Veg-gendered: a cultural study of gendered onscreen representations of food and their implications for veganism

This thesis is an exploration of popular media texts that influence veganism, with either explicit representations or implicit messages that implicate vegans. Research focuses on the question: How does the gendering of food in popular media texts implicate veganism? Theories used include a combination of cultural, film, and feminist studies, including Stuart Hall’s audience reception, Laura Mulvey's male gaze, R.W. Connell’s hegemonic masculinity, Carol Adams' feminist-vegetarian critical theory, and Rebecca Swenson's critical television studies. A print and television advertisement analysis demonstrates the gendering of food, and subject-object relationship of meat, women, and men. A film analysis of texts with vegan characters and horror film texts with implicit vegan and feminist messaging follows, thus revealing interesting trends and developments in the characterization of vegans on films, and hidden messages in the horror films studied. Lastly, an examination of competitive and instructional cooking shows ends the analysis, with interesting challenges to hegemony present in these television texts. The thesis concludes with examples of modem media feminizing veganism through food associations, the problematic imagery of women and meat as fetishized objects, along with challenges to hegemony that exist in some explicitly vegan texts.