LAUSR

Food media have long been recognized as cultural artifacts that reference culturallyand historically-specific ideals of gender, drawing on the simultaneously mundane and omniscient qualities of food as a medium for interrogating ideas about feminism and identity performance. The increasing popularity of food media throughout the 21 century, as well as the expansion of such media across a variety of genres and platforms, warrants an exploration of the feminist potential encoded within these media. In this Commentary and Criticism section, the authors introduce a diverse sample of case studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food media. Emily Contois explores the ways that celebrities navigate gendered performances through their engagement with hot sauce on the YouTube series Hot Ones. Alyxandra Vesey looks at singer Patti LaBelle’s food media output as a form of music merchandising, drawing on a history of food work being used to negotiate the parameters of female celebrity. Alexia Smit analyzes the show Siba’s Table, hosted by South African celebrity chef Siba Mtongana, as an example that exposes and challenges the Western bias and racial assumptions inherent to postfeminist food culture. Danielle Seid examines two ‘Asian auntie’ cooking web series which can be read as a feminist response to the racialized masculinity of popular Asian celebrity chef food media. Finally, Astrid Schwegler-Castañer discusses the gendered contradictions inherent to the Korean cultural phenomenon of muk-bang, a digital genre involving the live broadcasting of a person eating a large amount of food while interacting with viewers via chat. These essays serve as a reminder of the rich ways that social realities are created and challenged through making and sharing food. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1478689