliberalism tends to equate consumption
choices with morality, and ignore the structural limitations of class and their impact on the
spaces in which consumption decisions are made. While I focus particularly on class in this

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discussion of alternative food and motherhood, the same logic is applicable to the discursive
limitations on the discussion of gender politics in a culture of postfeminism, and racial politics in
a ‘colour-blind’ society. It can be seen that the mechanisms of neoliberalism foster an erasure
and silencing of political speech, which is replaced by euphemisms around consumption choices
and rituals. While this discussion of neoliberalism is not new, I use budget and austerity blogs to
illustrate these limitations. I find these examples particularly useful for illustrating and collapsing
the myth of classlessness and meritocracy, as the contradictions of form and content within this
subgenre make clear the insidious impacts of class on food choice.

Motherhood in Postfeminist Times
Contemporary food culture and alternative food movement rhetoric is implicitly
intertwined with the performance of postfeminist motherhood, as women are called forth to
perform the additional labour of researching and preparing alternative food, and to bear the
emotional labour of navigating this culture of anxiety surrounding the current foodscape.
Additionally, the two blogs discussed in this chapter both make the mother identity prominent to
their brand rationale and their discussions of food. For these reasons, I wish to begin with a brief
background to the postfeminist transcription of motherhood in popular culture and on digital
media.
Motherhood has long been a central topic of debate for feminists and it continues to work
symbolically as a barometer of contemporary cultural trends in femininity and feminism.
Although not all food bloggers are mothers, the focus on food preparation is designed to evoke
maternal nurturing, and motherhood (or being a daughter/granddaughter) is often featured as a
prominent aspect of the food blogger’s identity. Postfeminist motherhood is best characterised by
Sharon Hays’ concept of ‘intensive mothering’ (1998) and Susan Douglas and Meredith

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Michaels’ ‘new momism,’ (2004) both of which dictate an all-consuming model of motherhood
for educated women. This professionalisation of ‘ideal’ middle-class motherhood is understood
to displace the rewards of the public sphere for women. More recently, digital media and
neoliberal anxiety have given rise to the model of the crunchy mama, whose devoted
maternalism appears to organically inspire entrepreneurial ventures built upon natural lifestyle
practices. All of these tropes posit mothers as moral guardians of the home and family, a role that
is increasingly complex and demanding in this neoliberal climate of individual responsibility that
displaces any expectations of duty of care by the State or corporations.
Intensive Mothering and New Momism

Postfeminist media of the 1990s presented a female model resistant to the assumed pull
of motherhood as natural and integral to women’s full subjectivity. For instance, for the cynical
main characters of Sex and the City (Star, 1998) the topic of motherhood is framed
predominantly through the themes of disdain, pity, and abortion – aside from Charlotte whose
maternal drive is thwarted through the negative experiences of IVF and divorce. Similarly,
postfeminist icon Ally McBeal (Kelley, 1997) was periodically haunted by hallucinations of an
absurd and intrusive dancing CGI baby in her self-titled television show. Nevertheless, these
media representations of strong, child-free postfeminist women were at odds with the prevalent
discourse of 1990s motherhood which Sharon Hays described as the ‘cultural contradictions of
motherhood’:

In a society where over half of all mothers with young children are now working outside
of the home, one might well wonder why our culture pressures women to dedicate so
much of themselves to child rearing. And in a society where the logic of self-interested

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gain seems to guide behavior in so many spheres of life, one might further wonder why a
logic of unselfish nurturing guides the behavior of mothers (1998, p. x)

These contradictions come to light through a fetishised model of middle-class, white
motherhood that Hays calls intensive mothering, “a gendered model that advises mothers to
expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children” (1998, p. x).
Written into this ideal standard for mothers is a romanticised nostalgia for the Victorian-era cult
of domesticity as well as a nod to mythological 1950s, post-war representations of the
achievement of domestic bliss through the suburban nuclear family and the maintenance
separate, gendered spheres. The new gravity with which motherhood is undertaken is also
indicative of the appointment of mothers as moral guardians of the ‘priceless’ child, a social
transition described by Viviana Zelizer (1985) whereby children are no longer valued for their
labour and potential financial contribution to the household but have become socially valued for
their innocence and their intangible sentimental worth to parents.
These standards appear to have intensified in the twenty-first century. In the postfeminist
context, Douglas and Michaels (2004) describe a similar phenomenon to Hays which they call
‘new momism.’ Perpetuated aggressively by mainstream media, new momism suggests that
motherhood is “eternally fulfilling and rewarding, that it is always the best and most important
thing you do, that there is only a narrowly prescribed way to do it right, and that if you don’t love
each and every second of it there’s something really wrong with you” (2004, pp. 3-4). They do
not suggest that women are ‘duped’ into believing that these images are realistic, but rather that
women are willing to buy into the seductive but unattainable ideals of new momism because,
while it “keeps [women] down by demanding so much of [them], [it] keeps [women] morally
superior because through it [they] defy a society so driven by greed and self-interest” (2004, p.

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13). This link between postfeminist motherhood and moral superiority becomes particularly
pertinent in my analysis of food blogs.
Both intensive mothering and new momism are forms of anti-feminist backlash. For
Hays, the ideals of intensive mothering undermine the insistence that postfeminist subjects
pursue success through professional aspirations. Structurally, motherhood continues to be viewed
as irreconcilable with white-collar professionalism, and women become solely and individually
responsible for managing these contradictions. As earlier discussed, in 2012-2013 Slaughter’s
(2012) ‘Why Women Can’t Have It All’ article and Sandberg’s book Lean In (2013) were highly
circulated and much mainstream media attention was devoted to their attention to ‘women’s’
work-life balance issues. However, these representations detailed very specific and privileged
working and family conditions which were not reflective of – and in many ways offensive to –
the majority of women’s experiences of working as a financial necessity within increasingly
precarious post-Fordist labour conditions. As Leonard argues, even women “who opt out of the
paid workforce are likely to see this as a temporary rather than permanent change and likewise
enjoy an option open only to the relatively financially privileged” (2007, p. 105). Furthermore,
Leonard points out that “although highly skilled jobs that require autonomy and intelligence are
the kinds most often represented in media culture, in real life many female workers find
themselves performing tasks that are…characterized by repetition, routine, and a focus on
emotional rather than intellectual labor” (2007, p. 113).
However, what is usefully illustrated by Slaughter and Sandberg is the obligation for
women to individually manage the irreconcilable expectations of middle-class professionalism
and postfeminist motherhood. These popular texts reflect the mantra of neoliberal individual
responsibility – particularly as applicable to women – which is summarised by Hays’ tongue-in-

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cheek observation that “all the troubles of the world can be solved by the individual efforts of
superhuman women” (1998, p. 177). The resulting ‘failures’ of these impossible demands on
women have led to the normalisation of a negative affect and fear of never being able to fully
satisfy professional or personal obligations, which drive women towards fantasy representations
of retreatism and professional, glamorous motherhood. This is further encouraged by the
continued social criticism of women and mothers, regardless of their choices. As Hays continues:

If a woman voluntarily remains childless, some will say that she is cold, heartless, and
unfulfilled as a woman. If she is a mother who works too hard at her job or career, some
will accuse her of neglecting the kids. If she does not work hard enough, some will surely
place her on the ‘mommy track’ and her career advancement will be permanently slowed
… And if she stays at home with her children, some will call her unproductive and
useless. A woman, in other words, can never fully do it right (1998, p. 133)

This sense of inadequacy continually foisted upon women and mothers has provided the
foundation for the most recent fad for ideal parenting, spurred on by the conditions of cultural
anxiety in the U.S. as well as dominance of new media platforms and logics: the crunchy mama.
Introducing the Crunchy Mama

The website crunchymoms.com defines the ‘crunchy mom’ as a “mom who is
environmentally, health, and socially conscious”

(Crunchy Moms, 2014). This same definition is
used by website EarthyCrunchyMama.com, with the addition that crunchy mamas foster “a
strong bond with their children through natural living” (Earthy Crunchy Mama, 2010).
Colloquially, crunchy mamas are best recognised through the polarising topics that have publicly
defined their movement such as refusing to vaccinate their children, practising home-birthing,

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attachment parenting, using cloth diapers rather than disposables and home-schooling their
children.
Crunchy mamahood is imagined as an unorthodox stance waged against the government
and corporations, with the crunchy mama positioned as a fierce and educated radical who “cares
enough about her family to question the status quo” (Earthy Crunchy Mama, 2010). The crunchy
mama is a pioneer on a journey of re-information, for which digital resources for sharing and
accessing community knowledge are vital. Her attention to maintaining an environmentally
conscious and natural, toxin-free environment gains its urgency as it is directly linked to the birth
of her children and a revelatory awareness of the need to protect and nurture them, making this a
role particular to mothers. For instance, blogger Katie – a mother of five who writes the blog
Wellness Mama – tells a prototypical crunchy mama awakening story as the rationale for her
blog:

It all started for me almost a decade ago when my first son was born. I was sitting in the
doctors office at my follow up visit and I read in a magazine that was sitting on the side
table that...[f]or the first time in centuries, the current generation of children will have a
shorter life expectancy than their parents…That hit me like a ton of bricks. I was holding
my perfect newborn and reading about how his generation would face higher rates of
cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease and other many other health problems. That
day, my life changed and I decided to work to change that statistic (Katie, n.d.).

In the food context, intensive crunchy mamahood prescribes labour- and resource-
intensive, ‘from scratch’ cooking within the home in opposition to modern conveniences and
processed foods such as fast-food chains and the large-scale farming and agriculture that have

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made food cheap and plentiful across the country. The landmark industrialisation of the U.S.
foodscape – which was a source of pride for the post-war U.S. nation – is now shunned by the
middle-class as an example of the frightful evolution of an unchecked corporate foodscape,
against which the educated crunchy mama must step in as a force singlehandedly tasked with
navigating and resolving current contradictory and fear-based discourses around health and
wellbeing.
The fashioning of the crunchy mama as an inspirational and glamorous identity for
women has been aided by the lifestyle blogosphere as well as a celebrity trend for promoting
crunchy mama values. Celebrities including Alanis Morrissette, Mayim Bialik and the late
Peaches Geldof have all spoken publicly of the benefits of attachment parenting. More
prolifically, the most well-known crunchy mama currently in the public eye is Jessica Alba. Alba
– an actress previously best known for her highly sexualised film roles – has in recent years
undergone a public image transformation through her business The Honest Company, which
sells baby products that are “unquestionably safe, eco-friendly, beautiful, convenient, and
affordable” (The Honest Company, n.d.-a) Similarly to Katie, founder of the Wellness Mama
blog, Alba links her transition to motherhood as the catalyst for her business idea. As Forbes
recounts this story:

In 2008 Alba was newly engaged to Internet entrepreneur Cash Warren and pregnant
with their first child. At a baby shower thrown by family and friends, she remembers her
mother advising her to use baby detergent to prewash the piles of onesies she’d received
as gifts. She used a mainstream brand and immediately broke out into ugly red welts,
harkening back to a childhood spent in and out of emergency rooms and doctors’ offices
(Kroll, 2015).

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In response, Alba launched The Honest Company in 2011, and as of 2014 the business
was valued at an estimated $1 billion. Stockists include WholeFoods, CostCo and Target
although the majority of sales are derived from the company’s website and online subscription
services. The Honest Company website conveys a natural, easy breezy aesthetic with liberal use
of white space for a clean, minimal aesthetic. The company’s brand makes use of fresh turquoise
and tangerine accents, connoting a contemporary affiliation with the environment without
sacrificing style. The Honest Company brand makes use of an earnest tone, as the website states:
“Go ahead, ask us anything. We'll tell all. While we really do try our best in all regards, if we
make a mistake or can't live up to your expectations, we'll fess up and keep trying to do better, no
matter what it takes” (The Honest Company, n.d.-b)
8
. The upbeat tone of the brand is
inspirational and capricious: “We are dreamers. But, more importantly, we are doers. You know
what they say, if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself… tied with a bow of integrity
and sprinkled with a little cheeky fun.” (n.d.-b) This tone helps construct the crunchy mama as
hip, empowered and virtuous in her health consciousness.
Alba’s company is the most mother-focussed of a series of celebrity-hosted lifestyle
franchises. These include Gwyneth Paltrow’s oft-ridiculed lifestyle website Goop – which was
“[l]aunched in the fall of 2008 out of … Paltrow’s kitchen” (Goop, n.d.-a) – that is more broadly
centred on women’s alternative health practices with content such as ‘health-centric recipes’ and
information on soup cleanses, colonics and infrared saunas. Similarly, Blake Lively released a
short-lived website titled Preserve in 2014, which sold expensive artisanal products sourced from
around the country. While the brand somewhat coincided with Lively’s marriage and first

8
It is worth noting that this promise did not seem to be met with the 2015 controversy over the Honest Company’s
sunscreen – in which thousands of parents complained that their new formulation left children and adults severely
sunburnt.

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pregnancy, and Lively has long publicised her ambitions to follow in Martha Stewart’s footsteps
– crunchy mama content was not made explicit in this entrepreneurial venture.
However, while Alba’s feminised brand is in line with celebrity trends, it appears to be
equally influenced by the humble, down-to-earth identities of mommy bloggers. The Honest
Company website alludes to ordinariness by positioning Alba – as far as plausibly possible – as a
humble girl-next-door. The site describes her simply as ‘a mom called Jessica’ and the
company’s media emphasises her working-class background (Lagerwey, 2015). In a promotional
video, she introduces herself by waving gawkily at the camera. Accordingly, the crunchy mama
can be viewed as both ordinary and glamorous, a devoted mum as well as a creative
businesswoman, working within the home while her work is positioned toward a public
audience. Moreover, the crunchy mama interprets the intensive and excessive labour required to
maintain an all-natural lifestyle for her family as a moral undertaking. The crunchy mama’s
home and the bodies of her children are pure spaces to defend against toxins and pesticides,
creating protective barriers through the curative powers of raw milk, coconut oil and placenta.
These interests are supported exclusively by middle-class capital, and require significant
emotional labour for, as Wilson and Yochim describe, “mampreneurialism is not simply
accomplished through recourse to new domestic enterprises…but also requires mothers to
optimize and appreciate their own capacities and affects through ongoing emotional reflexivity
and self-work” (2015, p. 670).
My interest in the crunchy mama comes from the glamorisation of this position as the
solution to the evils tolerated within the free-market, as well as the seemingly inevitable
progression of crunchy mamahood into a professional and entrepreneurial venture. While
postfeminist motherhood may require an all-encompassing devotion to intensive parenting, the

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crunchy mama posits that the rewards of this devotion should not only be emotional but material,
due to digital media platforms that are able to translate this emotional labour into entrepreneurial
opportunity. With the following blog examples, I wish to explore the ways that food blogs
document the crunchy mama phenomenon and particularly their treatment of morality and class.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget: Accounting for the Invisible Privilege of Class
The first case study that I present is called 100 Days of Real Food. This blog is an
example of the way the crunchy mama identity is adopted to champion the need for a radical
stance against mainstream American food culture. This identity is used to frame the issue of
alternative movement as a moral choice that purposefully denies the structural limitations on
food choice and access. However, I use this example to show how the disjunct between form and
content on food blogs creates a rupture that makes visible the false myth of classlessness in
American society, opening a juncture from which to address class in a way that is not readily
permitted within the limits of neoliberal discourse.

Alternative Food and Middle Class Morality
Lisa Leake is the creator of the brand 100 Days of Real Food and its subsequent spin-off
100 Days on a Budget. According to her origin story, this blog was originally conceived as a
public record for a self-prescribed, 100-day ‘real’ food challenge followed by Leake, her
husband and their two daughters. As an explanation for starting her new diet and blog, she
writes: “After reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan I got the wake up call of my life
and felt like our eating habits needed a serious overhaul” (n.d.-a). She uses the blog as a resource
to help others making this transition and it includes a list of rules that comprise their definition of

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real foods, a list of weekly updates Leake published when she and her family undertook the
original challenge, and a page where readers can sign up to commit to their own real food
pledges for 10-days.
The blog’s home page features a header with the four family members professionally
photographed in sepia, caught laughing by the camera in an apt symbol of the posed candour of
the blogosphere. The About page describes the blog as a chronicle of Leake’s postfeminist
‘makeover’ moment as prior to 2010 she claims to have “never before read an ingredient label,
never bought anything that was organic (at least not on purpose), nor…ever stepped foot in a
farmers’ market” (n.d.-a). Her ‘real’ food awakening is described as a revolutionary and
revelatory moment and leads her work being intertwined with the contemporary alternative food
movement which Julie Guthman defines as “institutions and practices that bring small-scale
farmers, artisan food producers, and restaurant chefs together with consumers for the market
exchange of what is characterized as fresh, local, seasonal, organic, and craft-produced food”
(2011, p. 3).
Leake’s definition of ‘real’ food is not satisfied simply by fresh produce and dairy.
Rather, she prescribes premium foods such as organic fruits and vegetables, dairy that is
“organic, whole, unsweetened and pasture-raised”; whole grains; and, seafood that is “[w]ild
caught preferable over farm-raised” (n.d.-b). This detailed list stands as an indictment of the
extent to which the U.S. foodscape has been distorted by processed foods that have become
normalised within the U.S. diet. However, it is also an indictment of the ways the alternative
food movement has prescribed orthorexia as the only way to guarantee health (and, implicitly,
moral virtue), an extreme dietary ideal that is unattainable for the majority of Americans due to
financial, temporal and geographical constraints. Orthorexia, which is literally defined as a

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“fixation on righteous eating” (Kratina, n.d.) is not currently included in the DSM-5 although it
is recognised by the National Eating Disorders Association. Guthman is critical of the alternative
food movement’s reliance on orthorexic eating and its popular manifestation on selective,
premium consumption habits, describing it as a personally pleasurable but politically null action.
She writes:

by exalting a set of food choices, the alternative-food movement tends to give rise to a
missionary impulse, so those who are attracted to this food and movement want to spread
the gospel. Seeing their food choices as signs of heightened ethicality, they see the social
change as making people become like them. This gives far too much power to those who
happen to be privileged (and thin) to define the parameters of food system change…
those who make these choices tend to be already privileged and thin and forget that they
probably didn’t become privileged and thin through these choices (2011, p. 141)

From this quote, we can see that the alternative food movement draws its political logic
from the same neoliberal tenets of consumerism and individualism as contemporary feminism,
and focuses on issues of concern to privileged consumers. Guthman forwards a damning critique
of this willingness to substitute pleasurable consumption for activism, writing: “Eating local,
organic, seasonal food that you prepared yourself may be pleasurable but it is not universally so,
nor is it tantamount to effecting social justice” (2011, p. 5). However, the connection between
food and social politics has been further disturbed through a rash of recent documentaries that
have highlighted the problems of industrial food production including Supersize Me (Spurlock,
2004), Food Inc. (Kenner & Pearlstein, 2008), Forks Over Knives (Corry & Fulker, 2011) and
Fed Up (Soechtig, Olson & Singbiel, 2015) narrated by Katie Couric; television programs such

