Description
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.
The author 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.
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.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Desire for a Mate
Chapter 3: Desire for a Meal
Chapter 4: An Account of the Betty Crocker-Barbie Complex
Chapter 5: Where the BC/BC is Reinforced and Distributed
Chapter 6: Complications from the Complex
Chapter 7: Toward a Sustainable Relationship with Food
Chapter 8: Toward Believable Body Acceptance
Chapter 9: Rethinking Diagnoses and Treatment of Eating Disorders
Chapter 10: Canceling the Complex
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 220 |
| ISBN | 9781978760905 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 4 tables |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |













