Fixing Food to Fix Families: Feeding Risk Discourse and the Family Meal

Creator(s)

Amber E. Kinser, East Tennessee State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2-2017

Description

This article examines mothering rhetorics as they relate to feeding the family. The analysis is grounded in public, popular, and institutional texts about family meals and focus-group data from 31 mothers talking about their experiences and perceptions of family meals. The author demonstrates how family meal discourses work as a reproducing rhetoric that moralizes maternal feeding work. The author argues that family meal discourse is problematic because it obscures the ways in which it is mother-targeted and mother-blaming; suppresses maternal voice and misrepresents family food labor; and regulates maternal activity, and thus identity.

Citation Information

Kinser, Amber E.. 2017. Fixing Food to Fix Families: Feeding Risk Discourse and the Family Meal. Women's Studies in Communication. Vol.40(1). 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2016.1207001 ISSN: 0749-1409