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as UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Fowl Dinners (Lazenby, Ward & Van Someren,
2008) and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Hugh’s Chicken Run (Palmer & Simpson, 2008); and,
books including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and Food Rules (2009),
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009), Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (McLaren,
Thomas & Linklater, 2001). These media are focused primarily on the problems manifest in the
U.S. food system – including the over-consumption of soda, fast food and processed foods and
questionable mass-production practices such as factory farming – and frame these problems
within concerns about health.
While these texts do raise some of the failures of neoliberalism and the capitulation to
profit motives without appropriate regulations to protect social welfare, ultimately such politics
are rendered benign within the neoliberal framework. That is, the suggested solutions are
nevertheless expressed through the very market logics that produced these issues in the first
place. For example, the critique of the food industry has led to the lucrative construction of
markets for organic foods, health foods and allergen free products, all of which are sold with
financial premiums attached. That is, while attention to these consumption practices has always
existed, their adoption in the contemporary moment is becoming increasingly mainstream and
expressed through the market. For instance, Guthman (2004) charts the rise of the organic food
movement from a radical, back-to-the-land movement to a post-1980s popular trend that began
to gain mainstream traction, to the current moment where ‘organic’ products may not be entirely
conventional but are found in most grocery stores across the country. Similarly, while Alice
Water’s foundational alternative food restaurant Chez Panisse was founded in the 1970s, this
watershed for seasonal, organic and local produce is now supported by a strong network of
suppliers and distributors for such food including national specialty grocery chains such as

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Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Earth Fare whose stocks continue to climb; the exponential
increase in local farmers markets, which have risen 472% in the last 20 years (Economic
Research Service, 2014); and, the normalisation of farm-to-home food boxes, community
gardens, and community-supported agriculture. Additionally, consumption movements including
eating locally, seasonally, organic, gluten-free, paleo and vegan are increasingly being catered to
by conventional supermarkets, restaurants and food suppliers, with the organic food market
predicted to increase 14% between 2013-2018 (Daniells, 2014).
Yet, given this evidence of the current popularity of food awareness in consumption and
production issues, there is a marked lack of attention being paid to food insecurity which is
currently reported to affect 14% of U.S. households, a high rate that has remained relatively
constant since a 4% rise in the wake of the 2008 recession (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory &
Singh, 2015). This increase in food insecurity has not been matched by a significant increase in
national food and nutrition assistance programs – such as School Lunch and Breakfast Programs,
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Supplemental Nutrition
Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) – with a reduction in overall participants and
allowances for SNAP in 2014/2015, and estimates that in 2014 only 70% of eligible households
participated in State food programs (Prell, Newman & Scherpf, 2015).
Accordingly, I draw on Guthman’s arguments to suggest that neoliberal food movements
work to reinstate the privilege of those who can already afford to make empowering food
decisions, with the critique that “the alternative-food movement has been far too complicit in the
neoliberal agenda, with the effect (not the intention) of producing self-satisfied eaters”
(Guthman, 2011, p. 142). More worryingly, these movements can have a devastating effect
through bifurcating the industrial food system. For example, while the organic market is

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increasing its market share, only 18% of shoppers constituted half of organic food consumers
(Daniells, 2014). As evidenced with postfeminism, neoliberal-based politics allow the
distribution inequalities that have flourished within advanced capitalism to continue unchecked,
and to obfuscate the systemic issues that impact food access and choice in the United States. Yet,
at the same time this rhetoric easily seduces through offering pleasurable solutions that reward
the already-privileged individual with agency and superiority.
I wish to use Leake’s blog to provide a nuanced analysis of these issues. On the one hand,
I see the proponents of alternative food as having noble intentions in their desire to advocate for
changes to the conventional food system. There is ample evidence that these interventions are
sorely needed. On the other hand, I am wary of the ways that the main thrust of neoliberalism has
directed this discourse towards the development of niche healthy, safe and delicious food
products but only for those who have the means to buy their way out of the profit-driven,
dubious-quality dietary ‘norm’ accessed through the highly industrialised food system. The
alternative food movement can be understood more broadly as emblematic of a trend for free-
market politics to drive market-based political actions towards the sphere of ‘buycotts’ than
boycotts, creating premium alternative markets rather than encouraging consumers to opt-out of
the market, for which there is no language within neoliberal discourse. This results in well-
intentioned desires to improve the conventional food system being distorted and co-opted into
the language of consumption, affluence and privilege. Not only are these alternative food choices
inscribed with moral superiority, but the celebration of such alternative consumption choices
reinforce the emphasis on neoliberal individual responsibility, and a blind optimism that the
trickle-down effect of the free market suffices to magically transform the ‘virtuous’ individual’s
actions into broader social benefits.

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On the other hand, I do not wish to entirely write off the potential for consumer activism
that takes place within the household. The food blogs in this chapter are still implicated in the
arguments about girlie entrepreneurialism made in the previous chapter, and in doing so they
inherently contain evidence of feminist resistance. However, in the context of food justice and
the alternative food movement, class rises as the primary category of significance. Fostered by
the pervasive myth of the U.S. as a ‘classless’ society, there is a tendency to use consumption
choices to reproduce “myths and negative stereotypes about the working class and the poor [to]
create a reality that seemingly justifies the superior positions of the upper-middle and upper
classes and establishes them as entitled to their privileged position in the stratification system”
(Kendall, 2011, p. 2). However, the same neoliberal logics similarly structure the ways in which
gender and racial politics are transmuted through postfeminism and colour-blindness in America,
and consequently I see class issues as but one example of these harmful apolitical logics. I thus
examine budget food blogs as texts that may make classless rhetoric ‘visible’ through their
concern with the materiality of food and consumption practices, as well as through their digital
form.
Being Class(less) and Performative Moral Accounting
After the initial success of Leake’s 100 Days of Real Food challenge, Leake repeats her
experiment but this time adding a weekly budget component that addresses reader feedback to
her original experiment. She explains:

Now while most agreed that real, unprocessed, organic, local, whole foods sounded great,
quite a lot of readers also implied that it couldn’t be done without breaking the bank. So
we of course had to prove all those skeptics wrong, which is why in October 2011 we

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began our ‘100 Days of Real Food on a Budget’ pledge. We let the blog readers vote to
determine our weekly budget of $125 for our family of four (n.d.-c).

I focus primarily on this budget version of Leake’s blog challenge, as its insistent denial
that class is a factor within the alternative food movement aptly exemplifies the contradictions of
neoliberal food politics. While Leake adheres to rhetoric that choice, willpower and education as
sole components of healthy consumption, her blog contains content that openly reiterates this
myth of classlessness. In particular, I look at the ways that the juxtaposition of classless
discourse with the digital form of the budget blog and the material richness of food in fact make
clear the insidious and pervasive effect of class in structuring consumption choices.
Leake’s budget challenge broadly fits under the subgenre of budget food blog. This
category is digitally structured to evidence an overarching concern with the quantification of
daily minutiae. Leake’s series of budget posts are typically comprised of dry and detailed lists
where each grocery item is listed and priced to the cent and to the ounce. Each weekly list is
annotated and accompanied by a photo that visually verifies this information. One example is the
following list of Trader Joe’s items in the post ‘Budget day 40: Almost halfway and tortilla fail’:

Pumpkin seeds $5.49
Sunflower seeds $1.49 (it is hard to beat that deal!)
Sliced almonds $2.49
Mushrooms $1.99
Monterery [sic] Jack cheese $3.07
Cheddar $4.29
Raisins $2.69
Cashews $5.49
Parmesan cheese $4.12 (2010b)

While mundane detail is common within the food blogosphere – and indeed the recipe
format itself favours a similar breakdown of precisely quantified information – I regard Leake’s

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lists as different in that they contain no transferable value for the reader. These weekly shopping
lists are not themselves attached to a recipe that can be easily recreated in the reader’s own
kitchen, nor are these lists designed to be strictly imitated by the reader, given the vague details
of how they are constituted into a weekly meal plan as well as the likely price variations of these
same ingredients across the country (although it should be noted that Leake does offer weekly
meal plans as paid premium content for her readers). Instead, I argue that this attention to detail
simply serves as a form of accountability, supporting the premise of Leake’s profitable blog and
brand.
Leake cushions these lists with short narratives, mostly describing the difficulties of her
self-imposed challenge and the adjustment she must make to meet her ‘stringent’ weekly budget.
In a post dramatically titled ‘Budget Day 33: Almost Broke’ she writes:

Yes, I am almost broke and here’s why. Can you believe that the jar of local honey
pictured below cost $11.99?? And then as if that was supposed to be a good deal the big
jug of 100% pure maple syrup (grade b) was on sale for $18.99!...Luckily, the super
expensive syrup should last us a long time (I do use a little in my mocha on most
mornings), and I am going to have to start watching the honey more closely (2010c).

And in a triumphant post titled ‘Budget Day 43: Under Budget!!’ she prattles on:

I planned to spend $82 today, but my first round of groceries surprisingly left me with 10
bucks to spare. I certainly could have saved this unexpected $10, but I am a spender by
nature so instead I decided to get a few “extras” that weren’t on my original list…I was
more than thrilled that I got to splurge on my favorite cheese and still end up with 50

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cents to spare. It seems like every other time I go to the store I plan to spend $25 and I
end up spending $30…so this is major progress for me! (2010a)

Here Leake uses the tactics of girlie entrepreneurialism, offering these anecdotes
presumably to assure the reader how eating real food on a budget is difficult but achievable, and
as a self-deprecating measure that seeks to inspire her reader. This investment is set out by Leake
in her introduction to the blog:

Our hope is since our family (that does not live on a farm, has two young children, and a
husband that travels frequently) went 100 days without eating a single ounce of processed
food or refined ingredients that you will consider taking our 10 Days of Real Food
pledge…If we did it for 100 days, then I am absolutely convinced that anyone can do it
for only 10 days! (n.d.-a)

She also presents each post in her 100 days series as an index that is numbered by the day
of the challenge, unlike most food blogs which order posts chronologically according to date.
This has the effect of structuring Leake’s content into a neat and linear package that progresses
according to the postfeminist makeover narrative, detailing several minor complications to her
goal but ultimately depicting her achieving ‘victory’ and experiencing life-changing revelations
by the end of this journey:

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Figure 10. 100 Days of Real Food - List of posts for budget challenge [Screenshot].

While ostensibly Leake offers such information as an assurance of transparency and
inspiration for her readers, it also reads as a performance of moral conspicuous consumption that
is increasingly fetishised and expressed through performative moral accounting. The
‘accounting’ component of this term comes through a concern with expressing the self, the body
and identity through quantifiable units, such as dollars, minutes and calories. This information
often takes the form of lists, tables and temporally or financially defined challenges. While such
quantifiable units have to some extent always played a role for the ideal self-disciplined subject,
digital technologies have rendered such quantification an imperative, as indicated by the

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quantification of self movement – which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five –
whose tagline is self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology. This digital accounting
of the self often demands additional labour – for example, the postfeminist subject is tasked with
tracking calories and exercise as part of their compulsory bodily regime, managing time to
achieve personal work-life balance, and controlling their finances to combat the precarity of
labour in the post-recessionary economy. It is also suggested that personal accounting is a core
state of contemporary motherhood, as Wilson and Yochim argue that many postfeminist subjects
“experience motherhood as an endless sea of anxiety and control: never really sleeping, always
on alert, calculating and assessing, trying desperately to prepare, steady, manage, know” (2015,
p. 674). This amounts to an increasing pressure to maintain the illusion of constant productivity
in the personal sphere.
The ‘performative’ component of performative moral accounting arises from the fact that
this personal accounting is undertaken somewhat ostentatiously as a public performance. I
contextualise Leake’s 100 Days on a Budget brand – as a restrained and considered, ritualised
consumption practice – within a social trend for detailing the privileged individual’s conspicuous
non-consumption. Such performances include sugar/gluten/processed food detoxes, the tiny
house movement, living off the grid, the kon mari method of home organisation, freecycling,
DIY culture, and the SNAP challenge. These movements are all envisioned in response to
necessary interventions into the rampant consumerism of advanced capitalism, and are practiced
in the noble quest to rediscover intrinsically self-actualising values such as personal
relationships, the natural environment, and emotional health.
However, increasingly these romanticised and simplified interpretations of the ‘good’ life
do not simply entail opting-out of the market space, for which there is increasingly little

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language or precedent. Instead, these movements continue to centre around consumption, while
dictating draconian forms of the correct ‘types’ and quantities of consumption. Consider the
ways that the popular representation of the tiny house movement on FYI television show Tiny
House Nation (2014) does not simply prescribe downsizing but presents the tiny house as an
elaborate design marvel that is able to cater to the hip and stylish lifestyle of its proponents. In
this way, the tiny house is less representative of the rejection of consumption and more indicative
of contemporary rituals of conspicuous non-consumption, which entail the pleasurable
construction of new and innovatively designed tiny houses. Similarly, while DIY culture broadly
imagines self-actualisation through domestic productivity, many of the most popular DIY
activities still involve a financial investment, whether that be mason jars and a canner, or knitting
needles and yarn.
The expression of conspicuous non-consumption as a game or challenge further blurs the
distinction between radical political action and trivial games undertaken to bolster the moral
superiority of the privileged. Gamification is explicitly written into the design of the popular
SNAP Challenge, which is publicly performed as an act of conspicuous non-consumption and
conceived as a fun personal challenge to benefit the individual, rather than being explicitly
linked to issues of food equity and access. The SNAP Challenge seeks to build empathy with an
awareness of food stamp recipients by asking individuals to artificially live off $31.18 per week,
which is the average allowance received by SNAP recipients in 2015. While the creators of this
challenge are earnest in their attempts to garner empathy and awareness of food insecurity,
ultimately there is no correlation with participation in this challenge and any concrete social
action. The challenge exhibits a curious mix of cheery and upbeat motivational language, with

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peripheral motioning towards the abstract problem of food insecurity. The website for Food
Share – a non-profit food bank – breaks down the challenge into three easy steps:

Step 1 – Eat on $4.15/day for a week, a month or longer… Step 2 – Experience hunger
for yourself. Learn about the daily struggles faced by our hungry neighbors! Step 3 –
Engage others by sharing your experience. Create a blog, post to Facebook & encourage
friends to participate” (Foodshare, n.d.).

Not only does the step-by-step breakdown of the challenge evidence the fetish for
restriction and planning, but it makes clear the fact that Step 3 provides no tangible link between
the well-intentioned actions of participants and any type of political action that might work to
alleviate food insecurity.
Instead, the structure of the SNAP challenge tends to produce recursive and narcissistic
outcomes. For instance, in 2015, Gwyneth Paltrow was widely ridiculed for posting her
$29/week attempt at the SNAP Challenge on her lifestyle website Goop, with a shopping basket
that included seven limes, spring onions, cilantro and kale. In this post, Paltrow readily admits
that she fails the challenge and that by mid-week she has supplemented her shopping basket with
“some chicken and fresh vegetables (and in full transparency, half a bag of black licorice)”
(Paltrow, n.d.). Paltrow’s basket shows scant awareness of the calorie-dense foods required to
maintain individuals who are feeding themselves while on severe budget restraints. Instead,
Paltrow discusses this failure in the context of the detox-heavy diet promoted by her brand and
website, which liberally features leafy greens, herbs and garnishes, writing: “After this week, I

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am even more grateful that I am able to provide high-quality food for my kids. Let’s all do what
we can to make this a basic human right and not a privilege” (n.d.).
On the one hand, Paltrow’s admitted failure to complete the challenge can be accurately
read as a portrayal of the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of feeding oneself on the current food
stamp allowance. On the other hand, the design of these challenges and their desperate attempt to
capture the imagination and interest of the middle- and upper-classes, tend to encourage navel-
gazing and self-affirmation by privileged individuals more than they can be said to effect
positive changes for low income families suffering from food insecurity. While Paltrow was
widely ridiculed and publicised for her SNAP Challenge failure, she nevertheless received
material benefits from her participation in the form of hits to her website and additional publicity
for her Goop brand. In contrast, aside from the platitudes offered to those suffering from food
insecurity, the structure of the challenge demands no other concrete action that might leverage
Paltrow’s wealth and celebrity, such as a donation to a food charity or a targeted message to a
politician urging the increase of SNAP allowances or the widespread acceptance of their usage.
In my mind, this lack of accountability is egregious given the outrageous luxury lifestyles touted
on Goop, epitomised by a 2015 holiday gift guide that includes $125,000 gold dumbbells, $956
toilet paper and a $40,000 sound system (n.d.-b). These items suggest that Paltrow’s
participation in the SNAP challenge is indicative of a middle-class fascination with poverty porn
more than it is a good-faith effort to improve social equality. Salon writer Mary Elizabeth
Williams aptly critiques such poverty tourism, writing: “It’s insulting when rich people assume
that because they’re rich, that makes them smart or competent…Just because [Paltrow] —
blonde and wealthy — can’t do something that millions of Americans pull off every day doesn’t
make it ‘impossible’ (2015).

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Moreover, the structural limitations of conspicuous non-consumption can even become a
liability due to the fact that even when adopted by politicians, these challenges are somewhat
meaningless. Liberal politicians participating in the challenge merely confirmed that – as
predicted – it is hard if not impossible to feed oneself well off the current SNAP allowance but
more problematically, the design of this challenge can be easily flipped to serve oppositional
agendas. This was the case with Republican aide Danny Ferguson, who participated in the
challenge and spent his weekly allotment buying root beer, peanut butter and cereal from a dollar
store, leading him to claim that there was room in the budget to cut an additional 12% from
SNAP benefits (Ferguson, 2013).
More disturbing, in my mind, is the tendency of these challenges to arise in conjunction
with the new association of restricted and selective consumption with moral character, bringing
us to the ‘moral’ component of performative moral accounting. This morality is typically
justified by arguments that these anti-consumption movements amount to a form of trickle-down
politics – as evidenced by Leake’s proposition that

every time we food shop or eat a meal we are voting for either processed food-like
substances or real food. If all of us make the right choices together then we can make a
big impact, which will help change our country’s food system for the better (n.d.-d).

While this misguided faith in the neoliberal free market to enact positive change is
incisively refused by Guthman – who counters that “the idea that the food system can be
transformed by selling and buying good food (through informed choice) is a huge concession to
the neoliberal idolatry of the market” (2011, p. 148) – it remains popularly inscribed in

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neoliberal discourse. Furthermore, the gamification of conspicuous non-consumption tends to
distort the intentions of the participants, turning these rituals into opportunities for self-
flagellation and individual benefit rather than linking them explicitly to social justice for a
broader swathe of the population.
It seems obvious to point out that opting-in to a gamified and artificially limited
experience of restricted consumption as a virtuous challenge is a far cry from the stresses of the
working class experience of negotiating always-limited choices. Yet this is the discourse
consistently preferred by proponents of performative moral accounting. Notably, Leake boasts
several times on her blog that her challenge is more restrictive than the conditions faced by
SNAP recipients, while she nevertheless explicitly excludes the middle-class luxuries of
travelling, entertaining, hosting friends and alcohol from ‘counting’ as part of her budget. As she
writes:

No one needs to know how much we spend on our alcohol, which helps us get through
these pledges in the first place. J … If we are out of town or entertaining guests we will
obviously be under different circumstances. Therefore food that falls under these
categories will not be part of our weekly budget nor will it be tracked for the blog
(2010g).

