Gender and Food in Transnational East Asias

Gender and Food in Transnational East Asias places the relationship between food and gender in cross-cultural, cross-regional, and transnational contexts in order to identify how global politics, economy, and culture influence gender dynamics; and maintain or shift the existing gender hierarchy, inequality, and sexual behavior.

Gender and Food in Transnational East Asias illustrates how the production and consumption of food encapsulates the changes that affect social positions of women and men and their relationships with their families, the state, and their work, as well as shapes their gender, sexual, ethnic, and national identities. The transnational movement of food and people between East Asia and the rest of the world is increasingly visible, forming various forces behind the cultural and political constructions of gender politics among and beyond Asian diasporas. By critically engaging with history, practices, and representation of food as a constructive window to articulate gender dynamics in the East Asian region, this volume approaches food as a symbolic and material site where gender roles and identities are imagined, performed, and negotiated. It argues that a critical engagement with practices and representations of food from gender perspectives can enhance our understanding of the society and culture of transnational East Asias.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Jooyeon Rhee, Chikako Nagayama, and Eric Ping Hung Li

Part I: Imagination of Culinary Nationalism

Chapter 1 Women, Waste, and War: Food, Gender, and Rationalization in Wartime Japanese Discourse

Nathan Hopson

Chapter 2A Bite of the Gender Equality Discourse in China: Observations from Food

Guojun (Sawyer) He, Dandan Fang, and Jonathan Deschênes

Chapter 3 Young Men in Chef Uniforms and Suffering Mothers in Hanbok: Gendered Representation of National Cuisine in the Sikkaek Series

Maria Osetrova

Part II: Body and Embodiment

Chapter 4 The Body as Food: Gender, Eating, and Cannibalism in Yan Lianke’s The Four Books

Shelley W. Chan

Chapter 5“Veganism Will Rise like Feminism”: The Porous Contestation of Intersectional Vegan Feminism against the Exclusive Politics of Korean Popular Feminism

Su Young Choi

Chapter 6Embodying Carnal Appetites: Food and Sexuality in Li Ang’s Mandarin Duck Aphrodisiacs

Chien-wei Pan

Part III: Performance of Masculinity and Femininity

Chapter 7Gender Politics in Food Escape: Korean Masculinity in TV Cooking Shows in South Korea

Jooyeon Rhee

Chapter 8Neoliberal Women’s Agency and Time-Space Management in the Cook-and-Save Method, Tsukurioki

Chikako Nagayama

Chapter 9 Eating as a Way of Performing Gender: The Intersection of Food, Gender, and Human Capital in Taiwan

Amélie Keyser-Verreault

Chapter 10 (Post-)traumatic Logic of Socialism, Hunger, and Masculinity in Zhang Xianliang’s Mimosa (1984)

Gabriel F. Y. Tsang

Part IV: Transnational Practice of Food and Gender

Chapter 11Fashioning K-Food: New Gendered Space and Culture in South Korea

Eric Ping Hung Li, Somin Lee, and Matt Husain

Chapter 12Grace Chu: Chinese Cooking at the Crossroad of Ethnicization and Emplacement

Violetta Ravagnoli

Chapter 13 Social Change and Gendered Gift-Giving Rituals: A Historical Analysis of Valentine’s Day in Japan

Yuko Minowa, Olga Khomenko, and Russell W. Belk