Embodied Foodways

Abstract

The desire for a thin body has long been associated with elite cultural capital (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). It is connected to issues of self-restraint in dietary and sexual practices, as women’s bodies are considered in need of control (Inckle 2007). In Judeo-Christian ideology the duality central to Western morality focuses on the control of the body through fasting and chastity (Counihan 1999, 101–3). Hence, the links between food and sexuality have a long history of dualist and absolutist rhetoric that positions women as ‘other’ whose appetite for food and sex needs to be controlled.