These self-serving and somewhat frivolous rules deepen my objection to Leake’s
assertion that her challenge is a form of politics or morality. This example illustrates the ways
that performances of conspicuous non-consumption authorise participants to adopt a didactic and
evangelising tone. At the same time, these performances lead to the acquisition of private
benefits rather than broader social welfare. Moreover, when these performances of restriction

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become synonymous with moral virtue, not only are the underprivileged excluded from the
opportunities and pleasures of the capitalist system, they are also deprived of the opportunity to
prove their ‘moral virtue’ through the stylised performance of non-consumption. These
challenges therefore work to reinforce the seeming validity of middle-class ‘success’ as a result
of good planning, self-subsistence, and good choices, rather than elaborate networks of unseen,
structural advantage.
Class and the Contradictions of Form and Content
In the above sections, I have outlined the fraught class conditions which underlie
consumption choices and access in the U.S. One of the main reasons why the alternative food
movement has developed in the manner that it has is due to the pervasive myth of a classless
America. This myth flourishes through the language and narratives used to conceptualise value
and success in current society – the notion that one must pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, that
most of us believe we are middle-class although as Kendall (2011) points out this would be
statistically impossible, the rule of exceptionalism, going from rags to riches, and the popular
assumption that poor people have made poor choices leaving them “dependent on others (welfare
issues) or as deviant in their behaviors and lifestyles” (Kendall, 2011, p. 18). This pervasive
language of classlessness in America has made it difficult to adequately uncover the impact of
insidious structural inequalities on quality of life. For instance, Hays (2003) notes that even
welfare mothers have internalised the ideology that many other welfare mothers are cheating the
system. The ubiquity of this neoliberal stereotype about welfare recipients is important to
“implicitly allow[ing] us to wash our hands of this population. It is to claim that their values,
beliefs, and practices bear no relation to our own. The problems they face are therefore not our
responsibility” (Hays, 2003, p. 122).

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However, I believe that the depictions of alternative food on food blogs offer an
opportunity to unpack these discourses. While the content and premise of 100 Days of Food on a
Budget is heavily invested in the rhetoric of classlessness, through the contradictions of this
content with digital form and the material richness of food as a social object, class is still able to
everywhere permeate this work. I am therefore interested in the ways that the contradictions
between form and content constitute a rupture through which deeper discussions about the effect
of class and structural inequality may begin to be examined.
Building on the analysis offered above, Leake’s most egregious forms of denying class
privilege takes place through her flippant comparisons of her artificial challenge with being a
food stamp recipient. This comparison is repeated several times throughout the course of her
blog, most offensively occurring in the context of a joke as Leake starts her post for Budget Day
25 by writing:

Just guess how much money our family of four would have available to spend on food if
we were getting food stamp benefits (which by the way has been renamed to SNAP)?
$167/week. Yep, that is $42 more a week than what we are currently spending during this
little 100 Days of Real Food on a Budget project. In all fairness we are also allowing
ourselves to spend $20/week on eating out. But, even if we included that additional
money (which we’ve barely used so far) it would still mean we fall $22 short of a family
on food stamps. Must be nice…an extra 20 bucks or more a week would feel like a lot of
money right now! (2010d)

Of course, it is easy to surmise the numerous but invisible ways in which Leake’s ability
to complete her challenge is intimately shaped by a host of class privileges, most notably having

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the liberty to be a stay-at-home mother while her family is adequately financially supported by
her husband,
9
turning the additional labour of unconventional food preparation into a profitable
business, living in a large city with easy access to a variety of grocery stores, and raising her
children within a two-parent, heterosexual household in which her husband takes on at least
some of the burden of food preparation. However, the design of these hegemonic privileges is
that they are not readily visible within the consciously groomed narratives of family life that
Leake discloses on her blog.
The ways in which Leake’s wilful blindness to her class privilege are ultimately made
salient is through the particular foods and practices she highlights, which are themselves rich and
evocative social objects that are attached and familiar class connotations. Leake describes the
experience of shopping at specialty organic grocery store Earth Fare on a budget: “while I was
checking out I seriously had to give the cashier back at least a half a dozen items that I couldn’t
afford to buy (mental note: bring calculator next time). After we got through that little
embarrassing moment my bill came to $67, which I was okay with. I used to very easily drop
$200 or more at Earth Fare so I feel like today was A LOT of progress for me” (2010g) Leake’s
shame arises from potentially being mistaken for someone without adequate financial means
during this encounter. Additionally, Leake details the unpleasant and clearly unfamiliar
experience of grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, with a post unequivocally titled ‘An Unfortunate
Visit to Wal-Mart’:

I tried shopping for food at Wal-Mart today, and it was almost a complete waste of my
time. I knew they carried Stoneyfield Organic yogurt so I assumed they must at least have
a couple of organic cheese options and maybe even some other inexpensive organic stuff.

9
Although her husband has now quit his corporate job to work full time on the blog with Leake

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With the exception of some organic brown rice (which I didn’t buy since it wasn’t quick
cooking) and some organic Pam cooking spray, the yogurt was just about the only thing
that made it worth going there. And who wants to traverse through a football field size
store to save a measly buck or two on three things? I was actually a little relieved I don’t
have to go back anytime soon!...
There were also several other things I needed, but I decided to wait until
tomorrow when I can get the organic version. I just have a hard time pumping too many
pesticide-infused things into my precious daughters (2010e)

This disparaging account of Wal-Mart – where Leake openly admits that many products
are cheaper but that she still cannot bear to do her grocery shopping there again – clearly
highlights the bifurcation of food products according to class status. Instead, Leake spins this
experience into an example of her personal moral superiority, insinuating that she will boycott
this affordable store for personal reasons as she writes “I just have a hard time pumping too
many pesticide-infused things into my precious daughters.” (emphasis mine). Of course the
inverse situation – that people buy particular products because they enjoy consuming pesticides –
is absurd, but unaccounted for in Leake’s myopic interpretation of food choices in America.
Instead, she attributes her privileged food choices to her superior morality and mothering ability.
Inversely, Leake waxes lyrical about a number of extravagant ‘non-negotiables’ that she
insists be accounted for within her weekly budget. This includes the family’s $30-per-week farm
to home milk delivery service where Leake boasts: “Not only can I call and ask them questions
anytime (and you know I do!), but I could even go visit the farm myself if I thought it was
necessary to do so” (2010h). Leake rues the high cost of nuts, given that they comprise such as
central part of her ‘real’ food diet, and talks sadly about how she and her husband have been

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reduced to buying frozen rather than fresh berries to sprinkle on their cereal in the morning
(2010f). These social objects are much more effective at conveying the everyday realities of
class than Leake’s empty rhetoric around budgets and SNAP allowances. They effectively refute
Leake’s adherence to the irrelevance of budgetary and class capital considerations in food
choices.
Gamification also reinforces the superficiality of Leake’s budget challenge. Leake
frivolously writes off mistakes or failures to keep to her planned budget, writing: “after taking
into consideration the twenty or so unnecessary dollars that I spent, my bill came to $108.43. So
what did I do? Nothing other than have my husband return the unopened pecans and dates on my
behalf” (2011b). She is self-congratulatory at the end of her challenge, ending the series with a
post titled ‘Victory!’ and whining:

After all of those warm and fuzzy benefits and budget tips I am allowed to complain a
little, right? Because as much as I love and believe in all of this real food stuff I am so
happy the budget pledge is over!...I know you blog readers didn’t do it on purpose, but
reporting out every last detail of my food purchases to all of you was a lot of pressure
(2011a).

Such cavalier attitudes to budgeting make recognisable to anyone who has ever been
truly limited by a budget that Leake’s challenge is an artifice that could only be expressed in this
way because she is not truly required to stick to a budget. Meanwhile, the digital structure of
performative moral accounting details the excess labour and resources that Leake has to devote

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to the mundane details of her daily life, and the class cachet that allow these mundane details to
be transformed into a lucrative spectacle.
Ultimately, these digital traces work to disturb the premise of classlessness that is
perpetuated within U.S. neoliberalism and by Leake herself. Leake’s ‘choice’ not to buy cheaper
products that require a visit to Wal-Mart, and her purchase of $19 maple syrup to drizzle in her
morning coffee, are extravagances that are anomalous with being on a food budget. The
juxtaposition of these highly privileged choices with her denial of class privilege effect a rupture
that makes glaringly visible the contradictions and myths of neoliberalism. As earlier discussed,
the myth that America is a classless society is well-engrained because while multiple narratives
circulate to make meritocracy seem self-evident, there are no equivalent narrative tropes to
describe the insidious impact of wealth disparity. Thus, even while some discerning citizens have
begun to question the validity of the premise of classlessness – particularly in light of the
widespread impact of the 2008 recession, although this has had the effect of highlighting middle-
class precarity much more so than those pushed into abject poverty by these economic conditions
– neoliberalism effectively silences such dissent through discursive lack. For this reason, I
believe that the contradictions between form and content on 100 Days on a Budget work to
crucially make visible what neoliberalism does not: the structural inequalities that characterise
class difference. In the same way that Paltrow’s pathetic attempt at the SNAP challenge creates
cognitive dissonance when situated alongside the extravagant luxury items promoted on her
website, Leake’s blog food and shopping choices make clear the inconsistencies of her classless
rhetoric. And while visible contradiction does not in and of itself constitute political action, it
sets important groundwork by shattering the discursive limitations of neoliberalism which have
hampered contemporary discussions of class, race and gender politics.

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Therefore, while Leake builds her brand upon the supposed ordinariness of her family
and their resources, the object and form of her challenge reveal the peculiar middle-class and
privileged investments and design of ritualised consumption. This obsession with detoxification
and purification is a middle-class game that ascribes moral virtue to those who have and refuse,
while eliding understanding of the reality for those who have not. Leake’s condescending
performance of ‘playing’ poor as a gimmick to monetize her blog, and the didactic spirit in
which she writes, quickly reveals the incongruity of simultaneously trying to position her family
as both ‘ordinary’ and ‘extra-ordinary’ for their commitment to a particular diet and lifestyle.
Leake’s embrace of real foods is excessive and a monetisable brand for her, while remaining an
unrealistic diet for the majority of American households. In summary, the conflation of correct
consumption choices with morality have further obscured the original intentions of the
alternative food movement – to intervene and point out the problematic limitations of the
conventional food system – and exacerbated the bifurcation of the U.S. foodscape by not only
excluding lower-class families from access to increasingly popular premium food products, but
also by reinforcing the prejudices cast against lower-class families for their structurally limited
consumption choices.
This may be the most uncharitable conclusion I arrive at in my analysis of food blogs.
While I stand by this assessment, I also wish to make clear that in many ways Leake is simply re-
circulating a popular rhetoric that originates from the alternative food movement. The tendency
for the alternative food movement to conflate ‘correct’ consumption choices with moral virtue
reflects the middle-class origins of this intervention. This does not necessarily erase the need to
interrogate the conventional food system but is indicative of the need for more self-reflection

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within the movement on how to foster inclusivity and empathy, and how to develop a more
ethical social awareness of food.
Moreover, Leake’s work speaks to the pressures surrounding postfeminist motherhood in
this neoliberal foodscape. I would argue that her partnership with Dr. Oz and her New York
Times bestselling cookbook give us an indication of the likely middle-class audience base for her
work. In providing a resource for middle-class mothers, Leake addresses the multiple self-
disciplinary pressures that govern this demographic including eating healthy food, sticking to a
strict budget, performing intensive mothering and making sure one’s attitude stays optimistic at
all times. More importantly, outside of the questionable advice offered by Leake herself, her blog
has value in creating a community space for the discussion of food practices. In the comments
section of Leake’s posts, readers ask questions that are not answered by Leake herself but by
other readers of the blog. Although Leake’s brand seeks to monetise her work, the gift economy
embedded into internet logics nevertheless provides a space for participants to gather, share their
personal food concerns, and exchange knowledge. In summary, then, Leake can be seen as
providing a service with her blog through fostering a space for knowledge exchange between
women in an age of food anxiety.
A Girl Called Jack: Austerity and the Working Class Challenge

Lunch is an apple, Sainsburys Basics, 8p each, with a Sainsburys Basics can
of tomato soup, 25p, and a glass of water, free. Total cost so far: 38p. Not bad.
– A Girl Called Jack, October 11, 2012

The case study I examine here – A Girl Called Jack
10
by Jack Monroe – is in many ways,
an exception to many of the qualities of food blogs that I have discussed thus far. Authored by a
single mother offering her perspective of feeding herself on a meagre and precarious income,

10
Re-named Jack at a Pinch on 29 October 2015 and then Cooking on a Bootstrap in 2016, but my analysis
generally centres around the brand as it was known as A Girl Called Jack so this is the name that I refer to here

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Monroe’s work is a polar opposite to Leake’s brand. In contrast to Leake’s circulation of
American, middle-class food discourses, Monroe speaks to the condition of being a welfare
recipient living on the poverty line in England. While Leake’s blog depicts the heteronormative,
middle-class family replete with marriage and two children, Monroe’s blog centres around her
life as a young, queer single mother. While Leake’s posts are indicative of consumption as a
lifestyle hack, Monroe’s posts link consumption directly to explicit forms of political action.
However, I also find the commonalities of these two blogs to be quite revealing. In many ways,
Monroe leverages the visible quantification of middle-class motherhood as a political act, a
personal accountability that is linked to her larger project of defending and fighting for the rights
of single mothers and those living on and below the poverty line. I include this brief discussion
of Monroe’s blog as an example of the ways that class can be made explicit on food blogs, but
also to point out the tendency for expressions of political activism to be subsumed within the
mechanisms of neoliberalism.
Jack Monroe is a blogger from Southend-on-Sea, England, who started her blog, A Girl
Called Jack, in 2012 in response to a local councillor who made a statement that was transcribed
into the inflammatory headline ‘Druggies, drunks and single mums are ruining our town’ by
Southend’s local paper, Echo & Gazette. Monroe’s watershed post – titled ‘Hunger Hurts’ –
remains one of the most popular posts on her blog and ends with the moving statement: “Poverty
is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one weetabix and says ‘more mummy,
bread and jam please mummy’ as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the
pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam” (2012b).
Monroe’s blog, and her unexpected position as the public face of British poverty,
originally centres around her decision to quit her job at a fire station as the shifts become

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increasingly inflexible and therefore incompatible with caring for her young son as a single
mother. Ending up on benefits, she uses the blog to detail her stringent and scrupulous attention
to the cost of groceries and cooking, a form of planning labour necessary to feed herself and her
son on the post-austerity, government-prescribed benefits in Britain. In sharing this information,
Monroe subverts the confessional tone of the food blogging genre, using its qualities of intimacy
and domesticity to offer a testimony of the hardships of providing for her son as a single mother
living off the meagre welfare allowance provided by the government.
Such work is positioned as a defense against the harmful and prejudiced tropes
circulating about welfare mothers. In the U.S. the term ‘welfare queen’ – popularised during
Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign – is circulated as shorthand for the lazy and deceptive,
raced and feminised, imaginary welfare recipient becoming rich from the government and
taxpayers’ money. In debunking these myths, Hays writes (of the U.S. context) that a
“foundational problem is the false assumption that most welfare recipients were previously
lacking the motivation to work. Another problem, apparent to anyone who has ever tried to
survive on a minimum wage job, is that the low-wage work typically available to welfare
recipients offers neither financial independence nor the independence associated with the higher
ideals of American citizenship” (2003, p. 34). Yet while the ‘welfare queen’ stereotype
misrepresents the situation of mothers on welfare, there is a link between mothers and poverty as
Hays writes, “welfare recipients whose morality has been under attack are not just desperately
poor. The vast majority of adult welfare clients – over 90 percent – are mothers. Most of these
women are raising their children alone” (2003, p. 11).
Monroe’s battle against the welfare mother trope takes place firstly through, similarly to
Leake, drawing on the conventions of performative moral accounting. Monroe uses her blog to

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record painstaking, weekly £10 menu plans. These plans typically revolve around simple
variations on basics such as breads, soups and pastas, for instance, a recipe for sweet potato and
lime bread that simply contains flour, yeast, sweet potato and lime juice and amounts to 11p per
serving. These recipes and the detail in their documentation make clear Monroe’s commitment to
planning and frugality, without sacrificing her desire for fresh, healthy and delicious food. For
example, the annotated ingredient list for her recipe ‘Pasta Alla Genovese, 19p’ (2013) reads as
follows:

100g spaghetti (8p: 40p for 500g, Sainsburys Basics)
50g fine green beans, trimmed and chopped into 1cm pieces (7p: £1.40/kg,
Sainsburys)
200g potatoes, cut into 2cm chunks (8p: 15p for 540g can, Sainsburys Basics)
Handful of basil leaves (Free, growing on my window ledge!)
Handful of mint leaves (Free, also growing on my window ledge!)
Pinch of grated parmesan cheese to serve, 10g approx (9p, £2.30/200g,
Sainsburys Basics Hard Cheese)
1 small garlic clove, peeled and crushed (3p: 46p for 2 bulbs, average 8 cloves
per bulb, Sainsburys Basics)
Splash of vegetable or sunflower oil, 20ml approx (3p: £1.69/1l, Sainsburys)

The precision of this ingredient list and its careful accounting refutes assumptions of the
laziness and/or extravagance of welfare recipients. What is made visible is a meticulously
planned recipe in which every clove of garlic and pinch of cheese is and must be accounted for
as evidence of Monroe’s character and credibility in working hard to overcome the traps of
poverty. In clearly articulating the labour of planning and economy, Monroe alludes to her
approximation, within her means, of virtuous, middle-class food preparation and intensive
mothering.
It is likely that Monroe is able to successfully perform to the audience of the middle-class
viewer due to her upbringing in a middle-class family and her education at a private school, facts
to which the press have paid much attention. Accordingly, Monroe is able to effectively deploy

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her middle-class capital towards a narrative that posits single and working-class motherhood as a
noble attempt to reproduce middle-class new momism within her limited means. In many ways
Monroe is the ideal spokesperson for austerity Britain, being articulate, a good cook, and
understanding the middle-class sensibilities by which the working class and welfare recipients
are judged. Furthermore, Monroe’s publicised middle-class upbringing helps the media attribute
her status as a welfare recipient as an outcome of the precarious class conditions of modern
neoliberalism rather than strictly as a result of her ‘poor’ choices. Monroe is therefore well
positioned to deploy social media in its most utopian political form: as participatory politics, that
gives voice and influence to groups who are disenfranchised and excluded from participating in
the public sphere.
Indeed, Monroe’s stance is accompanied by explicit attention to the political conditions
surrounding welfare during the era of austerity regimes in the U.K. – in the face of ever-
dwindling public services, Monroe uses her blog to tap into a larger undercurrent of public
dissatisfaction that openly calls politicians to task. While Monroe is not the only blogger to have
taken on this format to document dire poverty in austerity Britain, her success can be attributed
to her focus on food to highlight her experience as a single mother. Monroe writes that her blog
“really took off when I started to write about food, and how I was managing to feed myself and
my son on around £10 a week, every week” (Wren, 2013). Thus, the material richness of food
that so effectively reveals Leake’s class privilege also works affectively to detail the pain and
struggle of Monroe’s poverty.
At odds with the generic conventions of food blogs, Monroe’s blog includes overt
political writing which is anomalous within the lifestyle-oriented, U.S. food blogosphere.
Monroe intersperses her recipes with political commentary and poetry in a way that explicitly

