Cooking, Eating, and Social Pressures of a Domestic Identity : A Rhetorical Complex of Womanhood

This book offers insight into tensions faced by many women between cultural expectations to cook as a service to others, while eating to achieve or maintain thinness.

E. Vivian Leigh engages with a feminist theoretical lens for textual, rhetorical, and critical discourse analysis of cooking shows and popular diets to analyze the need for alternatives to commonly accepted gendered expectations attached to food. The pressures for thinness imposed upon women have become a normalized cultural practice capable of pushing women to develop eating disorders. Leigh contents that eating disorders should be given consideration as byproducts of these conditions, and she provides alternatives to toxic gendered expectations attached to food, along with increased understanding of sustainable relationships with food – rather than dieting.

This book stresses that understanding the rhetoric of women''s relationships with food can aid in re-examining the limitations of exclusively diagnosing and treating eating disorders as a mental illness by identifying and understanding them as potential byproducts of toxic grand narratives surrounding food consumption and societal pressures of thinness.