What a lot of different ideas are encompassed in this article ...
The writer doesn't give the evidence for saying that more food is provided through gathering rather than hunting, I would like to know that. It seems to me that hunting and gathering are complementary methods of securing food, rather than oppositional ones.
Which sums up my main response to the article: it talks about "the battle of the sexes", and ignores the possibility of collaboration or co-operation or mutuality. As it does any form of interaction or intimacy with her dinner companion.
Perhaps, if asked, he would be a willing partner to sharing the cost, taking turns or being treated himself. He may appreciate discussing the gender role that is thrust on him as it is upon her ... and at the end of the conversation, he might still like to pay for the meal because he values the person he is with, for who she is, and no other reason.
Last updated on Sunday 10th December 2006 by shani (54) at 14:49 4 comments
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Made by:Heike (11) on: Sunday 10th December 2006 at 20:04
even if this is going to sound out of "order", in response to this article I do recommend an academic article by Caroline Walker Bynum which shows other meanings of food which the article referred to hardly touches upon (‘Fast, feast and flesh: the religious significance of food to medieval women’, Representations 11 (1995), 1-25) - just in case anyone wants bedtime reading
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Made by:shani (54) on: Sunday 10th December 2006 at 23:25
can you summarise the article, Heike?
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Made by:Heike (11) on: Monday 11th December 2006 at 09:21
The article looks at the meaning of food for women in the Middle Ages. I find particularly interesting that the author refuses to reduce the complicated relationship of gender,food, power and religion, as some (male) colleagues do, to a medieval example of modern day eating disorders. The article just came to mind because it also centres on the question of (the provision of) food as a means of power and control. Here, however, in contrast to McGowan's article food as seen as a resource controlled by women, not by men, and also controlled in a rather effective way. Through their fasting some of these women achieved a high status in the religious hierarchy of their locales and thus effectively undermined the power of men. I just find McGowan's argument one-dimensional in its failure, as you mentioned above, to accept the opportunity of negotiation and co-operation.
Subject: food and stuff
Made by:shani (54) on: Monday 11th December 2006 at 11:28
I read an interview with Catherine Walker Bynum in which she talks about the Holy Feast and the Holy Fast (the book of the article quoted by Heike above) and an earlier book, Jesus as Mother. She made some interesting comments about gender and about how religious folks, both men and women, identified themselves and religious figures with both genders. Men didn't only identify themselves and relate to male-gender representations and likewise for women.
The reduction in the McGowan article of complex relationships and identity to a battle between two oppositional forces, imposes a rigidity on how men and women can be and can relate to each other. It closes down opportunities for varying sexualities, sexual orientation, forms of organising families and friendship relationships - exchanging patriarchy for a self-imposed oppression.
Relationships with food are complicated, as we have seen in other blog entries on the website, from my own desires to create communities through sharing food, to concerns about health, to fascinating ideas about redefining one kind of food as another kind.
I like food. It is fundamentally important, and its value is seriously underestimated in this fast food, pre-prepared, packaged time. We're bombarded with messages about eat quick, don't give time or consideration to this function and activity. Don't be aware of its social function.
Interestingly, Howard Rheingold suggests some different ideas about hunting and collaboration. There is the initial collaboration to capture the meat and then, he suggests, ancient peoples had a first technology - a surfeit of meat. Do only the valued members of the community eat the meat or is it shared?
Rheingold suggests that ancient peoples couldn't to afford the squander the resources they had expended capturing the meat by allowing the surfeit to go rotten before it could be eaten. He also suggests that the emphasis on competition, as opposed to collaboration, is fairly recent and closely related to the growth of capitalism as a way of organising.
He maintains that there are numerous examples of collaboration and co-operation, and symbiosis, in the natural world, and that collaboration features, but is forgotten, in Darwin's Origin of the Species, as much as the idea of survival of the fittest.
I especially like his quote from the Inuit about how they manage surpluses, "the best storehouse is my neighbour's belly".