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calls politicians to account and reveals her commitment to political actions, public
demonstrations, charities, rallies and petitions that focus on the issue of poverty in the U.K. For
example, she uses a post titled ‘Thatcherites’ to critique privatization and writes: “As Working
Tax Credits demand that people work an extra 8 hours a week to continue to be entitled to claim
them, and Child Benefit becomes means tested, the death knell sounds for the underpinning
principle of universality of the welfare state” (2012c). These reflections are interspersed with
calls to action, including an online petition instigated by Monroe which garnered over 100,000
signatures and led to a parliamentary debate on hunger in the United Kingdom (Wikipedia, n.d.).
Monroe is said to still attend local council meetings, and regularly posts about and takes part in
community events relating to food insecurity and council housing.
Monroe’s attempts to make visible her experiences within the explicit political context of
modern Britain are laudable. Based on the media coverage surrounding Monroe – including her
very public battles with conservative tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail – and the content of her
blog, Monroe evidences a genuine concern with the issues of food insecurity and prejudices
against the working class. Yet, I find that this tremendous commitment to political activism has a
tendency to be subsumed within the hegemonic mechanisms of free-market rhetoric. I look at the
digital and discursive limits of Monroe’s noble political intentions. This occurs in the discursive
incompatibility of working class motherhood with ‘good’ motherhood, as well as in the tendency
for Monroe’s work to be transmuted into a vehicle of poverty porn packaged for the affective
titillation of the middle class.
Classing ‘Good’ Motherhood
I have documented the ways that Monroe engages with the forms of activism most
commonly understood as politics within the history of social movements. I have also alluded to

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the ways in which Monroe’s performance and representation of motherhood comprises a form of
politics. It is this latter, more ‘ordinary’ performance of politics which I focus on in this section.
Monroe’s blog is not simply an illustration of the hardships and impossibilities of feeding
oneself adequately within the provisions allotted by modern social welfare. It also works to make
clear her desire to correctly perform middle-class ideals of motherhood within her limited means.
Monroe is adamant about feeding her son home-made meals with attention to nutritional value
and whole food ingredients. Her decision to quit her job and the subsequent need to accept
welfare is justified by the intensive mothering philosophy of wanting to spend more quality time
personally raising her son. Her writing is lucid and her subject matter well-suited to the candour
expected of the lifestyle blogosphere, drawing on the affective reverence generally accorded
motherhood within the blogosphere.
Like Leake, then, Monroe uses her performance of the ideals of middle-class motherhood
as evidence of her moral worth. This is necessary for Monroe who pits the discourse of intensive
motherhood against the welfare mother trope in ways that illuminate the political issues of
poverty and food insecurity. Her concern with, and her ability in, cooking from scratch situates
her closer to the middle-class crunchy mama ideal than the working-class and their association
with convenience and fast foods in the U.S. Her skills in writing and cooking make her perfectly
suited to enact a form of defense through incongruity, using her personal experiences to counter
the prejudices that allow the middle-class population to ignore the political and structural causes
of poverty and support the removal of state-sponsored programs to alleviate these problems.
Moreover, she deploys her personal experiences as a way of drawing attention to the whole
demographic affected by these same issues.

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However, unlike Leake, Monroe faces constant criticism due to the discursive
incompatibilities between being a working-class mother receiving welfare and being a ‘good’
mother. I consider this criticism to emanate from Monroe’s liminal position within the classed
categories of the at-risk and can-do postfeminist subjectivity outlined by Harris (2004). Harris
describes can-do subjects as “identifiable by their commitment to exceptional careers and career
planning, their belief in their capacity to invent themselves and succeed, and their display of a
consumer lifestyle. Can-do subjects are also distinguished by a desire to put off childbearing
until ‘later’” (2004, p.14) while their counterpart, at-risk girls, are characterised by “a lack of a
sense of power or opportunity, and inappropriate consumption behaviors, for example, of drugs
or alcohol. These young women are also more likely to become pregnant at a young age” (2004,
p. 14). It is telling that youth pregnancy is specifically written into these definitions of good/bad
girlhood and speaks to the way Monroe is condemned from the beginning.
The can-do and at-risk positions are inherently classed, as well as raced, and these tropes
define what and how the actions of their subjects are interpreted. Monroe’s political activism is
therefore liable to being interpreted as the unruly outbursts of an irresponsible single mother,
while Leake’s work is interpreted as an evangelical mission for the benefit of the country.
Moreover, Leake’s success is uncomplicatedly viewed as the meritocratic reward for her hard
work and commitment to championing a popular ‘social justice’ cause. While both women
assume primary care for their children in place of professional sphere labour, for Leake this act is
an act of responsible caregiving and devotion while for Monroe this same decision to raise her
child at home amounts to an act of ‘laziness’ and a poor choice. These examples reveal the extent
to which class discourse is rigid and limiting, reliant more on class tropes than on the actions or
choices of any individual.

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The at-risk girl is also the subject of surveillance regimes. Monroe has been quoted as
saying that “[p]eople check her shopping basket in the supermarket for extravagances, and she
has had threatening phone calls after writing that the Union Jack needed reclaiming from Right-
wing groups” (Clay, 2013). This intense scrutiny into Monroe’s personal life extends to her
sexuality and public attacks on her character. A furore occurred after she published a tweet
accusing David Cameron of using ‘stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise
selling our NHS.’ In response, Daily Mail columnist and wife of the Conservative chief whip
Sarah Vine uses the opportunity to criticise Monroe by re-hashing discourses on the rhetoric of
choice and at-risk girlhood, accompanied by a serving of moral virtue and homophobia for good
measure:

I was 34 when I had my first child. Why? Because that was the age at which I felt I was
stable enough, both financially and emotionally, to meet the needs of a growing family.
Ms Monroe didn’t feel bound by such constraints. She went ahead and had a child
in her early 20s. When her relationship ended shortly after, she had to give up her job at
Essex Fire brigade and found herself, in 2012, living on the breadline…
No one forced her to have a child. Indeed, in she was in anyway uncertain of her
sexual orientation, arguably she should have taken greater precautions. But it seems that
Ms Monroe isn’t one for assuming responsibility for her actions. (Vine, 2014).

After the incident, Sainsbury’s – who had hired Monroe to replace Jamie Oliver to front
their ad campaigns and offered her a limited term blogging contract – did not renew her blog and
issued a curt statement that: “Jack Monroe blogs independently. Sainsbury’s is not a political
organisation and we certainly don’t share her views” (Sinmaz, 2014). This reveals the general

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incompatibility of the corporate world – through which bloggers must navigate in order to get
their message out successfully – and overt political activism that is external to the neoliberal,
free-market agenda. While Sainsbury’s is happy to capitalise on Monroe’s celebrity and body of
work, this partnership is tacitly premised upon Monroe’s political silence, a concession to
performing the ideal postfeminist subject who “is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent,
to withhold critique in order to count as a modern, sophisticated girl. Indeed, this withholding of
critique is a condition of her freedom” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 34). From these examples, it is clear
that as Monroe steps up to the plate to bat for social justice, it is far too easy for detractors to
attack her unfairly and personally for her class positioning as a way of silencing her and far too
easily dismissing the political agenda behind her work.

Austerity Celebrity and the Marketing Political Activism
In addition to attacking Monroe’s personal character, there is a tendency to commoditise
her work, distorting her message to make it more palatable to a middle-class audience by
removing the political imperative of food access and transforming A Girl Called Jack from a
political tract on austerity into a brand on the less threatening topics of thrift and restrained
consumption. The popularity of Monroe’s message amongst some in the middle-classes also has
the effect of diluting the political importance of her work. Ironically, Monroe’s reception and
popularity have overshadowed parts of her political work. While Monroe remains an activist for
the causes of poverty and food insecurity, including recipes which amount to only a few pence
per serving and including posts with political commentary, her previously precarious social
position as a single mother has publicly improved. Monroe now lives in her own apartment, has
published two books based on the recipes on her blog, and remains a regular columnist for The
Guardian. Her blog post – while still built using a WordPress site – has been gradually

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redesigned and now features sophisticated embedded links and expertly styled photography. She
includes less ‘confronting’ narratives that replace abject poverty with thriftiness. For example,
for her ‘Kale, Barley and Cumin Soup. 38p’ (2015) she discusses low-cost meals not as a
necessary survival strategy but nostalgically, in the context of her mother’s Northern Irish
heritage and memories of eating barley soup as a young girl. Monroe has also begun to foray into
crunchy mama territory with the addition of vegan recipes, uncommon and low-calorie-dense
ingredients such as succa and mooli (daikon radish) and orthorexic fads including gluten-free
recipes and a ‘health kick’ diet.
While Monroe deserves recognition and compensation for her work, and it is heartening
that her experience of dire poverty has been relieved to some extent, the same popular and public
attention that works to disseminate Monroe’s political message also results in a gentrification of
Monroe’s message and brand. This is evident in the New York Times’ questionable labelling of
Monroe as ‘Britain’s austerity celebrity’ (Bennhold, 2014) and the public tendency to
appropriate Monroe’s story as a fable about the middle-class fetishisation of thrift, sacrifice and
environmentalism as moral virtues rather than a political stand against food insecurity. For
instance, Monroe’s attention to accounting for each cent and scrap of food fits quite neatly into a
broader food media revolution focussed on frugality and efficiency in the U.S. and the U.K,
including Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals, Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals, The Pioneer
Woman’s series of 16-minute recipes, posted on her blog and presented on her television show,
and the Food Network shows Sandra’s Money-Saving Meals and Ten Dollar Dinners with
Melissa D’Arabian. Rather than being connected to food insecurity and budgeting as a necessity,
these texts can more accurately be described as fantasy media for time-poor postfeminist
mothers.

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These carefully timed and budgeted recipes both endorse and romanticize the value of
efficiency, in an ode to the neoliberal ideal of maximising productivity from within the
household by requiring women to devote ever more intensive resources to her home economy
and efficiency. As an example, Elizabeth Nathanson describes Ray’s 30 Minute Meals as an
inherently postfeminist endeavour as the host demonstrates the virtuous “postfeminist woman
[who] strives to ‘have it all’ and find pleasure in everyday tasks by carefully balancing multiple
demands” (2009, p. 318). Ray’s show might be considered a paean to the ideal of contemporary
postfeminist life, which involves an economic and efficient overhaul of domestic labour –
through planning, self-awareness and commitment – which allows the postfeminist subject to
execute her life with flair and ease. The meals, although they appear in real time, are unlikely to
be followed in real time, given the free and widespread availability of such recipes on the Food
Network website. Therefore, the cook might turn to the show for inspiration as well as pedagogy;
not simply to pick up the small but usually quite obvious tricks and hints that Ray provides about
how to use time efficiently, but also to observe the fantasy of simplicity and efficiency that the
show sells as bubbly Ray churns through her labour in the kitchen without interruptions or
failures or exhaustion. Selling this ideology, particularly through the medium of television which
has so long been associated with the domestic mode of relaxation, is an important part of the
appeal of these shows. As Nathanson writes “[w]hile the program is dedicated to showing the
complete process of cooking, the goal of the program is to entertain viewers with the spectacle of
efficient labor that fills every second of airtime” (2009, p. 322).
In this context, where food media are increasingly directed towards leisure for
postfeminist mothers by perpetuating the fantasy that they can do it all, through their
representations of efficient, effortless cooking, Monroe’s austerity oeuvre neatly fits in to and is

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subsumed within this movement. In an article discussing Monroe’s public cheerleaders and
critics, Tom Slater writes that:

Monroe’s plight embodies the unholy trinity of modern leftist values – thrift, subsistence
and health. They see in her story the proof that economic growth is not only impossible
but actively undesirable and that on a planet of depleting resources we must all put up
with our lot (2014).

Even more provocatively, Slater alleges that:

far from being a portal into working-class strife, the austerity chic Monroe embodies is
the sole preserve of the middle classes: her recently released cook book will likely be the
gift-of-choice for Hampstead housewives rather than hard-up single mums. Far from
being the ‘face of modern poverty’, she’s the wet dream of well-to-do foodies (2014).

Monroe’s example therefore speaks to the inherent difficulties of practicing politics in a
context of neoliberalism. Even where the intent and action exists in the traditional sense –
including Monroe’s inclusion of political messages targeted towards politicians on her blog and
in media including weekly Guardian columns, and her involvement with numerous charities –
this work is all too easily commoditised in recognition of the need to appease the middle-class
‘majority’ as a trade off for achieving widespread dissemination of this political message. In this
environment, it is appropriate to reconsider whether these traditional forms of political action are
the most effective tools for change in the current climate.

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Conclusion
In this chapter, I looked at budget blogs through the lenses of class and motherhood. I
illustrated the ways in which the rhetoric around ritualised and constrained consumption is often
a euphemism for middle-class moral virtue. Specifically, the classism that currently underwrites
our understanding of the alternative food movement falls into the trap of rewarding those already
privileged by class with the benefits of moral superiority, while those who are excluded from
these privileged consumption rituals are further castigated. At the same time, the classed
undertones of alternative food movement discourse go unchallenged and are blatantly denied,
which I take to be emblematic of the mechanisms of neoliberal discourse. That is, while political
activism is increasingly integrated into the market – as part of a long history of expressing
political sentiments and responses through consumption behaviour – increasingly there is no
longer a discourse or desire to describe opting out of the market. Instead, with the development
of alternative consumption spaces and markets, opting out of the conventional food system is
only available to those with financial means, with no guarantee of healthy, ethical or safe foods
for those unwilling or unable to pay this premium.
In this environment of artificial restriction and romanticised thrift, poverty is reinforced
as a transient and even chosen condition that can and should be overcome through diligence,
planning and enacting empowered, positive choices in life and the marketplace. With this
narcissistic focus on individual emotions and experiences, there is very little room for a holistic
and adequate understanding of food insecurity, with much more blog space devoted to the
ignorant opinions of well-off individuals such as Lisa Leake. These individuals are
disproportionately rewarded for their ability to turn their participation in artificial and arrogant
performances of conspicuous non-consumption into entrepreneurial brands. At the same time,

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the predominance and glamour of poverty porn circulated within middle-class strata allows the
realities of food insecurity to be conveniently ignored and refuted as meritocratic justice. This
has the impact of diluting the political work of those who are explicitly committed to linking
issues of food access directly to the political system, such as Jack Monroe.
Given these shortcomings and limitations of the neoliberal discourse surrounding class
and food access, I look at the ways that the realities of class limitations might instead be inferred
through the material richness of the food objects that are circulated by food bloggers, as well as
the digital traces that belie the importance of class even as it is denied within conventional
discourse about alternative foods. I find that the disjunct between content and form on food blogs
is therefore able to illustrate the prevalence of class even where neoliberal discourse – and its
pervasive adherence to meritocracy and classlessness in America - fails. In turn, this disjunct
amounts to a rupture in which the lie of meritocracy is revealed, and will ideally prompt new
conversations around class and food access.
These moments of resistance are fleeting within the food blogosphere. Monroe’s attention
to explicit political action surrounding food insecurity in the U.K. is a rarity, even more so when
coupled with her relative success within mainstream media. I catalogued the tendency for
Monroe’s celebrity to have triggered a process of commoditisation of her work and politics,
wherein her commitment to food security for the working class was translated into a politically
neutralising attention to thriftiness and economy in the kitchen. It is this tendency for radical
political discourse to be subsumed and made palatable within the mechanisms of free-market
economics that demands a critical attention to these digital spaces of online ordinariness; in order
to be able to recognise and contextualise those fleeting moments of resistance when and where
they arise, and before they are reappropriated back into the conditions of free-market

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corporatism, we must be vigilant about documenting the meanings embedded in this digital
space.

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Recipes for Community: Healthism and the Virtual Vegan Potluck

Veganism is a diet that eschews the consumption of animal products, including animal
meat, dairy products, eggs, foods which contain meat, dairy or eggs as byproducts. As such, it is
a subsection of vegetarianism that is traced to the meat-avoidance practices of ancient India and
eastern Mediterranean societies (Suddath, 2008). As a religious practice, it is considered that the
“meatless lifestyle never really caught on in the West, although it would sometimes pop up
during health crazes and religious revivals” (Suddath, 2008). However, the invention of the term
‘vegan’ is credited to Englishman Donald Watson in 1944, who went on to found the Vegan
Society. Watson was horrified at the experience of seeing animals being slaughtered on his
uncle’s farm, but was also keen to avoid food which he regarded as laden with ‘toxins,’ leading
to his formulation of veganism as a diet.
The history of veganism as a conscious lifestyle practice was therefore intertwined with
the negotiation of ideas about ethics and health. Warren Belasco further documents the history of
using food to demonstrate countercultural values in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s,
during which vegetarianism became particularly popular as a radical action:

Brown rice became the icon of antimodernity…Jaded as we are now by commercial
phrases like ‘natural, whole grain goodness,’ it may now be hard to see revolutionary
significance in the eating of unhulled rice and curried carrots, or granola and yogurt. In
1969-70, however, dietary change was one of the more substantial household reforms.
Compared to other cultural adaptations, the emerging countercuisine seemed less co-
optable because it demanded greater personal commitment (1989, pp. 27-28)

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Part of the driving force of the counterculture was to recognise the limits of consumer
culture on the American diet and lifestyle. As a response to the consumption that was a core part
of the post-war boom in the United States economy, veganism was understood as a form of
passive resistance. The interest in a vegan diet developed symbiotically with the interests in
pacifism and bohemianism that became pervasive during this time, as a rejection of the
normative and standardised television dinners that had thus far come to characterise the
American foodscape. Given this radical countercultural history in the West, I see veganism as a
good barometer for plotting the changing politics of consumption in the information age.
In this chapter, I begin by exploring the theme of neoliberal individual responsibility
which has underwritten discussions of modern foodie culture, postfeminism and digital
technologies. I wish to explore the ways in which this imperative has structured contemporary
concepts of health and its relationship to an understanding of consumption as a minefield through
which the individual consumer must successfully navigate. I have argued thus far that the
contemporary foodie culture is one characterised by a certain anxiety surrounding consumption
choices. This anxiety in turn produces a burden of research and planning around consumption
that is gendered in its nature due to the fact that, as was touched on in previous chapters, women
have always and continue to assume the majority of food planning and preparation labour for the
household.
I look at the ways that digital culture has both exacerbated and resolved this gendered
labour. Using the example of the quantification of self movement, I first examine the ways that
the information age has provided tools that seemingly allow the individual to triumph through
taking responsibility and gaining customised insights into their health. Yet ultimately, I regard
quantification as a privileged and masculinist movement that does not adequately address gender

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difference either in recognising the history of women’s quantification or women’s need in the
design of quantification tools.
In contrast, I offer the Virtual Vegan Potluck (VVP) as an example of the ways that a
feminised community has been constructed around the digitisation of food and health discourse. I
look at the ways that the VVP focuses on individual authorship, but uses digital features such as
the comments section, blogrolls and cross-links to embed the individual within a supportive
knowledge community. Through the creation of digital infrastructures that support this feminised
online community, information exchange flourishes and provides a site of important critical
discussion for women.

