Eating as a Gendered Act: Christianity, Feminism, and Reclaiming the Body
In K. J. Clark (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, 2nd Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press. pp. 475-489 (2008)
Abstract
In current society, eating is most definitely a gendered act: that is, what we eat and how we eat it factors in both the construction and the performance of gender. Furthermore, eating is a gendered act with consequences that go far beyond whether one orders a steak or a salad for dinner. In the first half of this paper, I identify the dominant myths surrounding both female and male eating, and I show that those myths contribute in important ways to cultural constructions of male and female appetites more generally speaking. In the second half, I argue that the Christian church should share feminism’s perception of these current cultural myths as fundamentally disordered, and I claim that the Christian traditions of fasting and feasting present us with a concrete means to counter those damaging conceptions and reclaim a healthy attitude toward our hunger.
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2014-01-14
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2014-01-14
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438 ( #12,554 of 58,325 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
23 ( #31,702 of 58,325 )
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