anthropology writing -02

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Writing requirement:

Various articles this week have posited that gender is a cultural construction. This week's discussion will be divided into three parts. First, in one paragraph need to state your agreement or disagreement with gender as a cultural construction different than biological sex. In the following paragraph you should describe how gender is or isn't constructed or performed. This paragraph must be supported using two readings. In the next paragraph you need to describe how masculine norms are upheld through the ideal of science. You must also use two readings for this paragraph. You need to cite the readings according to your discipline including the last name of the author and page number of the edited volume we are reading. For example, (Counihan, 183). Finish with a short concluding statement.

In summary, please construct three paragraphs. The first on your agreement or disagreement over gender as a cultural construct separate from biology. No readings have to be cited here. Next you need to describe using two readings how gender is constructed (or isn't if you decided that gender isn't a cultural construct). The next paragraph should describe how science and constructions of masculinity are related using citations from two readings. The final paragraph can be short but should include a statement of your argument and supporting evidence.

Here is all this week's reading. No outside resources needed!!!! only use the resources that I provided.

“The Overcooked and Underdone” –T.J.M. Holden. FCR 119-137.“Domestic Divo?”

–Rebecca Swenson. FCR 137-153.“Japanese Mothers and Obentos”

–Anne Allison. FCR 154-172.

“Mexicanas’ Food Voice and Differential Consciousness” –

Carole Counihan. FCR 173-186.

“Feeding Hard Bodies”

–Fabio Parasecoli. FCR 284-298.

“Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption”

–Roland Barthes. FCR 23-30.“Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgmentof Taste”

–Pierre Bourdieu. FCR 31-39.“On the Move for Food”

–Deborah Barndt. FCR 472-484. “The Political Economy of Obesity”

–Alice Julier. FCR. 546-563.“Want Amid Plenty” –

Janet Poppendieck. FCR 563-571.