Neoliberal Individual Responsibility
In my discussion of neoliberal individual responsibility in this chapter, I rely on David
Harvey’s influential definition of neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property
rights, free markets, and free trade” (2005, p. 2). As Gill and Scharff (2011) point out, while
neoliberalism was historically associated with conservative government – namely, Thatcher’s
reign in the UK and Reagan’s government in the United States – it is now a common form of
economic management by left-leaning governments as well. Cultural studies theorists have used
the term neoliberalism primarily to critique the market’s influence on social activism and private
life.
Individualism is manifest in the project of neoliberalism. In its original conception as an
economic theory, neoliberalism relied on homo economicus – the rational and narrowly self-

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interested actor – to predict the movement and operation of the free market. It is considered that
homo economicus acts to maximize his own utility, and that the aggregate responses of such
rational actors specify supply and demand curves that signal the most efficient allocation of
social resources. In the modern neoliberal context, this individualism manifests as the onus for
self-responsibility – and the concomitant reduction in State responsibility – over social goods
including health care, financial security and consumer awareness. Additionally, it is important to
note that homo economicus is modelled on the rational liberal human subject, and his inherent
masculinity, whiteness and middle-class capacity for property-ownership.
The problems with this reliance on individualism have been noted by many scholars,
beginning with Harvey who notes that “[n]eoliberal concern for the individual trumps any social
democratic concern for equality, democracy, and social solidarities” (2005, p. 176). Discourses
of individual responsibility also minimise interest and attention to the structural conditions which
limit the choices available to certain individuals. For example, postfeminist subjecthood is
predicated upon the concept neoliberal individual responsibility – as was discussed previously,
Harris’ ‘can-do’ girl is counterposed by the ‘at-risk’ girl who is characterised by “a lack of a
sense of power or opportunity, and inappropriate consumption behaviours” (2004, p. 14). This
bifurcating discourse of girlhood reveals the ways that “success, personal effort, and self-
invention have become linked together in the project of surviving in a risk society…young
women are disciplined into creating their own successful life trajectories and taking personal
responsibility if they fail” (2004, p. 10).
A similar postfeminist application of neoliberal individualism is captured in what
McRobbie labels the rhetoric of choice, which alludes to the appropriation of ‘choice’ from its
liberal second wave usage in the fight for recognition of female personhood, to a defense of

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personal decisions used to justify any and all postfeminist and anti-feminist behaviours and
activities. The seductive rhetoric of choice lies in its sense of empowerment, as “women, by
definition, and across the boundaries of class and race, are now able to make choices, and to play
an active role in their own life-biographies” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 47). However, this discourse is
used both to disavow the “need for the kinds for combative, or angry styles of political
organization, associated with feminism” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 47) and – somewhat more
problematically – “totally ignores the continued existence of gender hierarchies and the perhaps
more subtle ways in which these are constantly being reproduced” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 46). That
is, the neoliberal emphasis on the individual forecloses the perceived utility of any social
collectives – including the State and social movements – and instead works to obfuscate the
continued existence of structural inequalities.
Returning to the context of consumption, this emphasis on neoliberal individual
responsibility has created an imperative to navigate the dystopic landscape of contradictory food
information in an effort to make healthy consumption choices. Historically, the success of the
economic actor’s rational choice is predicated upon their access to complete information within
the marketplace. While these conditions of perfect information have always been mythical,
recent exposes on factory-farm and processed food horrors have revealed the disturbing extent to
which production information is obfuscated and have perpetuated the aforementioned “rising
sense of distrust toward government, corporations, and the food system” (Matchar, 2013, p. 15).
On the other hand, cyberspace offers an abundance of contradictory and anxiety-provoking
information which must be sifted through and considered by the discerning consumer.
Unsurprisingly, in the context of food labour this consumer is typically the female head of

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household socially designated as responsible for the emotional and physical welfare of herself
and her family. This creates a significant gendered burden.
This sense of distrust and anxiety has seemingly accelerated the rise and justification of
neoliberal individualism, for with this loss of “faith in communal solutions for social, economic,
and environmental problems, there’s been a dramatic shift toward an ethos of family-based self-
reliance” (Matchar, 2013, p. 16). As has been discussed in previous chapters, in practical terms
this moral responsibility for the family has manifested as an additional burden for women who –
alongside the long increasing demands of intensive mothering (Hays, 1998; Douglas & Michaels,
2004) – are now expected to run households in a professionalised and labour-intensive fashion.
As the standardised convenience foods of the post-war American dream have “turned out to be a
big fat toxin-laden, environment-destroying nightmare” (Matchar, 2013, p. 12) so women are
increasingly driven by fear-mongering and moral condemnation to pursue unique and self-
actualising but increasingly demanding forms of domesticity as a professional enterprise. When
transcribed into the digital arena, I explore their political potential for creating important
knowledge communities that support women through the increasingly contradictory and
ambivalent proscriptions demanded of modern femininity.

Healthism and Alternative Food
As discussed in the previous chapter with Lisa Leake’s real food blog, food discourse is
often interrelated with understandings of health. Alternative food discourse in particular
evidences a fixation on healthism, which Robert Crawford (1994) describes as the Western
interest in health as a marker of moral virtue for the middle-class individual.
Crawford documents the rise of healthism as a product of changes in sacred, secular and
scientific thinking. From the eighteenth century onwards, Crawford attributes an interest in

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individual health to the protestant work ethic and demonization of the body as the source of sin,
as well as the reform in manners through which “‘civility’ was worked upon the body [through]
the minimalization of gesture, the privatization of bodily functions” (1994, p. 1350). Moreover,
scientific thinking flourished under the separation of the soul from the body, newly fashioning
the body as “an abstracted entity, identical to all other bodies, detached from living situations,
[where] health became a concept for describing its normal state” (1994, p. 1350). More relevant
to the discussion at hand, during the 1970s, healthism gained dramatically in popularity as a
concept. This is attributed to the understanding of the healthy body as a demonstration of the
personal character of the individual, as Crawford writes: “The healthy individual, for example,
was a person who, in resisting immediate gratification, took command of his or her life
possibilities…the pursuit of health became an arena for the display of the growing bourgeois
ideal of taking responsibility for determining one’s future” (1994, p. 1352). This modern, healthy
body was treated as a possession that could be maintained through proper care and disciplinary
regimes.
However, as with conspicuous consumption, the behaviours and markers of what
constitutes a ‘healthy’ body are constantly changing. As Guthman writes, the modern
understanding of health “has a ‘positive’ connotation that relies on various ideas and
assumptions about what constitutes a healthy body…Since health can never be achieved once
and for all, it requires constant vigilance in monitoring and constant effort in enhancing” (2011,
p. 52). Moreover, healthism posits a responsibility on the individual to stay current with these
changing fashions, as Guthman adds, the concept of health in the contemporary context has
“morphed from a critical perspective on both the biomedical establishment and industrial toxins,

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to an embrace of self-care, to an utter devolution of health responsibility to the individual”
(2011, p. 56). Thus, healthism is engrained in the rhetoric of neoliberal individual responsibility.
My aim in this chapter is to explore the ways that such individual responsibilities around
health and food are helped and hindered by digital technologies and information culture. I then
seek to think through the various ways that these technologies and this culture are gendered,
particularly thinking about the ways that this individual responsibility leads to heavy burdens
that uniquely influence contemporary performances of femininity. I will make these arguments
by beginning with a brief discussion of the quantification of self movement and the
conceptualisation of health it promotes, followed by a comparative analysis of the depiction of
technology and individual responsibility to achieve health goals on vegan food blogs.
Privileged Individualism and the Quantification of Self Movement

I got up at 6:20 this morning, after going to bed at 12:40 am. I woke up twice
during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute, and my blood
pressure, averaged over three measurements, was 127/ 74. My mood was a 4
on a scale of 5. My exercise time in the last 24 hours was 0 minutes, and my
maximum heart rate during exercise was not calculated. I consumed 400
milligrams of caffeine and 0 ounces of alcohol – Gary Wolf (2009).

Healthism and its twin desires – to publicly signal the individual’s moral virtue, and to
quell the fears of disease through knowledge – are encompassed in the increasingly popular
quantification of self movement, which marries healthism with digital gadgets to describe a
seemingly organic tendency towards “finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from
ordinary human activities” (Wolf, 2009). The quantification of self movement is attributed to
Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who coined the term in 2007 with the tagline ‘self-
knowledge through numbers.’ In 2008, Wolf and Kelly established a website for the movement
which contains details about informal meet-ups across the world for interested participants,
articles about self-quantification, and reviews of new quantification technologies and gadgets.

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This quantification of self appears to be driven by “discussions of how best to optimize one’s
life” (Lupton, 2013, p. 25) and involves “gathering data about oneself on a regular basis and then
recording and analyzing the data to produce statistics and other data (such as images) relating to
one’s bodily functions and everyday habits” (Lupton, 2013, p. 25).
My interest in the quantification of self movement arises from its insights into what it
means to be a subject or object of knowledge in this digital age of “information without
comprehension” (Andrejevic, 2013, p. 66). Although Wolf and Kelly acknowledge the history of
recording health metrics, the quantification of self movement is distinguished through its
association with wearables and a masculinist, technology-centric focus on how digital objects –
and their particular qualities of portability, miniaturisation, and individual customisation – can
lead to the biomedical optimisation of the body. This interest is fuelled by the proliferation of
tools and apps that allow the individual to track an extraordinary number of biometric patterns
over time and to value this activity as productive. As Lupton notes, “[d]igital technologies such
as smartphones with accelerometers, global positioning systems, microphones, cameras,
gyroscopes and compasses and wireless devices embedded with sensors that are small enough to
wear upon or even insert within the body” (2014, p. 3) and the fetishisation of these wearables
has propelled the recent popularity of the quantification of self movement. For example, the
company producing FitBit is currently worth $6 billion, and Google Glass has become one of the
most discussed digital technology wearables in the past few years: According to a survey on
“Wearables in the UK and US” conducted in October 2013, the most “astonishing finding [was]
the high awareness of Google Glass – a device that [had] not even been launched commercially”
(CCS Insight, 2013).

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The quantification of self movement thrives on discourses of empowerment and self-
responsibility. The stories that circulate at quantified self conferences are tales of makeovers and
health improvements told with evangelical zeal. The Economist recounts such stories from the
2011 Quantified Self Europe conference:

Sara Riggare, an engineer from Sweden, described how she used an iPhone app to
determine the best drug combination to control her Parkinson’s Disease, and a Nintendo
Wii game to monitor and improve her balance. Christian Kleineidam, a student from
Berlin who suffers from a spinal condition, explained how he used a device to measure
his breathing and identify which relaxation exercises were most effective. This helped
him improve his lung function by 30% (The Economist, 2012).

Neoliberal individualism tends to reinforce self-quantification as a responsibility rather
than a privilege, asking individuals to imagine health as a continual project of refinement. The
proliferation of tracking technologies only intensifies this focus, exemplifying the privilege skew
inherent to the quantification of self movement. In place of the widely used but less glamorous
tracking technologies of peak flow meters, blood pressure cuff and blood glucose reader – which
critically monitor asthma, blood pressure and diabetes – the quantification of self movement
centres around digital gadgets and gamification to seek out health solutions. These technologies
posit the individual subject as omniscient against the medical establishment, drawing on the
digital narrative of self-empowerment through entrepreneurialism. That is, “[t]he quantified self
approach may therefore be viewed as one of many heterogeneous strategies and discourses that
position the neoliberal self as a responsible citizen, willing and able to take care of her or his
self-interest and welfare” (Lupton, 2013, p. 28).

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Anecdotally, the intense self-scrutiny of digital quantification is presented as a necessary
intervention against the inadequacies of Western medicine. Wolf tells the story of computer
scientist Bo Adler, whose commitment to self-quantification stems from his dissatisfaction at the
traditional medical response to treating his sleep apnea. Quoting Adler, Wolf writes:

‘First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my
jaw and reset it to position my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my
mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ‘Let’s try the
standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is
different.’ Adler recognized what this proposal meant: it meant that his doctors had no
cure for different. They wanted to see him as a standard case, because they have
treatments for the standard cases. Before Adler underwent surgery, he wanted some
evidence that he was a standard case. Some of us aren’t standard, after all; perhaps many
of us aren’t (Wolf, 2010).

While Wolf intends Adler’s story to stand in as an inspirational tale of self-
empowerment, in a country and era in which health care is far from guaranteed for the majority
of the population, the story also evidences the shameful gap between those who can afford
customized health care solutions for non-serious health conditions and those who are denied
access to basic medical care. Adler, who has the time, money and self-importance to wear “a
blood-pressure cuff, pulse oximeter and accelerometer all day long, along with a computer on a
harness to collect the data” (Wolf, 2010) reveals the self-indulgence inherent to self-
quantification. The results that Adler collects are driven by “the idea that we can – and should –
defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge” (Wolf, 2010). However,

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what are the implications of applying this logic of individual customisation to medical
knowledge?
According to The Economist, the quantification of self community includes “an eclectic
mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies,
hackers and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems” (2012). More specifically,
the demographic information concerning quantified self movement participants reveals that “of
wearable device users, 75% described themselves as ‘early adopters of technology,’ 48% were
younger than 35 years, and 29% reportedly earn more than $100,000” (Patel, Asch & Volpp,
2015). The same article that reports these demographics notes that the “individuals who might
have the most to gain from these devices are likely to be older and less affluent. To better engage
these individuals, wearable devices must be more affordable, or new funding mechanisms are
needed” (Patel, Asch & Volpp, 2015).
The implications for medical knowledge and scientific process are even more far-
reaching. While the individual’s self-awareness is useful in the process of medical diagnosis and
treatment, medical knowledge has historically been built upon the collection of far-reaching and
longitudinally recorded population data. In contrast, the self-quantification movement reduces
the sample to one and adding a highly invested PI, and basing the meaning of data changes on
the quirks of the individual, customising knowledge to the benefit of the individual but less
explicit interest in the broader utility of this information. Ultimately, this emphasis on health as
individual responsibility appears to be a fast track to the bifurcation of health care, where those
who can afford premium health care demand increasingly specialised and labour-intensive
resources, while those who are unable to commit to the elaborate regimes and gadgetry of self-
monitoring receive sub-standard care.

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The quantification of self movement ultimately makes light of this association with
narcissism but without necessarily addressing the privilege inherent to the movement. Wolf
jokes: “There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a
few minutes to fill out...But of course…when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic,
they’re not wondering about clinical narcissism. They’re wondering about selfishness” (2009).
Furthermore, Wolf defends the value of the movement with the same trickle-down logic
employed throughout neoliberal discourse. Wolf claims that self-quantifiers provide important
information that is privately collected but published to a public community, with “a strong
tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it” (2009). As
The Economist optimistically claims, the sharing of self-quantified results across large
communities has already “yielded valuable results, such as the finding that patients who suffered
from vertigo during migraines were four times more likely to have painful side effects when
using a particular migraine drug” (2012). Lupton affirms that the movement is driven by an
impulse to share and compare personal data. She writes, the “drive towards ‘sharing your
numbers’ fits into the wider discourse of content creation and sharing that underpins many
activities on Web 2.0 social media” (2013, p. 28).
While the scientific method is by no means perfect, it is imperative to ask what is at stake
in its declared obsolescence in favour of the individuation of health tracking and knowledge. To
begin with, the predominant health concerns that afflict privileged and less-privileged
socioeconomic and racial communities are diametrically opposed, from which we can
extrapolate that the quantification of self movement would not contribute to an equal increase in
medical knowledge in the same way that the alternative food movement has not led to an
increase in quality food for the majority of the population. While obesity and diabetes are

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currently representative of working class disease, the quantification of self movement is
generally focused around non-fatal health concerns such as sleep apnea. The problematic
outcomes for allowing this movement to increase the savvy of the privileged individual to
displace medical expertise – and the unequally distributed effects that this movement is likely to
have – thus become predictable, with customized and attentive solutions for those with resources
and a further decline in care and access for those excluded by means and capital from the
regimes of digital self-quantification.

