Carole Counihan to Lecture on Gender and Food Activism

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., February 23, 2011 – Carole Counihan, leading scholar on food and gender, will visit Williams College on Monday, March 7, to give a lecture titled “Gender and Food Activism.” The event, which is part of the Gender and Food Series, will take place at 7 p.m. in Paresky Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

The literature on food and gender suggests several forces that may affect men’s and women’s participation in food activism, including women’s identification with feeding, the male-female division of food labor, gendered sensory, corporeal, and emotional relations to food, and gendered meetings surrounding food.

During the lecture, Counihan will explore the role of gender in food activism, considering the issue in a general sense as well as with respect to the Italian Slow Food movement. In Italian Slow Food chapters, men predominate in the central bureaucratic organization, but both women and men participate in the grassroots work. How might their gendered experiences with food in Italian culture contribute to or detract from the success of Slow Food’s efforts to promote good, clean, fair food?

Currently a professor of anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, Counihan has written and researched widely on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy since 2005, most recently working on the topic of her lecture, an ethnographic research project on the Italian Slow Food movement, which she began in the spring of 2009. This semester, she will spend time as a visiting professor in the gastronomy program at Boston University and at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia) in Italy.

Counihan is the author of “A Tortilla is Like Life: Food and  Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado” (2009), “Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence” (2004), and “The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power” (1999). She has also edited volumes titled “Food in the USA: A Reader” (2002) and two editions of “Food and Culture: A Reader” (1997, 2008). She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal “Food and Foodways.”

Counihan received her B.A. in history from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts.

“Gender and Food Activism,” along with other events in the Gender and Food Series, are co-sponsored by the Williams Sustainable Food and Agriculture Program and the women’s and gender studies department.

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Published February 23, 2011