Kate Cairns

Caring About Food Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen

This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implications for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequities persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.

Feeding the ‘organic child’: Mothering through ethical consumption:

In this article, we examine the gendering of ethical food discourse by focusing on the ideal of the ‘organic child’. Drawing from qualitative focus groups and interviews with Canadian mothers of various class backgrounds, we find that the organic child reflects the intersecting ideals of motherhood and ethical food discourse, whereby ‘good’ mothers are those who preserve their children’s purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases. Women in our study express the desire to nurture the organic child, and feel responsible for protecting their children’s purity. At the same time the organic child represents a gendered burden for women, our participants negotiate the ideal in complex ways that involve managing emotions and balancing the normative expectations of motherhood with pragmatic demands. The idealized figure of the organic child not only works ideologically to reinforce gendered notions of care-work, but also works to set a classed standard for good mothering that demands significant investments of economic and cultural capital. We argue that the organic child ideal reflects neoliberal expectations about childhood and maternal social and environmental responsibility by emphasizing mothers’ individual responsibility for securing children’s futures.

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.

A future to voice? Continuing debates in feminist research with youth

This paper explores the concept of voice in relation to a research project, now in its developing stages, in which I examine how rural youth imagine their futures in the context of a career‐based learning programme called The Real Game. The paper enters into conversation with feminist post‐structural scholars of education in order to situate the problematic of voice within broader epistemological and ethical questions regarding representation and responsibility in research. Exploring the limits and possibilities of the proposed study, and of critical feminist ethnographies more broadly, the paper is divided into three sections: speech, representation, and ethics. Questions of voice serve as an entry point into a larger interrogation of the interrelations of theory, epistemology, and ethics in research practice. The studys specific focus on imagined futures provokes questions about how relations of time shape the production of youth subjectivities and feminist scholarship.

The Sense of Entitlement

The first time Cameron visited the Toronto Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA), he fell in love. It was the song ‘Jellicle Cats’ from his favourite musical that enamoured him to the idea of attending a specialised arts high school. Star-struck with the students’ performance, he began to see himself as one of them. ‘They were so amazing! I was in awe’. He thought, ‘to be in that group one day would be incredible’. At that moment, Cameron felt that CAPA ‘was the place for me’. Similarly, after four years as a student at the Weston School, Frank says, ‘I feel like this place was designed for me, … that’s what I feel, I feel like this place was designed for me, custom-built’. He recalls visiting the school as a child for his father’s alumni reunions, and finding the place ‘magical’. ‘There’s something about this place in the spring where just the brick and the grass and the, I don’t know, the way it looks’, he explains. After four years at their respective schools, both Frank and Cameron have developed strong emotional attachments to their high schools. Cameron says that CAPA is ‘just an open place, accepting, loving, beautiful’, while Frank is convinced ‘that there’s not a better place on earth’.

Connecting to food: cultivating children in the school garden

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children’s relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.

The Mall and "the Plant": Choice and the Classed Construction of Possible Futures in Two Specialized Arts Programs

This article explores how conceptions of choice and visions of the future are constructed within the context of specialized arts programs in two Canadian public high schools. The authors consider how discourses of the arts are implicated in the way that possible futures are envisioned differently, delimiting the range of choices available to students. Their analysis shows how choices are unequally distributed and possible futures unequally constructed in ways that reinforce social class hierarchies. The discussion of the data is organized around the contrast in how three tropes—“the architect,” “the fifth year,” and “being lazy”—emerge in both school contexts in relationship to students’ futures. By illustrating how the arts operate in this process, the authors challenge the common assumption that arts programs have the inherent ability to transcend social structures in general and social class processes in particular. The authors conclude by considering the implications of their analysis for how notions of choice are understood in relationship to specialized arts programs.

Fast-Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties:

own before-and-after Botox photographs. That said, the book contains a surprising number of minor typos, which, along with morethan-minimal overlap between the methodological appendix—which is excellent—and the description of methods in the introduction, left me wondering whether the book was rushed to press. These are minor complaints, however. A timely, sociologically rich, and highly accessible book, Botox Nation will be a welcome addition to the shelves of scholars and undergraduate and graduate classrooms, especially in courses on gender studies, health and medicine, self and society, embodiment, and the life course.