The Technological Limits of Comprehension
It is true that the social network constructed around quantification data distinguishes it
from the historic forms of quantification humans have long performed, and lends new meaning
to the data that is produced. However, it is still not entirely clear that this mechanism leads to an
improvement in medical knowledge. This is summarised by Wolf’s provocative claim that, in the
age of big data, “the scientific method itself is growing obsolete…We already have the
measurements and the data. The struggle is to figure out what do we want to ask of all that data?”
(as cited in Standen, 2015). The examples presented represent this struggle, and generally fail to
illustrate a straightforward correlation with improved medical knowledge. For instance, Lupton
discusses sex apps that allow users to situate their results within those of the anonymous data
community, with predictably dismaying results. The ‘Sex Stamina Tester’ app tracks the length
of sexual encounters and “encourages users to employ their data to compare with others using
the device (‘Try to rank top 10 and show off your ability worldwide!’)” (2014, p. 5). The ‘Sex
Partner Tracker’ allows users to document their sexual partners, geographical location and
frequency of sexual activity and then collates this data to “allow users to determine how
‘promiscuous’ they are within their region and ‘who is the lover with the highest score within

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your region/world’” (Lupton, 2014, p. 5). Similarly, while Wolf offers the examples that “People
monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie
counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against
those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use
online tools to match their chart with others” (Wolf, 2009) the utility of quantifiers
comparatively tracking women’s collective menstrual cycles is not immediately apparent.
Despite the projected stance of individual empowerment, it is fitting to think here about
how self-quantification exemplifies what Mark Andrejevic more critically describes as the
infoglut of big data. Similarly to Wolf, Andrejevic describes the digital age as heralding an
exponentially increasing ability to record and store data, yielding the question of “what it might
mean to know something without comprehending it” (2013, p. 26). This knowledge without
comprehension is evidenced through the more banal possibilities of self-quantification imagined
by The Economist: “A sensor can be attached to a toothbrush, for example, or a watering can, or
the collar of a dog, making it possible to measure and track how often you brush your teeth,
water your plants or walk your dog” (2012). The prizing of raw data collection that is in and of
itself meaningless to the individual is also evidenced by the work and popularity of information
designer Nicholas Felton, who for ten years has meticulously tracked personal data – including
the number of SMS messages and emails sent, his top correspondents, and the places travelled to
– and rendered this information into beautiful visualizations published publicly as the Feltron
Annual Report (Felton, 2014).
While I argue that the information collated and published by Feltron is meaningless, both
to readers and arguably to Feltron himself, Feltron’s work is far from valueless. Feltron himself
receives regular and lucrative invitations to speak at conferences and symposia around the world,

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all of which are logged on his website. Yet while Feltron’s example perpetuates the myth of
entrepreneurial self-actualisation through data collection, Andrejevic touches on the more
sinister aspects of this infoglut, namely, that much of this data collection takes place through the
digital enclosure, “the interactive embrace of networked devices that record everything that takes
place upon them” (2013, p. 42) including cell phones that track one’s location, loyalty cards that
store an inventory of one’s purchases, and social networking sites which capture the intimate
images, posts and communications engaged in. Andrejevic’s overarching concern is to examine
the new hierarchies of power which are being built around big data and, specifically, “the
increasing asymmetry between those who are able to capture, store, access, and process the
tremendous amounts of data produced by the proliferation of digital, interactive sensors of all
kinds” (2013, p. 17).
Returning to Wolf’s open acknowledgment, “For many self-trackers, the goal is
unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue
because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including
answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask” (Wolf, 2010). While the individual is
struggling to make sense and meaning of their personal data, the corporations facilitating the
collection of this information have no such doubts. There is evidence that a driving interest in
self-quantification is directed not towards improving health for broad swathes of the population,
but rather towards assisting employers and insurance companies in developing more
sophisticated discriminatory surveillance regimes. As Lupton points out, “What is often glossed
over or ignored in this discourse of patient responsibility for self-surveillance are the inherent
inequalities that are reproduced in the use of medical information and monitoring technologies”
(2012, p. 240). The data produced voluntarily and involuntarily through self-quantification can

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quickly spiral – in conjunction with current social narratives of prejudice and discrimination –
into evidence that reinforces “racial and other profiling that may lead to discrimination, over-
criminalisation and other restricted freedoms…The potential for individuals who do not conform
to hetero-normative norms of sexuality to be exposed, or for individuals to suffer embarrassment
or discrimination due to their personal and intimate data being revealed is apparent” (Lupton,
2014, p. 9).
Moreover, this myopic focus on the neoliberal individual serves to efface the
asymmetries of information and power that are inherent to self-quantification technologies.
Lupton argues that self-quantification devotees are often unaware of the corporations that serve
as silent partners observing and profiting of the individual’s personal biometric data. That is, the
“rhetoric of presumption and participatory surveillance tends to obscure the uses to which the
data generated by users’ employment of digital technologies are put by their developers and third
parties” (Lupton, 2014, p. 8). Andrejevic adds: “It’s as if the casual conversations of daily life
that once disappeared into the ether have now been captured and fixed on searchable, sortable,
aggregate-able recording tape…once they are captured by the digital enclosure their temporal
and spatial reach expands far beyond what we likely imagine” (2013, p. 42). Similarly, Hayles
reflects on whether widespread collection and filtering of data by NSA computers “is covered
under the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unlawful search and seizure” (2006, p. 161) and
ultimately she concludes that “[h]uman and machine cognitions have now become so intertwined
that distinguishing between the two in the context of surveillance makes no sense” (2006, p.
162).
Often, these asymmetries of information and power only come to light in public,
widespread breaches including “in 2011 when FitBit accidentally posted data on the internet

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about users’ sexual activities they had recorded as part of their exercise activities” (Lupton,
2014, p. 8) or in 2014 when it was revealed that Facebook had manipulated newsfeeds as part of
a psychology experiment. Yet these transgressions are typically shrugged off as anomalies or
unfortunate but minority experiences that the user submits to in their usage of the technology.

Feminised Quantification of Self

129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days
as 4 hours of party was on New Year's Day), cigarettes 22, calories 5424 –
Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding, 1996, p. 1).

I use the above quote from Helen Fielding’s prototypical postfeminist character Bridget
Jones to underline the long and gendered history of self-quantification, and example of the ‘old’
technologies that have long been used to discipline and regulate docile, female flesh. While my
concern about the divergent impact of self-quantification on medical knowledge outlined above
lies largely along class lines, it is also important to make clear how gender difference is
demarcated in this practice through the history of how women have been surveyed through
technology, the use of technologies to control the female subject, and the gender biases that are
written into the design and usage of surveillance technologies.
Self-quantification, as historically undertaken by women, has been riddled with secrecy
and shame and adherence to mass ideological standards. The discovery of Bridget Jones’s diary
by her love interest is a point of tension and embarrassment. Women’s obsessive tracking of
calories and weight were internalised as measures of their social worth. Alternatively, in the
trendy masculinist world of quantification, biometrics are proudly and publicly graphed, and
FitBits are conspicuously adorned, driven by the mission to turn each bodily impulse into
something productive through its rendering into digital data. Moreover, unlike the unreliable

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subjectivity indicated by the personal diary through which Jones meticulously records the
metrics that mark her life progress as a postfeminist subject, digital technologies are regarded as
objective and omniscient.
The assumption that self-quantification offers tools for the empowerment of individuals
wrongly imagines – like the medical discourse that precedes it – that this subject/user/audience is
a heteronormative white male. These biases inflect the utility of this movement and its
technologies. As Rose Everleth writes, the sophisticated Health app by Apple “allows user to
track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to
respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium” (2014) yet somehow managed in its first iteration to
overlook the ability to track menstruation, “likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self
tracking” (Everleth, 2014). In the same article it is noted that technologies have long overlooked
the physical differences between men and women, with phones being designed larger than the
average woman’s hand and general medical, health and technological standards assuming a
Caucasian, male subject. Indeed, if the rhetoric of the contemporary quantification of self
movement seeks to rebel against the medical establishment, then it is a masculine rebellion
which continues to ignore the longstanding fact that when the “focus is on women’s bodies there
is more emphasis on medicalisation and risk” (Lupton, 2014, p. 8).
As the knowledge of self through quantification is intimately shaped by technological
design, there is an overreliance on data that is most readily available through accessible
technologies including pedometers, calorie counters, heart rate monitors and sleep quality
trackers. The push to make sense of the data that is most easily available can be reductive, as
Sara Watson notes that “many of these strange measurements come from what the phone is
capable of measuring: movement and sound” (as cited in Everleth, 2014). The myopic

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correlations between available data and human phenomena has the tendency to reproduce
existing gendered, racial and humanist stereotypes, as evidenced by Lupton’s (2014) work on
quantification tools designed to track the quality of sex, but are measured by heteronormative
and sexist data such as the number of thrusts, sound levels, and duration. These reductive
interpretations are a broadly unfortunate outcome of the creation of data doubles, as digital
technologies subjugate all bodies to a set of numbers, and a meaningless stream of data which
often speaks more to the recording capacities of instrument design than it does to the object of
study.
These gendered considerations are explicitly brought to light in the vegan food
blogosphere, as participants in this community deploy information exchange to address the
culture of fear and anxiety that surrounds current understandings of consumption and health. I
explore these themes through the example of the VVP, which I regard as a feminised online
community that addresses gendered burdens of knowledge in regard to healthism.

The Virtual Vegan Potluck
The Virtual Vegan Potluck (VVP) is an event described as a “plant-based, online party
for vegans and vegan-friendly food bloggers” (Virtual Vegan Potluck, 2013) which were held
biannually between 2012-2014. They entail food bloggers preparing a special vegan dish that is
published on their personal food blogs on an agreed upon time and date for the potluck. Each
participating blogger’s post is collated into a menu through hyperlinks to create the effect of a
vegan virtual feast and community. The VVP was a popular event within the food blogosphere,
with the VVPs held in May and November 2013 featuring 139 and 145 bloggers respectively. I
use the November 2013 dataset as my primary sample in the following analysis.

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Women comprise the majority of vegan food bloggers. Although one of the co-founders
is male, 125 bloggers participating in the May 2013 VVP were identified as female while only
six bloggers were identifiably male.
11
The female-skew of food blogs appears to go hand-in-hand
with the longstanding association of food preparation with feminine identity, particularly within
the context of the family unit. Sherrie Inness (2001) and Marjorie de Vault (1991) suggest that
American women continue to perform the majority of food labour. Susan Bordo predicates her
important concept of hunger as gendered ideology on the “notion that women are most gratified
by feeding and nourishing others, not themselves” (1993, p. 118) and the ways that the “[d]enial
of self and the feeding of others are hopelessly enmeshed in [the modern] construction of the
ideal mother, as they are in the nineteenth-century version of the ideal wife” (1993, p. 118).
Diane Tye adds that “the cooked dinner symbolizes the home, a husband’s relation to it, his
wife’s place in it, and their relationship to one another – and that, since women do the cooking,
they do it as a service to their husbands, deferring to his tastes and fitting in with his
timetable…Although all members of the family influence food choices, typically the husband’s
influence takes precedence” (2010, p. 80). Food work is therefore associated with virtuous
femininity and the gendered structure of the family institution.
This relationship between ideal womanhood and food preparation is noticeable in the
blogosphere. I have previously argued that the role of mother or wife is frequently deployed as a
primary identity characteristic on blogs, as a title that bestows authenticity and authority upon
their work. The correct execution of this feminine ideal and the quality of the recipes posted are
mutually reinforced as bloggers incorporate the feedback of their partners and children into their
narratives and demonstrate an awareness of their families’ tastes and nutritional needs. For

11
The remaining participants had defunct blog sites, were authored by more than one individual, or gender could not
reliably be inferred.

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instance, Rosalie at The Joyful Pantry boasts of her cookies: “I baked these on Thursday with a
crowd of preschoolers, and they were all gobbled up (the cookies, that is). My daughter has been
asking for them ever since” (Rosalie, n.d.-b) and blogger Holly at My Plant Based Family offers
the following tip on her ‘Butternut Squash and Quinoa Salad’ recipe: “My husband prefers this
salad without the onion, feel free to leave it out” (Holly, 2013).
I argue that the labour of constructing and performing this ideal femininity through
foodwork is increasingly difficult as neoliberal individual responsibility compels individual
households to make consumption decisions within a fraught and fear-based foodscape. Much of
this fear-based sentiment around food has been heightened through the recent popularity of food
media and documentaries seeking to expose the inadequacies of the industrialised Western food
system. The circulation and consumption of this media has unequal gendered impacts due to the
historical responsibility of women for nutritionally-based health outcomes for the family.
12
This
is evident in the structure of Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004) and Katie Couric’s
narration of the documentary Fed Up (2014). Supersize Me presents Spurlock as an intrepid
researcher who uses his white, male body as evidence of the harmful effects of fast food as he
undertakes to eat only McDonalds food for thirty straight days. The audience witnesses the
visual transformation of his body, a change that is reinforced by biometric data that is used to
underline the insidious effects of Spurlock’s exaggerated fast food diet. Much like the
quantification of self movement, Spurlock uses his body to evangelise ideal food practices and as
universal, scientifically-backed and seemingly irrefutable evidence of the dangers of fast-food
consumption. His heroism is conveyed not only in the ways that doctors apparently affirm his
body to be a perfect specimen of health a the beginning of the documentary, but also in the ways
he is viewed as courageously risking his life to complete his self-imposed, self-designed

12
Class is also an important factor in these decisions

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experiment. The natural disjunct between his body and the cheap, unhealthy McDonalds is
visually conveyed as Spurlock grotesquely vomits up his supersized meal halfway through eating
it in a parking lot.
While Spurlock is depicted as an agent of excessive consumption throughout the film,
women flank him seeking and begging him to relinquish his bad eating habits and to let them
feed him instead. At the beginning of the documentary, Spurlock proudly explains that even
though he hails from West Virginia – the U.S. State with the highest levels of obesity – his mum
cooked dinner for the family every night, they never ate out. His mother’s domestic labour is
therefore conveyed as a moral choice that produces Spurlock’s outstanding health at the
beginning of the documentary. Additionally, throughout the documentary Spurlock’s girlfriend –
a vegan chef – hovers nervously around him, proudly preparing a vegan feast before his
experiment, and then planning his detoxification diet and fretting about the negative health
impacts of his experiment. Moreover, a female nutritionist is employed to solemnly calculate the
woeful nutritional data of his fast food experiment and offer futile suggestions on how to
marginally decrease the adverse dietary impact of eating solely McDonalds. Thus, while
Spurlock’s aim is primarily to document clear evidence about the health dangers of fast food, the
documentary equally reinforces the moral responsibility for women to be the cure for the
nation’s fast-food scourge by lovingly, eagerly and knowledgeably engaging in home food
production.
Similarly, Couric’s Fed Up is a documentary that explores the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the
United States and spurred on by statistics that, according to current trends, by 2050 one in three
Americans will have diabetes and that for the first time the current generation is expected to have
a shorter life expectancy than their parents. While this documentary focuses primarily on the

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government and the excessive addition of sugar to processed foods, it also depicts the tragedy of
mothers who have seemingly failed their children by believing – rather than investigating – the
marketing claims of food corporations. The mother of obese teenager Maggie Valentine who is
featured in the film erroneously believes that due to its low fat content, “cereal is a good go-to
for pretty much any meal replacement” and the mother of obese teenager Wesley Randall
discusses her attempts to make healthier consumption choices for Wesley, saying: “He loves Hot
pockets. So they have Lean Hot Pockets. So I make sure to have the lean ones versus the regular
ones.” All of these quotes are judiciously included to support the premise of the film – that sugar
is the less widely understood cause of the obesity epidemic, and that the tragedy of childhood
obesity is inadvertently due to the erroneous understanding of nutrition by the mothers of obese
children.
These documentaries make clear that in a neoliberal context, where families are required
to shoulder the responsibility for making healthy consumption decisions, women are burdened
with a disproportionate share of the anxiety of making ‘good’ consumption decisions in a
purposefully deceptive market. They are also saddled with the shame when such consumption
decisions are judged to be poor ones. In contrast to self-quantification, which is self-directed and
indulgent but regarded as a sign of virtuous individual responsibility, women’s food planning for
the household is oriented towards the other in a time-poor, chaotic context. More broadly, within
the neoliberal reversion to the household as a seeming “administrative entity in its own right”
(Negra, 2009, p. 134), the social welfare that was previously assured by the State or outsourced
to corporations has become additional emotional and physical labour undertaken by women
within the private household. In response, I am interested in the ways that the VVP is structured

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to foster a technology-based community that explicitly addresses the needs and concerns of
female subjects and the demands of neoliberal individualism on health and food consumption.

Gendered Burdens of Information in the Digital Age
The digital context does not immediately alleviate this situation of the gendered burdens
of research. Digital space supplies an overwhelming amount of unfiltered content that
contributes to the chaotic, polarised and rapidly changing discourses around food and health. The
filtering and searchability of this content is a temporal cost borne primarily by machines but also
requiring significant input by human users. One result is that food anxieties can quickly spiral
out of control through their easy dissemination and perpetuation in online spaces.
This is evidenced on a recipe for oat milk posted on Angela Liddon’s popular
vegan/health-food blog Oh She Glows. Milk alternatives are a key component of the vegan diet,
arising from the perceived health problems and ethical violations arising from the production and
consumption of cow’s milk. However, the increasing popularity and commercialisation of
alternative milks nevertheless allows a host of new concerns to fester, as indicated by the
comments section of Liddon’s post titled ‘Homemade Oat Milk – Fast, Easy, Cheap’ (2013).
This simple recipe sparks hundreds of comments, a selection of which are included below:

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Figure 11a. Comments from post for ‘Homemade oat milk – easy, fast, cheap.’ [Screenshot].

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Figure 11b. Comments from post for ‘Homemade oat milk – easy, fast, cheap.’ [Screenshot].

This brief excerpt reveals a minefield of health concerns that spans health issues
including vitamin content and depletion, fillers and additives, poisons as well as production
concerns including agribusiness and industrial processes such as the use of GMO ingredients,
and gives a sense of the complex research practices that are required to keep abreast of the latest
food fads and developments. That is, not only is there a fear of harmful consumption but also a
fear of being inadequately knowledgeable about circulating health trends. This results in the
gendered burdens outlined above, namely a “troubling hyperindividualism” (Matchar, 2013, p.
248) of middle-class food production as a necessary and morally virtuous undertaking, and an

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adherence to caveat emptor that dramatically lowers expectations that the State and corporations
should or would protect the public from consuming harmful products.
Moreover, food blogs make visible the anxiety and burdens of food planning and
preparation. For instance, Rosalie at The Joyful Pantry includes a ‘Food Philosophy’ page that
details the concerns and difficulties that define her desire to meet these standards of femininity in
an increasingly hyperanxious foodie culture. She writes:

Quite frankly, the statistics associated with eating a Western diet scare me, particularly
after I had children. (For example, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention now
estimates that one in three children born today will develop Type II Diabetes). As a
result, I have tried to adopt a diet that I hope will nurture my family’s bodies as well as
please their taste buds. I’ve cut out as many of the foods associated with increased rates
of chronic disease and cancer as I can, particularly processed foods, sugar, unhealthy fats,
and animal products (n.d.-a)

Vegan food bloggers also make visible the ongoing process of transformation that is
entailed by the rapidly changing foodscape. Richa Hingle documents this process on her blog
Vegan Richa as she writes:

I try to use whole, organic and less [sic] processed as possible ingredients. I do use some
new products and substitutes to find out how they taste and work, but eventually phase
them out with home made or unprocessed options. Our food philosophy keeps changing
based on things that make sense to me and you can notice that in the posts and recipes
over the years (Hingle, 2012).

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Similarly, McCowan at Vedged Out describes the evolutionary process of her dietary
preferences: “I didn’t start this journey as an animal advocate, but I’ve since realized its
impossible to switch from the standard American diet to a wholly plant based one and not feel
remorse for living a life that harmed so many animals” (McCowan, n.d.). Finally, Rosalie
continues to outline the difficulties and contradictions that are enmeshed at the intersection of
food as social ritual, commodity, and object of fear and pleasure:

because I’m trying to strike a balance, I never know for sure if I’ve achieved it. I also
know that I have a lot to learn, and as the science and my knowledge of it evolves, so do
some of my habits…I don’t pretend to have final answers on what the best alternative
sweeteners are or which oils have the highest health benefits. If you came to my pantry,
you would also see some deeply-rooted hypocrisies, like my love, and liberal usage, of
ketchup, particularly on kids’ food, despite the fact that’s it’s mostly high fructose corn
syrup. Oh well, you pick your battles, right? If it [sic] my four year old loves tofu and
broccoli with ketchup, I’m not going to fight it (Rosalie, n.d.-a).

These statements of dietary philosophies recall Guthman’s description of the project of
healthism, where “[s]ince health can never be achieved once and for all, it requires constant
vigilance in monitoring and constant effort in enhancing” (2011, p. 52). It is undoubtedly this
constant vigilance that contributes to food anxieties and mounting food preparation pressures for
women, requiring a frenetic attention to producing nutritious, diverse foods from a wide range of
local, seasonal ingredients augmented by the latest superfoods and nutritional supplements.
However, I also see food blogs as offering two important resources for alleviating these
gendered burdens. The first is through managing these anxieties by offering empowering and

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supportive narratives about healthism and consumption. The second is through creating a
supportive digital community built upon knowledge exchange and discussion.

Healthism and Opinion Leaders
An overarching theme of vegan food blogs is the reliance on rhetorics of health to justify
the interest in and adherence to a vegan diet. I searched participating blogs in the sample for the
bloggers’ explanations of veganism and the factors leading to their adoption and support of this
diet. I categorised this information as falling under the broad umbrellas of health, ethics/animal
welfare, environmental and financial reasons. There were often several justifications for an
individual’s veganism, and so I nominated the top reasons of each site based on which was given
more prominence and was listed first in the description.
Health was by far the most common motivation, cited by 52 bloggers as the primary
concern or justification. A common narrative involved the blogger adopting a vegan diet in the
face of serious or chronic illness. For example, Heather Poire who founded the blog Sunday
Morning Banana Pancakes writes:

In 2008 I became very ill - Doctors were not 100% certain what was wrong. I was
‘diagnosed’ with acid reflux, heart burn and a myriad of minor illnesses. I was given
several different medications which I reluctantly took, but even with all the medications
and Doctors visits I wasn't getting any better - my weight had dropped and my symptoms
of nausea, stomach pain and burning were not subsiding (Poire, n.d.)

In response to these health issues, Poire goes vegan and experiences a health makeover:
“After becoming vegan my health improved 10 fold, I went off of all my medications and have
been in complete remission for over a year - I truly believe I have my plant based way of life to

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thank” (Poire, n.d.). Images of the blogger’s body are presented as evidence of the vegan
panacea, with before-and-after images juxtaposed as visual evidence of the radical
transformations facilitated through veganism. Somer McCowan, who authors Vedged Out, posts
an image of herself weighing 200 pounds and rendered obese due to medical complications next
to an image of her running in a competitive race with her new, slimmer post-vegan body
(McCowan, n.d.). Even when bloggers lack explicit health concerns, veganism is credited with
triggering positive physical changes, as Rebecca Weller at Vegan Sparkles writes: “I’ve lost
weight without even trying, feel fantastic physically, feel happier spiritually, am teaching myself
how to cook, have discovered a ton of new and exciting foods, and seem to have cured my own
chronic eczema!” (Weller, n.d.).
Blogger Anne Sture Tucker makes clear that her engagement with veganism extends only
to the point at which it benefits her health. Sture Tucker writes that although she follows a plant-
heavy diet:

This does not mean that I am a vegan, a raw foodist, or a vegetarian – I changed my diet
from being 80% based on meat, dairy etc./20% fruit and vegetable – to being 80% plant-
based/20% meat, dairy etc. I had the balance wrong and my body was suffering because
of it. I eat everything, but I make sure to satisfy my nutritional needs with delicious plant-
based foods first (Sture Tucker, n.d.)

Given the rich and political history of veganism as a dietary ideal, this overarching
concern with health appears to troublingly follow the neoliberal path of emphasising individual
responsibility over social and ethical concerns. One surprising finding from the VVP blog
sample was that so few vegan bloggers linked their dietary choices to a social consciousness. In

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comparison to the 52 bloggers who talked about the health benefits of veganism, and the 29
vegan bloggers who did not disclose any reasons for their practice at all, only 21 bloggers listed
animal or ethical concerns as their primary reason for becoming vegan. Moreover, many
bloggers took care not to alienate their readers or be associated with extreme political stances,
couching their personal choice to practice veganism within an explicit commitment to remaining
non-judgmental about others’ lifestyle choices. Savvy Sister writes “this is not a blog to tell you
what to do. Rather it gives you easy options to choose. Whether you choose them or not is totally
up to you” (The Savvy Sister, n.d.). Honk If You’re Vegan writes “You will not find Judgment! I
certainly will never judge you for the way you choose to eat. I welcome everyone!” (Celeste,
n.d.) and The Food Duo write “We're not trying to preach or convert to folks. We just want
everyone to see that you can have fun with food, be creative and not be limited by living a plant-
based, all-species-friendly lifestyle” (Carlo & Carmella, n.d.).
However, I would argue that this is not to say that vegan blogs are apolitical. Instead,
veganism is increasingly being used to express the disempowerment experienced by individuals
at the hands of harmful medical opinions, pharmaceutical remedies and the predominant North
American foodscape. The phrases spiritual and enlightening are often used to describe the
transformative effect of veganism as a contemporary health solution. Food bloggers express
themselves by drawing on the established postfeminist rhetoric of contemporary women’s
magazines – is fun, easy, empowering and self-actualising. For example, the slogan to the blog
An Ode to Mung Beans is “Mung beans are amazing, but I am here to show you that there is
more to vegan cooking than tasty little legumes!” (Sammy, n.d.) and blogger Sammy continues
“I created this blog to show, first of all, that vegan cuisine is easy and delicious! I also wanted to
show to everyone what it is exactly that I do eat” (n.d.).

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These expression of postfeminist empowerment posit the food blogger as a trustworthy
opinion leader, whose pedagogies are instructional and whose positivity is inspirational. As I
discussed in Chapter Three, these qualities make the food blogosphere a lucrative marketing
space. Because of their cultivation of intimacy and authenticity, bloggers are regarded as ‘trusted
peers’ (Matchar, 2013, p. 91) and evidence of “[i]ntense personal bonding with readers is a
hallmark of domestic blogs. Even bloggers with readerships in the millions interact with readers
in a way unimaginable to, say novelists or traditional journalists” (Matchar, 2013, p. 54). The
most cynical interpretation of a blogger’s work is that this performance is simply a ruse oriented
towards corporations and signalling the blogger’s influence and desirability as a corporate
mouthpiece. Corporations in dire need of public relations makeovers in this age of distrust are
responding eagerly to this signalling. Matchar describes how “McDonald’s partnership with
mom bloggers has been a major part of its recent, highly successful campaign to rebrand its food
as healthier and more natural…Nobody trusts McDonald’s claims that its own food is both
delicious and healthy. But when a trusted mom blogger says so…” (p. 61).
While such corporate endorsements and affiliate content seem to illustrate that the
opinions presented by food bloggers are not free of bias, I would argue that the impact of these
corporate influences is tempered in two ways. Firstly, food bloggers are required to consider the
long-term effects of endorsements on their online brand and their personal reputation as the basis
for their digital work. Secondly, as indicated in Liddon’s posts above, the blog post format
provides a space for diverse opinions to be discussed by a variety of users who may offer
alternative opinions. While the comment space is typically moderated – which could potentially
hinder the variety of opinions expressed – it does help situate the work of food bloggers.
Notwithstanding the ethical issues that arise as a result of corporations hitching their marketing

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campaigns onto the backs and voices of women’s digital labour, I do not see this intertwining of
the economic and the personal, the entrepreneurial and the political, to be inherently problematic.
I see these overlaps as an inevitable product of individual expression within the neoliberal
environment, which is being made visible in new ways by digital technologies.
The role of food bloggers as opinion leaders, even ones who are partially sponsored by
corporations, remains useful for readers who are similarly navigating the foodscape through
changing information and trends about health and food in conjunction with their loyalties and
relationships to corporate brands. In particular, the female food blogger as opinion leader is
valued for her assistance in providing food pedagogy gifts in the form of recipes, food processes
and consumer guidance, with knowledge that is grounded within the intimate and authentic
persona crafted over time by the blogger. Her positivity and sense of empowerment is
inspirational in a context where consumer practices are highly affective, constantly changing and
often overwhelming.
The Digital Structure of the VVP Community
The affiliated sponsorships often nurtured by food bloggers do not corrupt the personal or
political value of their work, but are evidence of the complex provenance and circulation of
knowledge in the digital age. In this context, one of the most powerful political reactions to
asymmetries of knowledge and access to information takes place through the creation of online
communities that foster knowledge exchange. Thus, I argue that the productive qualities and
value of food blogs are enhanced through the digital network structure in which food blogs are
embedded.
Finally, I wish to explore the attention to community that is evidenced on the VVP,
which I regard as offering the greatest political potential for participants in the blogosphere. The

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VVP is overwhelmingly characterised by a spirit of inclusivity, with the organisers consciously
using the label vegan-friendly community rather than limiting participation solely to strictly
vegan food bloggers or practitioners. They affirm this decision with the statement: “We had lots
of non-vegan bloggers participate in the last Potluck and I think it’s safe to say it was an
enjoyable experience for all” (Annie, n.d.-a) My analysis suggested that 88 blogs published
solely vegan recipes; 26 were vegetarian but not vegan; 15 were non-vegetarian; and 13 were not
specifically marked as vegan or otherwise. Indeed, several contributing bloggers asserted in their
‘About Me’ sections that although they prepared vegetarian-friendly food they did not practise a
vegan lifestyle. The co-founders of the blog articulate this decision to prioritise community by
welcoming participation by all kinds of food bloggers with the following statement:

Food bloggers of all kinds are welcome to join the Potluck. What if you aren’t plant-
based (vegan)? No worries. It doesn’t matter to me what you eat the other 364 days of the
year (actually, it matters quite a lot to me what you eat, but I’ll save that for another
venue!), only this one day. Prepare, write about and photograph a vegan dish (remember,
that means NO animal products used in the recipe, not even cheese) to share with other
Potluck participants as well as all of your blog readers (Annie, n.d.-a)

I take these statements to suggest that that actual practice or understanding of veganism is
secondary to the motive of expanding and nurturing a sense of community amongst food
bloggers and readers. This tension between muting of the philosophies that define ethical
veganism in favour of fostering community-building is evidenced by the statements of VVP co-
founders. Annie from An Unrefined Vegan desires to expressly promote a vegan identity in her
‘About’ page: “Unlike many folks who have given up eating animal products, I am not afraid to

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use the words vegan or veganism. In fact, I get quite a lot of pleasure out of saying those words.
Maybe it’s my contrary nature. I know that some find those words off-putting or somehow
superior-sounding” (Annie, n.d.-a). On the other hand, co-founder Jason of Jason and the
Veganauts pursues a more accepting approach as a way of furthering the cause of veganism:
“With the belief that you catch more flies with agave nectar than you can with vinegar, Jason is
excited to invite anyone trying to live a vegan lifestyle to join him as a veganaut. The veganaut
label casts a wider, more accepting net, giving many ‘almost vegans’ a place to call home”
(Annie, n.d.-b). In this section I focus on the ways that online community building takes place
through the digital structure of the food blogosphere. While blogging is an inherently personal
practice – as evidenced by origin stories of vegan blogs which abound with personal
considerations such as the desire to document a personal health journey, or to “share wholesome
recipes primarily with family and nearby friends” (Amanda, 2008) – the networked features of
online space transform these personal narratives into a knowledge-exchange community.
Community is visible in the digital structure of the VVP. Many food bloggers use their
posts to explicitly write about their excitement and gratitude for the default community that
arises through their participation. As co-founder Jason from Jason and the Veganauts writes in
the opening to his potluck recipe: “Old friends and brand new visitors alike – welcome,
welcome, welcome to the ‘ole [sic] blog as we break bread together for the second Virtual Vegan
Potluck! I love it when food and people come together, especially if the people are focused on
socializing” (Gillett, 2012). This virtual breaking bread is visualised in the way the individual
contributions of food bloggers are collated and organised into a lavish dinner menu, arranged
into the categories of appetizers, beverages, bread, salad, sides, soups, main dishes and desserts.
While bloggers publish these contributions on their personal blogs – using their participation in

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the VVP to generate useful traffic to their websites – each blogger is required to add a VVP-
branded button to their post, which links their recipe to that which appears before and after them
in the menu order.

Figure 12. Example of buttons linking posts of VVP event.

While hyperlinks typically transport the reader to a parallel or tangential space, the link
structure organised by the VVP results in a journey that hypothetically guides the reader through
each contributor’s work. As individual bloggers graciously introduce the recipes featured before
and after theirs, the closed hyperlink circle that results has the tenor of virtual hand-holding by a
supportive community. For instance, Jason’s VVP post prefaces these buttons with the statement:
“With so many dishes to sample from the many participating bloggers, I’d like to offer you a
quick bite of the Earth shattering appetizer I’m sharing before kicking you out the back door and

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on to your next stop on the Munchie March” Gillett, 2012). In a similar vein, Megan at Vegan
Cook Book Aficianado explains: “the potluck is kind of like an online conga line. Don’t forget to
scroll to the bottom of the page to find links to the blog before mine and after mine. If you wanna
start at the beginning, just head on over to Vegan Bloggers Unit and work your way through 169
blogs!” (Muggins, 2013).
These generous acknowledgements of other participants leads to my interpretation that
the community fosters supportive bonds between participants.
13
Moreover, although the network
of participants is closed, access to the content therein is unlimited and the VVP is positioned for
public display. Consequently, the closed circle structure of the community can be read as a
connective mechanism that serves the dual purposes of underlining the solidarity of the
participants in their subcultural practice of veganism, and promoting the virtues of a vegan diet
to an outside audience.
The temporospatial organisation of the VVP also reinforces community. Spatially, the
event is voluntarily hosted by a blog or site that centralises the disparate food blogging
community. This show of unity is triumphantly expressed through the inclusion of the
geographical affiliations of participants, who are predominantly located in the United Stated,
Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

13
However, it is also important and interesting to note the alternative interpretation of the blog circle structure by
Tara McPherson (2000) who, writing in the context of neo-conservative Southern community Dixieland Ring that
the site “does labor to reconfigure the much-heralded rhizomatic nature of cyberspace by structuring its links in a
circle, creating a kind of closed mobility’ (p. 122).

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Figure 13. List of VVP participants (May) [Screenshot]

These temporospatial qualities reinforce the emphasis on community that is articulated in
the design of the VVP. They work to highlight the collective effort and immediacy that
structurally brings the disparate work of bloggers together in a show of coordination that is
unique within the blogosphere.
Within these contradictory and complex conditions of contemporary feminist and
consumption politics, I see most political potential in the ways that food blogs support quotidian
information exchanges and construct supportive female communities. The value of online
communities is established by Henry Jenkins who describes knowledge communities as
“form[ing] around mutual intellectual interests; their members work together to forge new
knowledge often in realms where no traditional expertise exists; the pursuit of and assessment of
knowledge is at once communal and adversarial…They can also give us insight into how
knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence” (2006, p. 20). These knowledge

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communities gain particular significance in the paradox of the digital, where “at the very
moment when we have the technology available to inform ourselves as never before, we are
simultaneously and compellingly confronted with the impossibility of ever being fully informed.
Even more disturbingly, we are confronted with this impossibility at the very moment when we
are told that being informed is more important than ever before to our livelihood, our security,
and our social lives” (Andrejevic, 2013, p. 2).
This paradox plays out clearly in the context of food knowledge, as evidenced by the oat
milk example with which I began this section. Given these pressures to stay informed and make
good choices around food, I would characterise the value of the food blogosphere through its role
as a knowledge community in which pedagogies of food work are circulated. The value of these
communities lies in their work in filtering and moderating the overwhelming quantities of
anxiety-provoking information on food and nutrition by couching home cooking in simple and
creative terms and providing a searchable and indexed archive of recipes and pedagogy. While
food blogs generate anxieties in and of themselves – particularly in presenting the fantasy of
effortless and aesthetic wholesome family life as real and ordinary – their operation of a digital
and feminised gift economy clearly yields real and tangible benefits for lurkers and bloggers.

Knowledge Exchange and the Digital Gift Economy
In this section I focus on the value of the blogosphere in creating a digital database of
recipes. The VVP stands as an archive of the vegan recipes produced by contributors, serves as a
vital resource within and outside of the vegan community. In providing pedagogical information
about the non-normative dietary practice of veganism, participants forge bonds with disparate
individuals, seen and unseen, and across time in a gift economy. The gift economy is defined by

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Marcel Mauss as a system of exchange where objects are exchanged without prior agreement or
expectation of immediate future reward. Paul Booth expands on this notion, using the term ‘digi-
gratis’ to explain that: “The new gift, the digital gift, is a gift without an obligation to
reciprocate’ (2010, p. 134) and Jenkins et al argue, “such transactions depend on sociality but not
necessarily reciprocity” (2013, p. 91). As evidenced by the VVP, bloggers share recipes,
pedagogies and experiences in order to bring together an online knowledge community. Some of
the specific needs of vegans include learning about substitutes for animal products, managing
nutrition, and amassing a stockpile of effective and delicious vegan recipes. These needs inspire
the formation of a knowledge community, where personal experiences are exchanged without
expectation of reward.
Food bloggers are aware of this utility to and purpose of their work and this appears to
inform their desire to produce food blogs, as the author of blog The Blooming Platter of Vegan
Recipes Betsy DiJulio writes: “My 2009 New Year’s resolution was to start this blog as a way of
‘giving back’ to all of the wonderful vegan bloggers and other cooks/chefs out there who have
inspired me, taught me so much, and continue to be incredibly generous” (DiJulio, n.d.). This
pedagogical function is also written into the concept of self-empowerment through healthism that
is so popular amongst vegan food blogs, as blogger Amy Preuss writes: “I’m telling you this
because if you…feel like you’re losing control of your body without any other options because
your doctor doesn’t know or isn’t telling you about them, then you have a choice to make. Either
choose to live with your condition(s) and take your meds without complaint, or choose to take
ownership of your body and health” (Preuss, 2013).
In turn, this community can be deployed to produce and disseminate food knowledge that
gives voice to rampant food anxieties and offer practical solutions to counter these concerns.

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Returning to Liddon’s post on oat milk it should be noted that – despite the proliferation of
concerns that are published in the comments section – the recipe itself serves primarily a
resource designed to empower consumers to produce their own alternative milks to avoid the
concerns and costs of commercially produced milk alternatives. Moreover, these posts become
collaborative spaces for the dissemination of food pedagogies. For instance, Liddon publishes a
similar post titled ‘My Favourite Homemade Almond Milk + Step By Step Photos’ (2013a)
where the comments section yields advice and opinions on appropriate alternatives to
cheesecloth for straining nut milk:

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Figure 14. Comments on post for ‘My favourite homemade almond milk,’ (Liddon, 2013).

This comment thread reveals the ways that the food blog becomes a space for the sharing
and comparison of food pedagogies that serve as a useful community resource, which
demonstrates the true potential of the gift economy. When used to their full potential, these
shared online discussions act as a feminised space that act as a stance against food anxiety. They

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give voice to the nature of these concerns but address them through collective wisdom and
experience. That is, food blog space allows women to both perform and articulate the concerns
and processes of food planning and food knowledge.
This value of the VVP knowledge exchange is elevated due to the non-normative food
culture of the vegan community. Bloggers in the VVP comment on and respond to the work of
other participating bloggers to clarify cooking techniques and ingredients. Andy, the blogger at
Karate Rice, responds to The ZenVegan’s recipe for Black Pepper Tofu: “Your tofu sitting on
top sounds nice and flavourful :) I'm a little bit confused about the freezing and boiling. Could
you elaborate?” (The Hippy Hippie, 2013). These requests for knowledge formalise individual
experiences into an archive that serves as a reference point for future audiences, expanding the
mediated dissemination of food preparation knowledge. In this context, it is clear that the
community-building value of food blogs have a vital role to play. Digital communities and the
knowledge exchange gift economy have allowed alternative diets to flourish within the
blogosphere and as lifestyle practices, as the educational needs of vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free,
gluten-free, paleo and other specialty diets are each catered to by individually-authored food
blogs. These user-generated resources can be invaluable to those seeking out information on
alternative diets for health, allergies and other reasons. The digital network allows this formerly
alternative information to be disseminated and archived to its best effect: producing a useful food
resource that is neatly searchable, indexed and archived.
Liddon’s work realises my earlier arguments about food bloggers as opinion leaders, as
her carefully cultivated online brand includes curated information resources that provide
background context to her recipe and her posts. Liddon’s almond milk post is embedded with
informative links on issues such as the use of propylene oxide on almonds, and a list of brands

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that do not use this chemical. Not only does this provide the useful service of filtering resources
for her reader, but Liddon’s carefully cultivated online brand and reputation give the reader a
sense of authority that act as a useful endorsement of particular digital opinions and resources. In
this era of abundant information, bloggers use their position to share their navigation of the
online foodscape and to helpfully filter information on food preparation for their audiences. In
turn, Liddon’s success as a blogger attracts a large community of followers, optimising the
potential communal wisdom generated in this space. These two acts are indicative of the
important role that food bloggers play in disseminating food practices, knowledge and
pedagogies.

