Hobart and William Smith Colleges has a center called the Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men. This year's Fisher Center Lecture series is titled: Digesting Gender: The Politics of Food.
- Are you covering topics related to Food in your classes—its acquisition, distribution, and ingestion? And, have you ever wondered about how this relates to issues surrounding gender, race, and class?
- Are you and your students interested in learning more about how the politics of food impacts our communities, nation, and global world?
- Have you ever wondered why the production and preparation of food remains a space of domesticity and invisibility for women, immigrants and the poor, while at the same time it's a route to celebrity and wealth for professional chefs, critics, corporate agribusiness and fast food conglomerates?
Here are upcoming events for Spring 2012.
February 15 Carole Counihan*
“Gender and Food Activism in Italy”
7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: This talk will ponder whether and how gender plays a role in contemporary Italian food activism. The literature on food and gender suggests several forces that may affect men’s and women’s participation in food activism, for example, women’s identification with feeding; the male-female division of food labor; gendered sensory, corporeal, and emotional relations to food; and gendered meanings surrounding food. This talk uses ethnographic interviews conducted in 2009 with leaders of several Italian Slow Food chapters and in 2011 with a range of food activists in Cagliari, Italy, to ask how their gendered experiences with food in Italian culture might contribute to or detract from efforts to make the food systemmore just, more sustainable, more responsive to local communities, and of higher quality.
Bio: Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She has a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (University of Texas Press, 2009), which is based on food-centered life histories collected from Hispanic women in the town of Antonito, Colorado. Counihan is also author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge, 2004) and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge 2002), with Penny Van Esterik, of Food and Culture: A Reader (Routledge 1997, 2008), and with Psyche Williams-Forson of Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World (Routledge 2011). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. Counihan has been a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy since 2005, and she has also been a visiting professor at Boston University and the University of Cagliari (Sardinia), Italy.
TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED:
February 22 Film Screening: "After I pick the fruit", Director Nancy Ghertner
7:00-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
After I Pick the Fruit is a feature-length documentary that follows the lives of five immigrant farmworker women - three of them undocumented -over a ten-year period as they struggle to fulfill their roles as workers, wives, mothers, and members of an isolated community that’s almost invisible to the outside world. It’s an intensely personal film, born of friendships forged by filmmaker Nancy Ghertner with each of the five women, who asked to be identified simply as Soledad, Verge, Maria, Elisa, and Lorena. After I Pick the Fruit begins and ends in the apple orchards around Sodus, NY, but includes footage on location in Chilapa de Diaz, Mexico, the US-Mexicanborder in Texas, the orange groves of Florida, the Capitol Building in Albany, and most importantly, in the women's homes when the work day is done. The Bush Administration's post-9/11 crackdown on illegal immigration is pivotal to the film. Ghertner shows how a series of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in 2006 affects the women, their families, farmers, and residents in and around Sodus. When Elisa learns that her husband has been deported in an early morning raid in front of the local grocery store, she invites Ghertner into her home to talk about what happened. The film also documents the stunned reaction of the farmer who employed Lorena's husband after his deportation. Later the film follows a group of area residents whohave volunteered to stand watch outside a Catholic church on Sunday mornings - on the lookout for ICE agents - while undocumented immigrants attend Mass inside.
For some info on this film and etcetera, try here or here. For the trailer, click here.
March 14 Film Screening and Discussion with Lucia Berliner, William Smith ’12 and the Fisher Center’s 2011 Woodworth Fellow
7:00-9 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Film Synopsis: Berliner’s film will investigate the basic means for survival—food. By focusing on the creation, actualization, and beneficiaries of Healthy Food for All, a unique program initiated by Remembrance Farm and the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the film will demonstrate demand and compassionate supply create by a network of small businesses and individuals vested in making a difference.
Bio: Outside of the classroom, Media & Society / Psychology major Lucia Berliner ’12, plans socially conscious events and programs on campus such as ArtFest, a Japan relief fundraiser, and EcoFusion, a free after school program designed to connect middle school children to various facets of environmental stewardship. A lifelong Hudson River activist, Berliner was born and raised in the Hudson Valley where she has always been fortunate enough to have access to healthy local foods, a goal she hopes to help make a reality for all people.
April 11 Julie Guthman*
“Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Reflections on the Origins and Character of Contemporary Food Activism,”
7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: In this talk I will reflect upon how food activism has become “feel good politics”. Drawing on nearly a decade's work with students who enrolled in the food and agriculture track in UC Santa Cruz’s Community Studies major, I have found that most contemporary food activism in the US consists of teaching others how to eat and grow food rather than contesting state or corporate practices. This, I argue, is a convergence of neoliberalism’s politics of the possible, the governmentality of healthism, and the desire for connection. While such activism affords those enrolled the pleasures of doing good by eating well, it largely neglects the deep socialinjustices propagated in the production and consumption of food.
For a bloggish review of one of Guthman's books, click here.
Bio: Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz where sheteaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. Since receiving her PhD in 2000 in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley, she has published extensively on contemporary efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed, with a particular focus on voluntary food labels, community food security, farm-to-school programs, and the race and class politics of “alternative food.” Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California, (University of California, 2004), won the Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society and the Donald Q. Innis Award from the Rural GeographySpecialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Her new book, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California, 2011) challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the so-called obesity epidemic, including that it can be addressed by exposing people to the "right" food.
*These two events (Counihan and Guthman) feature a Thursday morning roundtable discussion at 9-10 am, The Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men, Demarest 212