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Hegemony and Difference: Race, Class and Gender 9 More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken”: The Power of Race, Class, and Food in American Consciousness Psyche Williams-Forson 10 The Overcooked and Underdone: Masculinities in Japanese Food Programming T.J.M. Holden 11 Domestic Divo? Televised Treatments of Masculinity, Femininity, and Food Rebecca Swenson Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 12 Japanese Mothers and Obentōs: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus Anne Allison 13 Mexicanas’ Food Voice and Differential Consciousness in the San Luis Valley of Colorado Carole Counihan 14 Feeding Lesbigay Families Christopher Carrington 15 Thinking Race Through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market Rachel Slocum 16 The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine Dylan Clark Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 9 More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken”: The Power of Race, Class, and Food in American Consciousness* Psyche Williams-Forson Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. In 1999 HBO premiered Chris Rock’s stand-up comedy routine Bigger and Blacker. One of the jokes deals with what Rock humorously calls the “big piece of chicken.”1 Using wit, Chris Rock delivers a semi-serious treatise on parenting and marriage. First, he admonishes the audience for not recognizing that “a real daddy” receives little praise for “making the world a better place . . .” A man, or “daddy”, according to Rock, pays bills, provides food, and all of a family’s other necessities. Despite his efforts, he rarely receives any praise for his “accomplishments.” Although these tasks are clearly part and parcel of adult responsibilities, Rock ignores this truism in an effort to set up his commentary on the intersection of race, class, gender, and food. Continuing, he argues, “Nobody appreciates daddy . . .” By way of illustrating why a father needs and deserves such concern Rock points out that fathers work hard all day fighting against the stresses of life. Then a father— particularly an African American father—comes home to more stress: And what does daddy get for all his work? The big piece of chicken. That’s all daddy get is the big piece of chicken. That’s right. And some women don’t want to give up the big piece of chicken. Who the fuck is you to keep the big piece of chicken? How dare you keep the big piece of chicken! A man can’t work for 12 hours and come home to a wing! When I was a kid, my momma [would] lose her mind if one of us ate the big piece of chicken by accident. “What the fuck? You ate the big piece of chicken. Oh Lawd, no, no, no! Now I got to take some chicken and sew it up. Shit! Give me two wings and a poke chop. Daddy’ll never know the difference.”2 Chris Rock’s kind of humor has an extensive history as a form of black expressive culture. Physically, he walks back and forth on stage, bobbing and weaving as he shares different versions of his comic narrations, turning out stories from “everyday conversational talk.”3 Rock uses this form of performance or narrativizing to wage social commentary on a variety of issues including stereotypes of black people and chicken. When an artist uses stereotypes there are a number of factors that have to be considered including the purposes to which such oversimplifications are put. * Originally published 2008 Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 108 Psyche Williams-Forson Stated more plainly, the humor of Chris Rock makes us wonder about the subversive ways in which objects like food can be used to contest hegemonic representations of blackness and the ways in which performances of blackness reveal complicated aspects of identity. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Investigating Intersections As more or less correctly stated, there are roughly two methodological schools of thought when talking about African American foodways. There are those that focus on the food itself and its connections to the African Diaspora. Among them are historians of the American South (e.g., Karen Hess, Joe Gray Taylor and Sam Hilliard) and African American studies (e.g., Tracy Poe and Robert Hall), archeologists (e.g., Theresa Singleton and Anne Yentsch), geographer Judith Carney, anthropologist Tony Whitehead, and independent foodways scholars (e.g., Jessica Harris, Howard Paige, Joyce White, and Diane Spivey). Those who focus generally on the intersections of food and identity, representation, and/or contestation are literary scholars Anne Bower, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Doris Witt, and Rafia Zafar, sociologist William Whit, anthropologist Charles Joyner, and folklorist Patricia Turner; media specialist Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, and historians Kenneth Goings and M. M. Manring.4 My research into the realm of African American foods is not only about locating, identifying, and understanding the connections between foods but also the people who consume them. This approach goes beyond the theories that argue we are what we eat and the ways our foods reflect our cultural identity. Rather, the method I employ asks us to consider what we learn about African American life and culture by studying the intersections of food, gender, race, class, and power. How do African American historical, socioeconomic, and political spaces influence the foods that are consumed? How is this consumption a part of the performance of black class? Further-more, what do we learn about African Americans when black people willingly engage in perpetuating the oversimplified images or ideas that are sometimes held by the larger American society? Black people have long been engaged in ideological warfare involving food, race, and identity. Most commonly known are the stereotypes concerning black people’s consumption of fried chicken and watermelon. Though these stereotypes have been around for centuries they are still pervasive in the contemporary American psyche. Consider, for instance, the numerous postcards, invitations, and other ephemera that illustrate African American men, women, and children with watermelon. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins suggests the need to be attuned to the ways in which processes of power underlie social interactions and are involved in the process of external definition. These definitions can be challenged, however, through the process of “self-definition.” The acts of “challenging the political knowledgevalidation process that result[s] in externally defined stereotypical images . . . can be unconscious or conscious acts of resistance.”5 One engages in the process of selfdefinition by identifying, utilizing, and more importantly, redefining symbols—like chicken or watermelon—that are commonly affiliated with African Americans. By doing this, black people refuse to allow the wider American culture to dictate Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken” 109 what represents their expressive culture and thereby what represents blackness. But this process of defining one’s self is fraught with complications and complexities particularly if the group fails to understand or acknowledge that there is a power structure at work behind the creation of common affiliations, labels, or stereotypes. Collins explains these complications further in her delineation of self-valuation or the replacement of negative images with positive ones. This process of replacement can be equally as problematic as the original external definition if we fail to understand and to recognize the stereotype as a controlling image. This concept is perhaps best illustrated by the example of Chris Rock’s comedy that opens this essay. Though I will return to Rock’s funny side later, Collins’ caution is registered here. The exchange of one set of controlling images for another does little to eradicate the defining image itself. Consequently, black people need to be clear about the ways in which historical, social, political, and economic contexts have established reductionist narratives and how these accounts are embedded in food. One way that blacks can both deal with these narratives and gain independence from them is to begin by taking a close look at the historical basis of various food stereotypes. These stereotypes tend to be distorted portrayals of those cultural behaviors that are and have been used in order to diminish black personal and collective power. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Stereotypes Abound Stereotypes involving black people have been around for years. Indeed, they continue to exist.6 Elsewhere I argue extensively for the partial evolution of some of these stereotypes as ideologies shaped from laws and ordinances passed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7 It was and continues to be my contention that these depictions partly emerged as a way to control the economic gains of enslaved and free men and women who bartered and traded in the marketplace. Historians often cite newspaper articles, court documents, and travelers’ accounts among other critical sources detailing information on early African and African American entrepreneurs of food. Nineteenth-century travelers’ diaries, for example, indicate “flocks of poultry [were] numerous” and, “there are very few [slaves] indeed who are denied the privilege of keeping dunghill fowls, ducks, geese, and turkeys.” Moreover, some black people would often sit by the wharf for days on end waiting to buy foods like chicken and then sell them for exorbitant prices.8 Historian Philip Morgan notes a similar practice whereby some travelers would instruct their stewards to hold in reserve various foods like bacon so they would have bartering power with “the Negroes who are the general Chicken Merchants [sic].”9 As with any encroachment, the bartering and trading by African Americans ushered in a slew of regulations that sought to limit items being sold door-to-door and in the market. To be sure the ambiguous ownership of goods prior to sale was one of the many reasons for stalling and halting the sale of goods. Foods were not supposed to be sold prior to passing through the town gates, and in particular customers were not supposed to purchase goods whose ownership might be difficult to trace. This included items such as chickens, which were often sold outside the market. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 110 Psyche Williams-Forson Archeologist Anne Yentsch maintains that foods such as oysters, salted fish in large barrels or casks, cattle, sheep, and hogs that were alive could easily be traced because they were by-and-large produced by small farmers.10 Chickens, on the other hand were far harder to pinpoint. Even though several blacks had chickens their masters and neighboring farms had them as well. Sometimes these birds roamed freely and thus were traded or sold in an effort to obtain more favorable goods. Often times, especially during the colonial era, it was difficult to ascertain the exact origins of a bird. Except among the wealthy, most chickens during that time were not kept in hen houses. Chicken and fowl were free to roam finding food and shelter wherever possible, an issue that easily lends support to the charge of theft. Additionally, there was no widespread formalized system of breeding in early America when many Africans and Native Americans were engaged in bartering. Consequently, it was difficult to distinguish most common fowl from one another with the exception of certain kinds of partridges, pheasant, and hens. This reality, however, did little to hinder the accusations of theft, which were not only levied against slaves but also free blacks and fugitives. These claims were fueled by black people’s use of trading practices like forestalling, which legal ordinances did little to reduce. According to the South Carolina Gazette, one writer complained that almost on a daily basis, black women could be found huckstering and forestalling “poultry, fruit, eggs,” and other goods “in and near the Lower Market . . . from morn till night,” buying and selling what and how they pleased to obtain money for both their masters and themselves. Often times their prices were exorbitant and they would use all kinds of marketing strategies to choose which white people to sell to and for how much.11 Robert Olwell captures this point when he explains: “as slaveholders, Carolina whites felt that slaves should be generally subordinate, but as property holders and capitalists they also had to recognize the legitimacy of the market in which sellers had the right to seek the highest price for their goods.”12 Many whites viewed blacks with “great prejudice” when they sought to engage in capitalist enterprises. Under slavery’s oppression, blacks, regardless of their status, were to be subordinate at all times. Any deviation from this norm was a threat to the social order that had been systematically and institutionally constructed over time. Consequently, any element of freedom recognized and enjoyed by black people, and particularly women, was an affront to white social power. Lawrence McDonnell explains it this way: “The marketplace . . . is a neutral zone, a threshold between buyer and seller . . . . Master and slave confronted each other at the moment of exchange as bearers of commodities, stripped of social dimensions . . . [this] linked black sellers with White buyers, and hence with White society, not only by assertion of black humanity but through White objectification. Slaves appeared here equally purposeful as Whites.”13 Money and a small measure of market power assaulted the charade played out during slavery that sought to convince black people that freedom would never come. Attributing black economic gain to theft helped to perpetuate the travesty. By attributing stealing by slaves to an inherent nature rather than a condition of their circumstances (or even to a performance of sorts), slave owners were able to deflect attention from their own participation in this aspect of slave victimization. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken” 111 Morally, it was much better to believe that slaves were natural thieves than to believe that the institution of enslavement contributed to their larceny. Clearly there is some truth to the claim that slaves engaged in thievery; the extent to which this was the case, however, is rooted in white patriarchal ideology.14 Though devoid of a disposition toward theft, some slaves did engage in pilfering and stealing. Some scholars however, have referred to these acts as skill and cunning. Eugene Genovese’s study of African American life and culture, suggests this when he writes, “for many slaves, stealing from their own or other masters became a science and an art, employed as much for the satisfaction of outwitting Ole’ Massa as anything else.”15 In Weevils in the Wheat, for example, ex-slave Charles Grandy tells that hunger was a motivating factor for stealing food. He says, “I got so hungry I stealed chickens off de roos’ . . . . We would cook de chicken at night, eat him an’ bu’n de feathers . . . . We always had a trap in de floor fo’ de do’ to hide dese chickens in.”16 This is just one example of African American trickster heroism that not only reflects a kinship to African traditions but also views this type of behavior as both morally acceptable and necessary for survival. At the same time, it is a subversive cultural form that uses humor in its expression. John Roberts’ point about early African Americans should be registered here: “Given the desperate and oppressive circumstances under which they lived, enslaved Africans could not be overly concerned with the masters’ definition of ‘morality’ of behaviors that enhanced their prospects for physical survival and material well-being. The task that they confronted, however, was how to make such individually devised solutions to a collective problem function as a behavior strategy for the group without endangering their adaptability or the physical well-being of members of their community.”17 Although the oppressive circumstances of today are nowhere near those of enslavement, the delicate balance of performing individual behavior and yet not suffering collective consequences is still applicable. Teasing out this sense of balance and its complications might become more apparent as I discuss African American performances of stereotypes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The South suffered a devastating loss of free labor with the end of the Civil War and migrations of newly freed blacks; it found itself in a precarious situation. Its infrastructure was suffering economically, politically, socially, culturally, and physically. Suddenly, the millions of freed blacks became an overwhelming problem. What about their rights? Would they be given rights? How and to what end? How would white Southerners keep their subordinates in line? Was this even possible anymore? These and many other questions played themselves out on the political landscapes of the day. But they were also played out on cultural playing fields as well. According to historian Kenneth Goings, the loss of control over black people registered such a blow among white Southerners that they began using emerging technology as one means of reasserting control and reclaiming power.18 Advancing technology, namely the camera, was useful for depicting African Americans—men, women, boys, and girls—as visually conciliatory. As Grant McCracken intimates, such illustrations were useful for alleviating some of the “nervous prostration” brought on by the rapid changes of the time. Goods and commodities were used in an effort to alleviate some of the distress caused by the Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 112 Psyche Williams-Forson social, political, economic, and cultural transformations.19 Goods were particularly useful for helping individuals contemplate the “possession of an emotional condition, a social circumstance, even an entire lifestyle” by making desires concrete.20 These illustrations, or commodities of racism, were coveted possessions. They enabled their owners not only to possess the physical object but also to mentally covet the pastoral image of the gallant South that whites wished to maintain. This interpretation is certainly not the only reason that people might have purchased these kinds of photos. But for sure these images and their owners were complicit in spreading the network of racial power. What quickly emerged through this visual communication was an ideology of black inferiority, which assisted in the formulation of racist stereotypes. These stereo-types were perpetuated by advertisements, trading cards, sheet music and stereoviews like that which illustrates an African American baby in a buggy, caption reading: “When I Dit Big, ‘Oo’ll Have to Roost Hiah.” This, and countless other images are clearly staged as if to appear natural. More than likely it was the case of African Americans performing to stay alive. From the thieving child, to the salacious lover of white hens, African Americans—particularly men and boys—were constantly ridiculed; more often than not it was centered on the stereotypical image of the coon. Kenneth Goings, whose study Mammy and Uncle Mose historicizes the cultural and political economy of black collectibles, maintains that the coon image was one of the most offensive stereotypes. M. L. Graham used this coon motif as the mascot for his little-known “Coon Chicken Inn” restaurants. The emblem, a black-faced man with large, extended red lips, was typically symbolic of how whites would stereotype black people with food to endorse various products like fried chicken. Considered a most effective advertising technique, images like these reinforced the stereotypical Old South/New South myth of the loyal, happy servant just waiting to be used by the master—and now the consumer. The restaurant with all of its accoutrements became a metaphor for whites using and discarding black service. When the meal is complete, the napkins, plates and utensils bearing the black-faced logo are discarded and along with it any remnant of the serviceable “darker” that is no longer needed or desired. This act of symbolic and physical disposal provided whites with what Goings describes in a similar discussion as a sense of “racial superiority” and a “therapeutic sense of comfort.”21 Manipulating these objects of material culture enabled white Americans not only to forge an alliance across class lines, but also to more collectively subjugate and vilify black people. The ideology of black inferiority provided a safeguard for white America during a time when their racial, economic, and political balance was perceived as unstable and threatened. Unfolding against this backdrop, are the numerous ways that food becomes interlaced with discourses of power, race, class, and gender in American consciousness. Chicken, for example, which was once championed as a celebrated food of the South prepared by some of the best culinary talent turns into an object of ridicule and defacement. Chicken—both the bird and the food—is fraught then, with paradoxes in the contexts of the historical and economic circumstances of the South. On the one hand, black consumption of chicken was seen as normative; on the other hand, this Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken” 113 consumption was also perceived as negative. The issue is made more complex when we read chicken—the food—as a cultural text. Fried chicken, a largely southern food that emerged out of social institutions shaped by racial complexities, is one of many foods that blurs the lines between the “symbolic separations [of] those who prepare the food and those who consume it.”22 Black women were widely credited with lining “Southern groaning boards.” This was their rightful place as loyal cooks—a cultural demarcation that became necessary for symbolically separating the domestic rituals of the South. Black women prepared and cooked fried chicken for white families but they did not consume it; and, thereby they maintained the purity of southern cuisine. Mentally, this belief was important for reinforcing the necessary symbolic distance between cook and consumer. This configuration is made problematic and complicated, however, by the insistence that black people are zealous about their consumption of fried chicken. What becomes necessary then are carefully coded words and messages. Namely, the word Southern becomes coded for white, while “soul food” is decoded as black. Diane Spivey has labeled this coding phenomenon, “Whites Only Cuisine.” She says: Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. The end of the [Civil] war also signaled the beginning of the redefining of southern White heritage. Food was a factor in the efforts of southern White elites to hold on to their old way of life. Cooking and cuisine were remade to look uniquely southern . . . . Asserting that the recipes were “southern” made [their] cookbooks exclusionary, and therefore racist, because the cookbooks and recipes contained therein were heralded as the creations of the elite southern White women. In an attempt to promote southern White culture, therefore, the concept of “southern cooking” started out as Whites Only Cuisine.23 Given the mass exchange of foods and food habits that occurred between early Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans it is almost impossible for one group or another to claim any recipe as original or native to their culture. With the ebb and flow of people across continents, regions, and lands come vast amounts of mutual exchange resulting in multi-amalgamations between and among cultures and foods changing and evolving over time. The intersections of food with power and other variables enable a reading of the ways in which the idea of blackness as performance boldly emerges. As I have discussed thus far, since their arrival in this country, Africans and Africans born in America have been performing race in myriad ways. Long after the auction block performance African Americans engaged in other racial acts like participating in staged photographs and witnessing their recipes being usurped. A good many of these performances of racial roles for survival involved food. Part of understanding the food and foodways of African Americans asks that we also question what all of these performances had to do with blackness and issues of identity? And how has agency been a part of the performance of this blackness? Turning back to Chris Rock’s comedic discussion of the “big piece of chicken” helps us to think a bit more about these questions. In the vignette that opens this essay Chris Rock is explaining how the children of an African American family have eaten the “big piece of chicken” even though they are aware that this piece of meat belongs to their father. In the comedy, Rock makes manhood and fatherhood synonymous with the right to have the largest piece of Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 114 Psyche Williams-Forson chicken not simply as a reward but as a right. Rock argues that this is the father’s just portion because “daddy can’t work all day and come home to a wing.” Implied, of course, is the fact that because the father leaves the home to work and engages in a number of anxieties outside the home, he therefore deserves all of the praise— including culinary recompense. On the surface one could argue that this routine is simply another of Rock’s treatises on the ills of society. Every race of people can identify with this scenario— one of the many aspects of Rock’s performances that endear him to diverse audience members. However, my contention is that this scene is multifaceted. Rock is, in effect, performing blackness in ways that can be described as both subversive as well as oppressive, rendering this piece to be about more than “the big piece of chicken.” Rock is dissident in that, more or less, he follows the basic formula of delivering an African American trickster folktale. Consider, for example, Jacob Stoyer’s slave narrative, Sketches of My Life in the South, wherein he tells a story of man named Joe and how he outsmarted the master’s wife, Mrs. King. According to the story, Joe killed and dressed a turkey that belonged to the King family. In his haste to get the bird into a pot without being caught, he neglected to cut it leaving its knees to stick out of the pot. To hide his thievery, Joe threw one of his shirts over the pot. When Joe failed to respond to the calling of Mr. King, Mrs. King came into the kitchen to inquire of his whereabouts. Discovering the theft, which Joe declined to know anything about, she saw to it that Joe was punished for “allowing the turkey to get into the pot.”24 The point here is the way in which Joe was able to dupe, if only briefly, the King family. The larger issue is the momentary reversal of power executed by Joe in his performance as a “dumb slave.” Similarly, Rock manages to dupe both white and black audience-goers who usually have paid a somewhat hefty price to enjoy a laugh. By performing racist, sexist, and otherwise problematic comedies Rock proffers the illusion that he buys into these notions as truisms. In doing so, he is a relative trickster, perpetuating the racist perception of black people as chicken lovers.25 But as E. Patrick Johnson argues, “blackness does not only reside in the theatrical fantasy of the White imaginary that is then projected onto black bodies. Nor is blackness always consciously acted out. It is also the inexpressible yet undeniable racial experience of black people—the ways in which the ‘living of blackness’ becomes a material way of knowing.”26 Among black audiences then, it is not surprising that Rock’s performances are laudatory and celebratory. Many watch the performances of him and other comedians and laugh uproariously knowing that much of what is being performed has all kinds of negative implications. Yet, there is something to be said for these dramatic interludes, which often make audiences momentarily forget about their troubles. The very fact of the matter is that these comedians are enjoyed precisely because they engage in the slipperiness of black cultural politics. Part of this slipperiness derives from another suggestion offered by Johnson: “The interanimation of blackness and performance and the tension between blackness as ‘play’ and material reality further complicates the notion of what . . . ‘playing black’ is and what ‘playing black’ ain’t.” Rock engages this question of “black is/black ain’t” with his audiences. With white audiences he leads them into thinking that he is performing what “black is” as he mocks, mimics, and ridicules black people. With black Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken” 115 audiences, he relies upon a number of “in-group” techniques to offer black audiences comic relief while simultaneously playing to a number of ‘truth claims.’27 Later, using a similar coded performance as the trickster hero in African American folktales, Rock turns the tables on this segment of the audience using the rhetoric of race, class, and gender. The art of verbal play has always been a vehicle of self-expression for black men and women, although women have only recently been recognized as engaging in such. Rock understands the role of signifying in the black community and employs it well in his routines. From Rock’s references to the fact that daddy experiences stress all day from working in a “white world,” we can assume that daddy feels little or no economic power. Consequently, in order to establish his manhood, he needs to assert his authority at home. One of the ways he is able to affirm his household status is by eating the “big piece of chicken.” Here the chicken functions metaphorically and literally as a source and a reflection of masculine power. Rock’s subtle explication of this power enables him to dupe his black audience-goers—particularly the women. Using children as the catalyst, Rock creates the scenario of mama as a culinary artist. After her children consume the forbidden big piece of chicken, she is able to flawlessly recreate it by expertly sewing together two wings and a pork chop. In addition to all of the other work mama has done during the day—caring for children, running a household, cooking and other chores—she now has to make up for the fact that one of her children has eaten the wrong piece of chicken: “Oh Lawd, no, no, no! Now I got to take some chicken and sew it up. Shit! Give me two wings and a poke chop. Daddy’ll never know the difference.”28 The challenge posed by this situation is perhaps the cause for Rock acknowledging, “Now mama got the roughest job, I’m not gonna front.” Denying daddy his rightful portion is a measure of disrespect that will surely bring wrath upon the children. To avoid this mama tries to make amends. Mama then has not only procured, prepared, and presented the food, she now has to alter and re-prepare the meal while simultaneously protecting her children. After all of this, mama will undoubtedly have to “do a jig” so that daddy does not recognize her necessary handiwork. She then will have to placate him if he discovers the ruse. The discussion of mama’s incredible talents is double-edged because while plentiful, her culinary and household ingenuity must not be celebrated because to do so would reveal that daddy is eating something less than the “big piece of chicken.” Equally problematic is that it has gone unnoticed that while mama is not in the paid work force, she is nonetheless very much involved in a system of work. Her work, unfortunately, is largely domestic, economically undervalued, and from the standpoint of this example, aesthetically unappreciated. Because even though mama has created another large portion for daddy she cannot speak of it because it will only make daddy feel that he gets little for all his “hard work.” Unspoken are the stories of mama’s day of work, her troubles, and her battles—many of which are represented symbolically by the chicken. It is not surprising that Rock would gender his discussion to include some kind of praise of a mother’s culinary abilities. As Pamela Quaggiotto notes, “the mother determines when, what, and how much family members will eat . . . . She controls the symbolic language of food, determining what her dishes and meals will say Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 116 Psyche Williams-Forson about herself, her family, and world.”29 And yet his depictions of “mama” are both enlightening and baffling for what they seem to reveal/hide about Rock’s gender and racial agenda. Clearly the parody and humor of this situation are evident. Though the audience knows it is a joke, there is uncertainty over whether mama’s work is being praised or ridiculed. Moreover, there are the questions of whether or not Rock is waging some sort of commentary on racial stereotypes involving black people and chicken. For example, it is significant to note that Rock never specifies whether the chicken is fried or baked. In fact, he does not have to because he relies upon a certain amount of a priori knowledge that assumes that chicken eating in the company of black people means “fried.” Comforted by the fact that black audience members bring to bear their own life experiences and cultural memories surrounding food and thus know what “black is” and “black ain’t” he is able to launch into his dramatization. Maybe it is a similar comfort and ease that Rock attends to when at the end of the routine he admonishes women to remember their “proper” place in dealing with men. Undoubtedly many in the audience see mama’s work as a labor of love that is taken for granted, not needing any particular recognition. In fact, Rock half-heartedly suggests this when he implies that daddy has the primary responsibilities in the household. As if rethinking this assertion, Rock soon after backtracks by supplying his one line of praise for mama. Despite all of this backpedaling, by the end of his show Rock is clear about his direction as he definitively reinstates his masculinist stance. He closes his performance with: “Women talk too much. They always want you to be listenin.’ Let a man get situated! Let me get my other foot in the door! Let me get somethin’ to eat. Let me get somethin’ to drink! Let me take a shit! Go in the fuckin’ kitchen and get me my big piece of chicken!” Having said this, Rock drops the mike and struts off the stage amid the cheers and shouts of approval from men—and women.30 Food objects are useful for elucidating the type of obscurities revealed by this kind of close reading. Additionally, they are politicized by the meanings inscribed in their uses and associations historically and contemporarily. This is particularly salient to an article like chicken that is perceived to be generic in its uses among all races and ethnicities of people. The meanings that chicken holds for black people are as diverse as its members. But when chicken is placed in various contexts alongside performances of power and race then it is plentiful for what it reveals beyond being a portion of food. This essay has attempted to illustrate the importance of moving beyond studying merely the foods of various cultures to include the behaviors, actions, contexts, and histories that involve them. As this article has also suggested foods like chicken, that have been used to stereotype African American people, are often actually undergirded by intersecting variables of race, gender, class, and power. This fact, perhaps more than any other, lends credence to the notion that food is always about more than what it seems. Notes 1. For a more detailed analysis of this particular routine of Chris Rock’s see Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006), 178–185. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken” 117 2. Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker. 3. Geneva Smitherman, “The Chain Remain the Same: Communicative Practices in the Hip Hop Nation.” Journal of Black Studies 28, 1 (September 1997): 3–25. 4. Though in no way this dichotomous, most of these scholars can be roughly divided into these categories, as Krishnendu Ray observes. See book review by Ray, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, in Food & Foodways, 15:1–6, 2007. Also see African American Foodways: Explorations of History & Culture, Ed. Anne Bower (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 5. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): 516–517. 6. African Americans have long been caricatured as brand mascots for various food and household products. For example, a grinning black chef named Rastus was used to represent Cream of Wheat hot cereal and a pair of black children who were known as the Gold Dust Twins, were used to advertise soap powder. In addition to the now infamous Aunt Jemima, who sold pancake mix, there have been numerous other grinning black women who were “Jemima-like” that were used to sell fried chicken, shortening, and cookware. It also should be noted that other races and ethnicities have also been stereotyped where food is concerned. First there was Frito Bandito, who spoke in an exaggerated Mexican accent and then there was the Chihuahua who muttered ¡Yo Quiero Taco Bell! In March 2007 Masterfoods USA, a unit of Mars Foods attempted to hoist the stereotypical depiction of “Uncle Ben” from servant to chairman of the board. The attempt was met with mixed success. See Stuart Elliott, “Uncle Ben, Board Chairman.” The New York Times. 30 March 2007, C1. 7. For a more lengthy discussion see Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, in particular chapters 1 and 2. See also Williams-Forson, “ ‘Suckin’ the Chicken Bone Dry’: African American Women, Fried Chicken, and the Power of a National Narrative.” In Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food. Ed. Sherrie Inness. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 200–214. 8. Anne E. Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 242. 9. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1998), 359. 10. Yentsch, 245. 11. Quoted in Robert Olwell, “ ‘Loose, Idle, and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace.” In More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, Eds., David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): 97–110. See also, Yentsch, 242–243; Phillip Morgan, 368–372. 12. Olwell, 102. 13. McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master: Market Relations and the American Slave Community.” In Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society, ed., Winfred B. Moore, Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler, Jr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988): 31–44. 14. Lichtenstein, “ ‘That Disposition to Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded’: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law.” Journal of Social History 21 (1989): 413–40. 15. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, Inc., 1976), 606. 16. Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, Eds. Weevils in the Wheat (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 116. 17. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989): 33. Lawrence Levine also establishes connections between the African American trickster and the acquisition of food. See “The Slave as Trickster,” in Black Culture, Black Consciousness. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–133. 18. Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4–7. 19. Grant McCracken’s discussion is a good one on the ways in which consumer goods helped to preserve hopes and ideals during the Victorian era. See “The Evocative Power of Things,” Culture and Consumption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 104. 20. McCracken, 110. 21. Ibid., 47. 22. Mary Titus, “ ‘Groaning Tables and Spit in the Kettles’: Food and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Southern Quarterly 20, no. 2–3 (1992), 15. 23. Diane M. Spivey, “Economics, War, and the Northern Migration of the Southern Black Cook,” in The Peppers, Crackling, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 263. 24. See Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life, Sketches of My Life in the South. Part I. 1849–1908. Salem: Salem Press (1879). Documenting the American South: The Southern Experience in Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Lee Ann Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 118 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. Morawski and Natalia Smith (2001). Academic Affairs Lib., U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (June 1, 2007). Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, 176–181. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. Patricia Turner and Gary Alan Fine suggest that when rumors and/or stereotypes are based on information that could be correct it is considered a truth-claim. Truth claims contain a certain amount of “cultural logic” because they make “cultural sense” (i.e. all black people eat fried chicken) even though no systemic, definitive evidence exists in which to substantiate them. Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 18. Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker. Videocassette. HBO Studios (1999). Pamela Quaggiotto as quoted in Carole M. Counihan, “Female Identity, Food, and Power in Contemporary Florence,” Anthropological Quarterly 61 (1988): 52. It is quite easy to become overcome with laughter by Rock’s prose and delivery. The immediacy and dramatic nature of the moment invite this response. It is only later, once you have had a chance to relive the scene that one might realize the sexism inherent in both the rhetoric and the performance as Rock leaves the stage seemingly in command, having said all that he has had to say. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 30. Psyche Williams-Forson Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 10 The Overcooked and Underdone: Masculinities in Japanese Food Programming* Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. T. J. M. Holden** To the Western ear, the phrase “Japanese food show” will likely conjure images of teams of smocked chefs hustling through a rangy in-studio kitchen, racing the clock, concocting ingenious ways to prepare a particular ingredient, thereby pleasing a panel of judges and defeating a crafty culinary rival. In fact, though, food battles are only one genre of food show in Japan; a genre, itself, that is widely represented on television. Moreover, battles are but one way that gender and, in this particular case, masculinities are expressed in Japanese culinary TV. Stated another way, on Japanese television, food shows are manifest—even ubiquitous—and food is a dominant means by which identity discourse transpires (Holden 2003).1 While masculinity is but one component of identity, it is a major one. It is a discursive formation that emerges prominently at various turns in TV food shows, in multiple ways. This article’s purpose is to demonstrate the degree to which discourse about masculinity courses through Japanese food shows. So, too, does it seek to open for consideration the communication architecture and set of codes through which masculinities are expressed. This is important for at least two reasons: first, because it has not been done before; and second, because (not unlike the false perception that Iron Chef is representative of the universe of Japanese food shows) prevailing assumptions about Japanese masculinity are similarly truncated. The paltry range of masculinities depicted on culinary TV must be said to play a part in that. For the most part, masculinity is a narrow, repetitive discourse; hence, the “overcooked” in this article’s title. What is underdone is both ironic and intriguing. First, the salary-man—the prototypical version of Japanese masculinity—is virtually invisible; secondly, although a wide range of male characterizations (that is, fashions and mannerisms and lifestyles) may be on display, the actual range of masculinities represented on TV is close to nil. Despite the fact that a more protean set of representations concerning masculinity exist as social text out in the world beyond the screen, inside the box, these masculinities are, like the salaryman, incapable of being found. * Originally published 2005 Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 120 T. J. M. Holden Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Japanese Masculinity in the Academic Literature What are the prevailing assumptions about Japanese masculinity? Until recently, discourse was nearly univocal, confined to the social type, “salaryman.” The urban, middle class, white-collar worker has remained a relatively uncontested figure in both academic literature and public consciousness. Emblematic of the “typical” Japanese male since the 1960s (e.g., Vogel 1963; Plath 1964), this caricature persisted relatively unabated into the 1990s (e.g., Rohlen 1974; Allison 1994). Now, however, that image is beginning to change. As Roberson and Suzuki (2003:8) recently observed, the salaryman is but an idealized version of Japanese masculinity. Its wide currency may be explained because it articulates other powerful “discursive pedagogies,” such as the capitalist employee, state taxpayer and family provider. The authors cite Ito (1996), who has argued that past conceptions of Japanese masculinity have been driven by views of hegemony and, in particular, three “inclinations” characterize the dominant discourse concerning masculinity.2 These inclinations, identified as (interpersonal) authority, power, and possession (especially in relation to women), obviously align easily with conceptions of men as workers, members of power structures, protectors, and “bread-winners.” Importantly, Roberson and Suzuki assert, the salaryman is not the sole version of masculine identity in contemporary Japan. Indeed, there are numerous discourses available regarding what is “male” in contemporary Japan.3 Such a critique is consistent with a general, quiet revisionism that has transpired in Japanese studies over the past two decades; one that has alleged greater heterogeneity in Japanese identity.4 The unitary image of masculine identity in the form of salaryman reflects an association of masculinity with particular institutional sites (for instance, inside corporation or outside home). This has been a standard, unreflecting, academic trope during the post-Pacific War era. It is also (coincidentally) consistent with the way Hall (1994) has theorized that identity ought to be decoded (i.e., within institutional contexts). For most researchers of Japanese masculine identity, those institutional contexts have centered on the state, the workplace, and the school (Connell 1995). By inversion (i.e., reflecting a relative absence or exclusion), the institution of family (and its locus, the home) can also be included in gender-identity discourse.5 Perhaps in reaction to the institutional emphasis, Roberson and Suzuki’s volume is rich with alternatives: civil movements, transnational information flows, transgender practices, day-laborers. Non-institutional theorization of identity is an important maneuver, but does not minimize the importance of institutions in bounding, framing, and providing meaning to contemporary identity. This is particularly true in an era of “reflexive modernization” (Robertson 1992; Beck 1994), constituted by “late modern” or “post-traditional” societies (Giddens 1994), such as Japan. In this article, in particular, it is the media institution (generally) and television (specifically) through which masculine identity is found to flow. As shown in my previous work on “mediated identity” (2003), such formal institutional sites are heavily implicated in the gender-identity calculus.6 In a word, media (such as television) are institutions— no different than the state, corporation, or family—that provide the ideational and “physical” context within which masculinity is represented and through which it is reproduced. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 121 In this article, I explore one genre within this institutional site of television communication in Japan: food discourse. Surveying this content, one soon learns that Japanese masculinities are both on-message and beyond-message vis-à-vis past academic framings. Consistent with what has heretofore been alleged about masculine identity in Japan, there is a widespread hegemonic masculinity on display. At the same time (and significantly), that hegemonic masculinity is not played out through the aegis of the corporate worker. Despite the pervasive expression of masculine identity through food talk, and despite the fact that such identity tends to be hegemonic in nature, there is nary a salaryman to be found. Japan’s televisual masculinity is singularly hegemonic, yet it is not confined to a particular model or “type” of person. It is communicated through any number of people—both male and female (as we shall see), people who are both conventional and unconventional in appearance, job designation, or background. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Japanese Television and Food Discourse: A Précis All of this is important because television is the preeminent medium of communication in Japan. It has a diffusion rate of 100%,7 is viewed by virtually every Japanese person every day,8 and outpaces other popular forms of information processing, such as newspapers (86%), cell phones (73%), and the internet (27%). It has been reported that, on average, at least one TV set plays 7 to 8 hours a day in each Japanese dwelling, with personal viewing rates per day approaching 225 minutes.9 A recent European survey ranks Japan second worldwide in terms of daily TV viewership.10 While television is dominant, one might wish to argue that food is not. A conservative accounting—based on genres reported in television guides—suggests that TV food shows comprise but 5% of programming between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. The reality, though, is quite different. Begin with the fact that, unlike other countries (in which food shows are generally confined to specialty cable channels, or else a particular hour on a particular day), Japan’s food shows can be found on at least one commercial station during “golden time”11 on multiple days of the week. In past years, there has been either a food-themed show or a show with a regular food segment every day of the week in prime time. The best current embodiment is “Dochi no Ryāri Syou” (Which?! Cooking Show). Now in its seventh season, it is a highly rated Thursday night offering from 9 to 10 p.m. In this show, seven entertainers must choose between two dishes prepared before their eyes by rival chefs from a prestigious cooking academy. The guests are allowed to sample the food and are given a chance to change “sides” if or when their preferences for the respective dishes shift. Their decisions are often influenced by two hosts—both popular male TV fixtures, one in his late 40s, the other in his early 60s—who interview chefs, cajole the guests, and make impassioned appeals for their support. Dochi also serves as a window on the world, with segments on the people and places associated with one of the key ingredients in each dish: a fisherman, for instance, a dairy farmer, or cabbage grower, all toiling away in their respective remote corners of Japan. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. 