Consuming Patriarchy

Consuming Patriarchy is the second seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Thursday, 10 December 2026, 5:00-6:30 PM GMT/ 4:00-5:30 PM CET
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Francesca Calamita, University of Virginia: "Between Food and the Body: The Complex Relationship of Italian Women with Eating, Embodiment, and Self-Image in Ti trovo cambiata [You have changed] (2026)"

Abstract: Throughout Western history, the relationship between women and food has functioned as a metaphor through which broader questions of femininity, sexuality, and social conformity are articulated. From the biblical narrative of Eve and the apple to contemporary representations of women’s bodies and eating practices, female consumption has rarely been understood as an act of nourishment. Rather, women’s relationships with food have associated with desire, temptation, self-control, and transgression. At the same time, the preparation of food within the family have been aligned with socially prescribed forms of feminine care. As a consequence, the consumption, rejection, or restriction of food operate as a form of symbolic communication, enabling women to express emotions that remain difficult to articulate verbally. Eating—and refusing to eat—can thus become a means through which affection, anger, frustration, autonomy, and resistance are negotiated.

One chapter of my recent monograph, Ti trovo cambiata [You Have Changed], examines the relationship between women and food in contemporary Italy from a sociological perspective. This complex relationship has constituted a central theme of my academic research throughout my career. Situating the analysis within a contemporary context characterised by the persistent prevalence of eating disorders, the increasing visibility of orthorexia and other forms of regulated eating, and a renewed cultural emphasis on food as a source of pleasure, this paper draws upon both quantitative data and personal narratives collected for the volume. By bringing these forms of evidence into dialogue, it explores the ways in which broader cultural expectations surrounding femininity, health, self-discipline, and the body are negotiated through everyday food practices.

How do contemporary Italian women negotiate their relationships with food and their bodies?

Biography: Coming Soon

Josephine Taylor, Birkbeck, University of London: "Hyperfemininity, Cars, and Consumption Politics in Contemporary Women's Pop Music"

Abstract:

“All objects, cars included, become women in order to be bought”

(Baudrillard 2006)

The coalescence of cars, women, and a sexual politics of meat and consumption in popular music is omnipresent across twenty first century music videos and lyrics. Car iconography and the imagery of petroculture in music is often immersed in a gaze of masculine sexual appetite in which, as something like Justin Timberlake and Timberland’s “Carry it Out” music video displays: takeout food, women, and cars, as interchangeable commodities to be consumed and/or ridden.

Women’s contemporary pop music, however, such as Charli XCX or Kim Petras presents this absurd glamorous hyperfeminine performance embroiled with the speed of the automobile and the agency it provides as a way of owning and thus denaturalising such politics of consumption, a marker of both meat and oil culture. What becomes apparent in this feminine automobile accelerationism is both nuanced critique yet endorsement of the life of crude-oil enabled.

I present an exploration of this overt hyperfemininity in women’s pop music as a mode of eating and consuming well in the domain of sexual and gender politics. The paper addresses the petrocultural femininity of Kim Petras music and how, although perhaps not consciously, toys and plays with ideas of Adams infamous work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, alongside the gendered dimensions of car culture. Sophie Lewis poignantly notes ‘When certain feminist first turned against girly things, it was a giant error in Western women’s liberatory history.’ I present a celebration of this sexual excessive hyper-femininity within this type of pop music as a way of celebrating femme sexual agency Kim Petras songs such as ‘Treat me Like a Slut’ and the ‘Need for Speed.’ Both songs are immersed in petrocultural, sexual consumptive politics of women as meat and car objects but alternatively present a subversion of the male gaze, in which hyper-femininity can be seen as empowering, denaturalised, and agential.

Biography: Coming Soon

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by Giorgi Iremadze on Unsplash.