Call for Manuscript/Chapters
For Edited Volume in Bloomsbury Publishers, Home Series
Co-Editors: Michelle Szabo, University of Toronto, Canada &
Shelley Koch, Emory & Henry College, Virginia, USA.
Food, Masculinities and Home
Volume Overview
Men’s involvement with and relationship to food and the household is becoming more prominent
in academic scholarship and popular culture. Both gay and straight men are cooking more at
home and have more responsibility for food provisioning as dual-earners, single men and single
fathers. Gay masculinities are opening up new ways of ordering domestic work, including food
work, and new ideas of fatherhood are redefining roles within the household. Men are also
prominently featured as food experts in food shows and other media outlets.
While these trends are evident, we believe there is a gap in the social scientific and humanities
literature on masculinities, food and home. In the literature on food and gender there is some
attention to how particular foods can symbolize or invoke feelings of “home”. However, given the
long-held associations between women and domestic work, the focus has been primarily on the
co-construction of femininity, motherhood and home through women’s cooking and feeding
practices. In the same vein, the literature on masculinity and space tends to centre on men’s
movements in, and associations with, public space. A small number of works on “masculine
domesticity” and “domestic masculinity” (Gorman-Murray 2008) is slowly emerging in response
to this gender-traditional focus. However, these works – mainly journal articles – give only
tangential attention (if any) to the role of food. A similar note can be made about explorations of
“home” beyond the domestic scale (e.g. local, national or virtual communities that provide
feelings of “home”).
This interdisciplinary, edited volume will fill the gap by exploring how food practices shape and
are shaped by masculinities and notions of “home” -- dwelling, place and space –- at both the
domestic and beyond-domestic scales. We envision a variety of approaches –- empirical,
theoretical, literary –- that interrogate or reveal the intersection of masculinities, food and the
home. Some general categories that might be covered include, but are certainly not limited to:
●
Studies that reveal changes or continuities in masculine domesticity
○ Cooking, cleaning up or disposing of food, shopping (food provisioning), eating
●
Images of masculinity, food and home in pop culture, media and food literature (e.g.
cookbooks, food magazines) and/or the extent to which these images are reproduced
empirically
●
Gender inequalities and heteronormativities in relation to home and to food

Masculine domesticity as “leisure” (versus female domesticity as “work”)
●
Home food as national, local, or individual identity
o Food as nostalgia, reminder or creator of home, including in cross-cultural or
migratory contexts
●
Food and masculinity in other types of “homes” – institutional or virtual places (e.g.
retirement homes, group homes, community spaces, intentional communities)
●
Food, care-work and masculinities
●
Market-based food work that connects to the household
○ Food preparation for home consumption as it relates to masculinities
We invite proposals about masculinities broadly defined to include not only masculinities
performed by straight and biologically male bodies, but gay, queer, trans, female and other
masculinities. Given the current prominence of white, middle class masculinities in the food
scholarship, we also encourage proposals about racialized and classed masculinities, as well as
masculinities from periphery countries outside what Connell calls “the metropole” (Connell 2007;
Messerschmidt 2012).
Larger questions we hope the book will address:
•
To what extent are gender hierarchies and heteronormativities being challenged by
contemporary practices? To what extent is masculine privilege being reiterated in new
guises?
•
To what extent are traditional gender hierarchies around foodwork (e.g. male cooking as
leisure, female cooking as care) and long held associations between women, food and
home breaking down?
•
To what extent are notions of “home” being masculinized? How is this done through food
practices?
•
To what extent are masculinities re-shaped by the increasing presence of biological men
and other male-identified people in kitchens and other food-focused spaces?
Proposed Chapters
Chapters will be a maximum of 7000 words (not including tables, charts, pictures, etc).
Manuscripts should avoid footnotes, endnotes and the use of Appendices. As this book is
intended to appeal to students and scholars from a variety of disciplines, chapters should be
clearly and accessibly written without excessive jargon. Contributors must secure permissions
and rights prior to submission of the final manuscript.
Proposals
Please provide a short prospectus for your proposed chapter (500-750 words). In addition,
attach a short bio/CV (two pages maximum), and email these documents to: skoch@ehc.edu
and michelle.szabo@utoronto.ca no later than March 1, 2014.
Editor Bios
Shelley Koch is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia,
USA. She is the author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict published
in 2012 by Berg/Bloomsburg Press. She has an article on the intersection of household food
decision-making and the economy which will appear in the January 2014 issue of The American
Journal of Economics and Sociology. Her research interests include food, gender, consumption
and the environment, and she is currently interviewing fathers about their role as household
food provisioners.
Michelle Szabo recently received her PhD from the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York
University, Canada, and is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Toronto as well as
Curriculum Designer in Sociology at Ryerson University. Her interests include masculinities and
foodwork; the sociology of food and cooking; ethical consumption; the division of labour; and
household food habits as they relate to health, sustainability and social justice in the food
system. She has published in Journal of Gender Studies; Women’s Studies International Forum;
Sociology; Food, Culture & Society; Journal of Consumer Culture; Sustainability; Agriculture &
Human Values and Encyclopedia of Food Issues.