Women’s Online Food Communities
Women have found ways of creating rituals and bonds around the online production and
consumption of food. These default communities mimic the structure of political groups that are
formed around a shared consciousness, to which participants affirm their political positioning
through supportive and like-minded friends and networks. This is particularly important given
the feminisation of this online food blogging community. As Matchar argues, lifestyle blogs are
the “online versions of the knitting circles and quilting bees of preindustrial America, which
were themselves created to stave off the loneliness and isolation of pioneer life. Online, women
swap skills, tips, and recipes; give advice; offer emotional support” (2013, p. 52).
It is clear that female food bloggers thrive on the relationships that are built through the
blogosphere. The VVP is structured to virtually mimic rituals of bonding and sociality around
food – food bloggers commonly host virtual baby showers for their blogging friends. These
virtual baby showers are structured similarly to the VVP, with a group of participating bloggers
each contributing a recipe at an agreed upon time ‘in honour’ of the blogger. Food blogging

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couple Maria and Josh, who write Two Peas and Their Pod, have a virtual baby shower hosted
for them with an impressive list of participating bloggers. They write: “Today we are inviting
you ALL to our virtual baby shower. Below is a list of all of the bloggers who participated and
their posts. Please visit their blogs and enjoy! I hope you are hungry because these bloggers
know how to throw a party with fabulous food” (Maria & Josh, n.d.).
Another example of the virtual events that are organised in the blogosphere include the
moving Peanut Butter Memorial, which is centred around the unexpected death of food blogger
Jennie Perillo’s husband. Perillo writes:

As I spend Friday reflecting on the love and life that was gone in an instant, I’d like to
invite all of you to celebrate his life too. Mikey loved peanut butter cream pie. I haven’t
made it in a while, and I’ve had it on my to-do list for a while now.
I kept telling myself I would make it for him tomorrow. Time has suddenly stood
still, though, and I’m waiting to wake up and learn to live a new kind of normal. For
those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie this
Friday and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there’s no tomorrow
because today is the only guarantee we can count on (2011).

The blogosphere rallies to this cause and responds to Perillo by posting hundreds of
peanut butter pies. Their participation in this memorial also encourages many bloggers to reflect
on their relationships to each other. Many bloggers feel compelled to acknowledge that while
they have never personally met Perillo they nevertheless feel that they have a very close
relationship. Sweetapolita blogger Alyea writes: “Because the food community is a remarkably
tight-knit one, and through the wonders of twitter are able to connect on a pretty intimate level

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every single day, there is a camaraderie and connection that I simply wouldn’t believe possible if
I wasn’t part of it all. Perhaps this is why the entire community is so affected by Jennie’s loss.”
14

Kelly Yandell writes: “We all have a new kind of community that transcends geography and
family. It is strange to admit that…I was feeling profound grief for the loss experienced by a
woman whom I have never met personally and with whom I have only enjoyed a few congenial
exchanges online” (Alyea, 2011). Lynne Feifer writes “This whole thing has had me in tears. All
day I’ve been thinking about Jennifer, whom I’ve never met, and her two daughters” (2011).
However, it is clear that the food blogging community is not uniformly positive nor
supportive. In a post titled ‘Why You Should Never Start a Food Blog,’ Amanda Rettke, author
of the successful blog I Am Baker, writes: “It seems in food blogging, people feel they have a
greater license to be critical and harsh. Someone makes your recipe and it doesn’t turn out and
suddenly you have 7 nasty emails and a hate campaign started against you on twitter” (2012).
According to Rettke, food bloggers form cliques, compete against each other, steal creative
content from each other, and generate deep dissent about the ‘correct’ ways to do things in the
kitchen (Rettke, 2012). In the same breath, however, Rettke invites bloggers to share personal
stories that reveal the tangible effects and benefits of blogging. Aimee of Simple Bites writes “I
broke down in tears on US Thanksgiving after a single dad emailed me to thank me for my
turkey tutorial. He was making his first single-handed Thanksgiving dinner for his girls and,
according to him, it turned out perfectly. This in itself was awesome, but the fact that he took the
time to write a kind letter was so touching” (as cited in Rettke, 2012). Carrie from Deliciously
Organic chimes in: “The best are always the comments saying that a family member wasn’t keen
on healthy eating, but after trying one of my recipes they changed their mind. Or, when a mom
writes and says now she can feed her kids fun, gluten free/healthy foods. I absolutely love

14
http://sweetapolita.com/2011/08/how-to-make-a-rainbow-peanut-butter-pie-for-mikey/

245
helping people!” (as cited in Rettke, 2012). It is these informal knowledge networks and online
communities that serve to bolster a strong, feminocentric resistance to the contemporary anxiety-
ridden, North American foodscape. Blogger Brandi from BranAppetit offers: “The most
rewarding thing for me has been the friendships that I’ve formed with other bloggers. Some that
I’ve met in real life, and some that I still haven’t…that contribute to a community and support
each other in their successes and struggles and everything in between. Some of my best friends
have come into my life because of blogging, and I’m incredibly grateful for that” (as cited in
Rettke, 2012). These sentiments – echoed by food bloggers across the blogosphere – reveal how
the virtual commodities circulated on food blogs materialise and generate ‘real’ value.
These reflections reveal the power of these virtual bonds and their powerful potential to
rally disparate women through celebration and grief. The knowledge communities of food blogs
play an important role in creating feminised spaces for discussion, and this is even more
important in a context where neoliberal individualism assigns ever more labour and
responsibility to women in their private households. The strength of these bonds – as made
evident in the testimony of food bloggers – illustrates the value of this gift economy to
participants and foreshadows its political potential.
Conclusion
The current discourse around consumption and health is marked by fluidity and partiality.
Veganism has shifted from being a militant position aligned with radical countercultural goals to
being a healthy trend. As a trend, it is expressed using the language of intransigence, described
as a choice made ‘for now’ and an ‘evolving process’ as VVP participant Jess at Lemongrass and
Ginger explains: “As a meat-lover who believes in the environmental benefits of vegetarianism,
I’ve embraced the middle-ground position of ‘flexitarianism’ (meatfree weekdays and the

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occasional meat indulgence on the weekend!) since early 2011” (Jess, n.d.). This standpoint has
been popularised in the mainstream by movements such as flexitarianism, a term coined by
nutritionist Dawn Jackson Blatner to describe a primarily vegetarian diet with the sporadic
inclusion of meat, and Mark Bittman’s (2013) Vegan Before 6 diet which advocates eating vegan
meals during the day and then eating unrestricted foods after 6.00pm. These movements are both
symptoms and features of the rapidly evolving information age, in which food fads and fears are
rapidly circulated and have mass influence effects on what actions and consumer behaviours are
considered healthy/unhealthy, moral/immoral, and popular/alternative. Thus the relevant
question to ask in this age of politics and abundant choice is not why so few bloggers are able to
articulate or hold their practices to the standards of traditional political norms, but rather, how in
this age of information flux certain political values and ideas are expressed, adhered to and
evaluated.
In this context, the role of food bloggers is vital in offering an anchor around which
women can ground themselves in a fluid and uncertain foodscape. I argue that while vegan food
blogs seem unable to explore the radical politics or ethics of eating meat in any sustained and
meaningful way, attack unethical production or legislative frameworks in a co-ordinated way, or
contribute to a food justice movement for people and animals, their central value as a political
tool is through their role as an information well around which feminised communities have a
space to gather and share their navigation of a fear-based foodscape. The existence of the
resources, opinions and support offered within the vegan food blogosphere become pertinent in
the climate of distrust and anxiety towards the state and corporate sector, as well as the
concomitant emphasis for neoliberal individual responsibility, healthism and self-care. These
factors drive the impulse for anxieties to be expressed, information to be generated and

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exchanged, and archived and searchable as a ready resource in times of need. These close
personal bonds foster relationships of trust and sharing around which the gift economy for food
pedagogy flourishes. These feminised knowledge communities play a partial role in alleviating
fears and building a community with which to share the burdens of gendered food labour in the
information age.
The food blog is integral to contemporary expressions of political action and discussion
through the dissemination of information on alternative lifestyle, dietary and consumption ideas.
This form of user-generated exchange is a vital community response in an environment where
knowledge about health, food and nutrition has been shaped by vested corporate interests.
Moreover, for women, the attention to the practices and voices that are liberated within the
feminised online space of the food blogosphere serve as an important form of collectivity that
acts as a response to the forces of individualism created by the neoliberal marketplace.

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Conclusion: Everyday Politics in the Digital Age

The questions about feminist and consumption politics that have permeated this study
include: What is legitimated as politics in the contemporary digital and neoliberal context? How
do we evaluate the potential of political expression in digital spaces? And, what is the role of
knowledge exchange in informing and inspiring these politics in the digital age?
Discussions of digital politics have thus far been dominated by the ways that digital
technologies facilitate and obscure traditional expressions of political action and participation
that revolve around legislative action and social movements. For instance, many descriptions of
digital politics are tainted with suggestions of illegitimacy, as indicated by the pejorative labels
‘slacktivism’, ‘clicktivism’ and ‘armchair activism.’ Slacktivism is explicitly defined as “a
willingness to perform a relatively costless, token display of support for a social cause, with an
accompanying lack of willingness to devote significant effort to enact meaningful change”
(Kristofferson, White & Peloza, 2014, p. 1149; see also Davis, 2011 and Morozov 2009). Such
derogation of digital politics reinforces the binary distinction between digital culture and ‘real
life’ – supposing that actions in online spaces are confined to the virtual rather than correlated
with ‘real-world’ concrete action – and reify the mythology that politics exists as a pure sphere
separated from the economy and popular culture.
Recent scholars of digital culture have responded vigorously with more optimistic
interpretations of the potentialities of the digital for facilitating political discussion and action,
producing research that underlines the real-world connections between ‘slacktivist’ tokens and
engagement with material, political acts (Kristofferson et al., 2014; Glenn, 2015; Kellner & Kim,
2010). Furthermore, this scholarship has examined the ways that politics is activated through
digital/cultural pathways, developing concepts including participatory politics, transmedia

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storytelling, and hashtag activism. This work is oriented towards revealing the concrete ways in
which digital play and participation is linked to explicit political goals. For instance, Jenkins,
Ford and Green (2015) quote research supporting a positive correlation between social media
and political participation: “Despite critics who dismiss a politics grounded in the spread of
messages through social media as ‘slacktivism,’ research by Georgetown University’s Center for
Social Impact Communication and Ogilvy Worldwide in 2010 suggests that the small
investments in time and effort required to pass along such messages … may make participants
more likely to take more substantive action later (Andresen, 2011).” This suggests that armchair
activists are more likely to donate and volunteer and solicit donations than non-social-media
promoters. Similarly, Cohen and Kahne (n.d.) explore the potential of participatory politics
which they define as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to
exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern…these acts are not guided by
deference to elites or formal institutions.”
While I agree with the spirit of acknowledging different forms of digital political
expression, I think that this area of research is currently lacking in its attention to specifically
feminised forms of politics. Instead, the digital spaces which I regard as having the most
potentiality – marked as they are by the façade of seemingly innocuous collectives of women
discussing the ‘boring’ contingencies of normative femininity – are mostly overlooked in
contemporary discussions of digital politics. In this desire to seek out politics within feminised
culture, I am recuperating the pivotal work of feminist cultural studies scholars such as Radway,
Ang, Modleski and McRobbie who, in the mid-1980s, first fought for the legitimacy of
feminised cultural forms as expressions of pleasure but also politics for women. In many ways,

250
the legacy of their work has been taken for granted within the field of feminist media and
cultural studies.
Yet I find it necessary to revisit this work in the digital media context, where the impetus
on the ‘new-ness’ of such technologies has had the effect of erasing such histories to fit into a
linear model of technological progress. In this context, the political issues that are associated
with ‘old’ media are easily elided. It is for this reason that it is informative to return to the 1980s
and the formative descriptions of women’s pleasure as politics that were developed during this
time period, and to see how these projects are continued through digital media.
Of course, digital media offer unique considerations for the study of women’s political
expression. For instance, the quotidian and intimate, user-generated content have been written
into the logic of social media. Blogs offer a collapse of private and public spaces that are integral
to the development of girlie entrepreneurialism. Moreover, the networked possibilities for
community are explicit to social networking. Many of my arguments have centred around
evidence of the discursive contradictions that are revealed in the rhetoric of food blogs and in the
meaning suggested by the digital form. The food blogosphere offers a rich resource for
understanding contemporary femininity and feminism, and its value to corporations as well as
the numbers of women participating should make self-evident the utility of food blogs as a
feminist project of cultural studies inquiry.
However, there remains some pushback against the feminist potentiality of this space. In
a manuscript I submitted to one cultural studies journal on Food Network instructional shows,
while my points that these shows were evidence of retreatist femininity were acknowledged I
nevertheless received pushback on the relevance of this study, with the anonymous reviewer
commenting: “My solution is not to watch those programs, and I would guess most

251
‘cosmopolitan citizens’ do not either.” I find this idea – that the role of a feminist scholar is to
ignore those cultural products which do not recognisably fit into the mould of what good
feminist media should look like – to be myopic. It ignores the political ambivalence that sweeps
the psyches of contemporary postfeminist subjects, the idea that media can simultaneously be
pleasurably and critically consumed, and it has the alienating effect of condemning those who
digest the ‘wrong’ media as cultural and political dupes. This idea subscribes to the logic that
there exists a pure and original expression of feminism, which perpetuates the antagonistic
generational divisions which have already fractured the feminist movement and, arguably, have
provided the foundation for postfeminism to gain such momentum in the past three decades.
This quest to seek out pure politics also predicates legitimacy upon a binary of what is
‘real life’ and what is virtual. Digital scholars have descended upon this problematic binary
enthusiastically, with an attention to the most dramatic and explicit expressions of political
activism and thought in digital spaces. This includes the realms of hashtag activism, the
mobilisation of social movements through social media, and the rise of feminist and activist
blogs, websites and digital material content. Ultimately, I believe that in the rush to define these
practices as digital politics, there is a tendency to once again overlook the politics inherent to
culturally devalued, feminised spaces such as food blogs. In this project, I have argued for the
ways that politics is expressed through the ordinary and the mundane in new media, and through
a deployment of normative femininity. These politics are not perfect. The user-generated
potentiality of social media has disappointingly perpetuated a homogenous version of ideal
femininity. The community centred around food blogs can encourage competitive pressure
amongst women as easily as they can spur rich online relationships. While these imperfections
are problems worthy of scholarly attention, they do not take away the fact that food blogs

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constitute a legitimate political response that sheds important light on the cultural conditions of
contemporary femininity and its performance in the digital age.

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List of Images

Figure 1. Asparagus, Bacon and Strawberry Salad with Poached Egg
Rusev, N. (2015, April 23). “Asparagus, Bacon and Strawberry Salad with Poached Egg.”
Savory Nothings, April 23. Retrieved from http://www.savorynothings.com/asparagus-bacon-
and-strawberry-salad-with-poached-eggs/

Figure 2. Purple Ombre Sprinkles Cake
Michaelis, S. (2011, November 14). “Purple Ombre Sprinkles Cake.” Raspberri Cupcakes.
Retrieved from http://www.raspberricupcakes.com/2011/11/purple-ombre-sprinkle-cake.html

Figure 3. Surprise on the Inside Gender Reveal Cake
Betty Crocker. (n.d.). “Surprising on the Inside Gender Reveal Cake.’ Betty Crocker.
Retrieved from http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/surprise-on-the-inside-gender-reveal-
cake/cbda6a71-5169-4cf0-8e21-fb01c86160ba

Figure 4. Ruffles and Roses Tea Party
Alyea, R. (2011, June 25). “Ruffles & Roses: A Mad(ish) Tea Party.” Sweetapolita. Retrieved
from http://sweetapolita.com/2011/06/ruffles-roses-a-madish-tea-party/

Figure 5. Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake
Perelman, D. (2008, August 11). “Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake.’ Smitten Kitchen.
Retrieved from http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/08/chocolate-peanut-butter-cake/

Figure 6. Bakerella front page [Screenshot].
Dudley, A. (2016, March 3). Bakerella. Retrieved from http://www.bakerella.com/

Figure 7. Word cloud – Defining the entrepreneur. Kinfolk issue fifteen: The entrepreneurs issue.
O’Hara, G. (n.d.) Defining the entrepreneur. Kinfolk issue fifteen: The entrepreneurs issue.

Figure 8. The Pioneer Woman blog header [Screenshot].
Drummond, R. (2016, March 1). The Pioneer Woman. Retrieved from
http://thepioneerwoman.com/

Figure 9. Bakerella main menu detail [Screenshot].
Dudley, A. (2016, April 18). Bakerella. Retrieved from http://www.bakerella.com/

Figure 10. 100 Days of Real Food - List of posts for budget challenge [Screenshot].
Leake, L. (2010). 100 days on a budget. 100 Days of Real Food. Retrieved from
http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/100-days-on-a-budget/ [Accessed 6 March 2016]

Figures 11a and b. Comments from post for ‘Homemade oat milk – easy, fast, cheap.’
[Screenshot].
Liddon, A. (2013, January 1). Homemade oat milk – easy, fast, cheap. Oh She Glows. Retrieved
from http://ohsheglows.com/2013/01/10/homemade-oat-milk-easy-fast-
cheap/#ixzz3QWbFwMuQ

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Figure 12. Example of buttons linking posts of VVP event.

Figure 13. List of VVP participants (May) [Screenshot]
Virtual Vegan Potluck (2013). May 2013. Virtual Vegan Potluck. Retrieved from
http://virtualveganpotluck.com/may-2013

Figure 14. Comments on post for ‘My favourite homemade almond milk’ (Liddon, 2013).
Liddon, A. (2013, January 24). My favourite homemade almond milk. Oh She Glows. Retrieved
from http://ohsheglows.com/2013/01/24/my-favourite-homemade-almond-milk-step-by-step-
photos/

255
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Creator Dejmanee, Tisha (author)

Core Title Making her cake and eating it too: the productive feminist politics of food blogs

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/05/2018

Defense Date 05/11/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag feminism,food blogs,food media,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,postfeminism

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Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair)

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