122 T. J. M. Holden In addition to shows that are exclusively about food, a number of golden hour variety shows feature regular segments built around food. For instance, SMAPXS-MAP— now in its sixth year and hosted by Japan’s premier “boys band” (SMAP)—includes a “Bistro” segment in which an invited guest (generally a female entertainer) is welcomed into the bistro by the “owner” (generally SMAP’s lead singer Masahiro Nakai), interviewed about her life and career, then eats (and judges) rather elaborate, multicourse meals prepared by competing teams (which are comprised of SMAP pairs).12 The popular, Thursday night variety show Tonnerus’ Minasan no Okage Deshita (Tunnel’s: Because of Everyone’s Good Will) offers a weekly segment in which two guests—usually one male and one female—are invited to sit alongside one member of the (male) comedy duo, Tonnerus. Both guests are served four dishes, which they must consume while being interviewed about the food as well as their life histories. Free discussion and casual banter co-mingle with on-camera consumption. At the end of the show, all four participants vote as to which dish the guests consumed and pretended to enjoy, but in actuality detested. Gotchi Battaru is a third show in which food plays an important, entertaining role. It is actually an elaborate segment of another show, the Friday evening variety hour, Guru Guru Ninety-Nine. Four regulars (comedians, usually, and all men) travel each week to a different top-rated (and pricey) restaurant and try to guess the price of a set of dishes prepared for them. An invited guest from the entertainment world accompanies them.13 After all individual estimates are summed, the guest farthest from the price of the entire meal must pay for everyone. Cumulative, weekly totals are also kept and posted on the show’s web site, listing how many times each regular has lost, and how far in arrears he is. Discussion during the show is balanced between good-natured ribbing of individual guestimates, information about how the food is prepared, and comments about how each dish tastes. These are four examples of food discourse on Japanese TV, reflective of a larger pool of shows in which food plays either a primary or secondary role. Factor in the number of shows in which food appears in an ancillary role (for instance, during morning “wake-up” programs that discuss urban culinary trends or local village festivals, or else travel shows that present the foods of target destinations that can be consumed) and the percentage of food-related discourse on Japanese television increases exponentially. This description does not even begin to tap the great reservoir of “inadvertent food discourse” in which food serves as an incidental, but prominent background feature during dramas, quiz shows, newscasts, sporting events, and the like. Finally, one must not forget the ubiquitous presence of food advertising on TV, which has been found to account for as much as 20% of all ads broadcast in a one month period (Holden 2001).14 All considered, it is impossible to view food discourse as a trivial or negligible element in Japanese televisual communication. Food is present on virtually every channel, every hour, every day of the week, throughout the broadcast day. Characteristics of Televisual Masculinities What then, of gender, in general, and masculinity, in particular, is in these televisual culinary productions? First, these elements are neither invisible, nor insignificant. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 123 Furthermore, scrutiny of the content of food shows supports recent theorization on gender. To wit, rather than simple sets of stereotypical differences between classes tagged as “male” and “female,” masculinity and femininity clearly emerge as social constructions, i.e., sets of reproduced practices and performances that mimic and support a system of power.15 In fact, the ways in which gender identities (in general) and masculinities (in particular) are communicated in these televisual productions faithfully reflect Ito’s (1996) trinity of authority, power, and possession. Similarly, there are cases in which femininities are constructed and communicated in such a way as to embody and buttress Ito’s hegemonic masculinity. Let’s consider concrete examples of these elements, in turn. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Power: Masculinity as Competition To begin, let’s return to Dochi, previously introduced, in which rival dishes are hawked by two male hosts. These front-men are combatants who do whatever they can to secure victory: interviewing the competing chefs (who are almost always men), sampling the food, cajoling the guests to join their side, and making impassioned appeals for support. At the end of the contest, one exults in victory, the other despairs in loss. Their win-loss record is updated weekly on Dochi’s website. At the close of each show, the victorious host holds court center stage, consuming the favored meal with the winning guests. He gloats and needles the losing host as well as those unfortunate guests who voted incorrectly. These minority members are made to observe and, sometimes, even serve the winners. Dochi’s discourse, in short, is one of contestation, of dominance achieved, and of subordination suffered; it operates in the vernacular of power.16 Its conflictual, competitive discourse is one normally associated with games—not unlike the Iron Chef show, with its clock, rival combatants, teams of specialists, sideline announcer, play-by-play and color commentators, and final judges. Such competitive shows adopt the rhetoric, the visual, contextual, and practical tropes of sport, “an institution created by and for men,” (Messner and Sabo 1990), whose practices service the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity.17 Viewed in this way, shows like Dochi and Iron Chef support a sporting, contentious masculinity. They conjure constructions of gender in terms of combat—not coincidentally performed almost exclusively by men. And lest one wonder whether this is but an aberration, we must note that this discursive practice is not confined to one or two shows. Bistro SMAP, after all, is a competition between teams. The results are not simply points on a weekly chart, but kisses acquired from the female guests. And even in shows where food is used to measure intellect, sophistication, and judgment (e.g., Gotchi Battaru), the discursive frame centers on competition to avoid pecuniary loss and, thus, public “face.” In keeping with the notion that gender is not simply reducible to male/female categorizations, there are those Japanese food shows in which women battle one another for judges’ approval. When they do, these females adopt the vernacular of (hegemonic) male discourse.18 They are operating within an authoritative structuration of power, working against rivals for a favorable personal result. In a word, women in the context of Japanese mediated identity are not immune from operating in the rhetoric, manifesting the core trait of hegemonic masculinity.19 Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 124 T. J. M. Holden Authority (I): Masculinity as Executive Function Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Among the categories that Goffman identified in his qualitative assessment of Gender Advertisements (1976) was “executive function,” the role (of elevated position, control, and authoritative action) that men adopt when paired in ads with women. This function was patent in my own content analysis of gender in Japanese television ads (1999); it also seems widely replicated in Japanese television food shows. Men are executives insofar as they are accorded the lead and the power to direct. All activity flows through them, or else beneath their commanding gaze. In food shows, masculine guidance can take the form of two guises: host and chef. Host As Dochi’s description suggests, men often appear in the role of host. This is not a hard and fast rule—Emiko no O-shaberi Kukingu (Emiko’s Cooking Talk)— features a female host. Importantly, though, Emiko defers to the chef who is a man. As is true of all food shows, in the matter of food preparation, culinary direction, and advice, the chef operates as chief executive. For the host, the role is clearly defined and circumscribed: hosts greet guests, interview them about their lives, solicit their opinions about life and food, ensure that attention is accorded to the chef’s (often backgrounded) work in the kitchen, and facilitate the flow between and balance these various elements. Important among the latter is timekeeping and scheduling; hosts determine when final judgments will be rendered. As guardians of continuity, they also verbally validate results tendered by chefs or guests. In a word, they exert administrative control over the communication event. In cases where there are multiple hosts of differing gender, executive function adheres to a “gender order,” with males invariably reigning over women. Consider the show Chūbō Desu Yo (This is the Kitchen). Airing at 11:30 p.m. on Saturdays, the hosts’ job is not only to welcome guests and make them feel at home, but also to prepare a meal with them in an in-studio kitchen. Like Dochi, the guest offers judgment on the food prepared, and, like Dochi, that decision has the power to make the hosts exult in triumph or deflate in defeat. Unlike Dochi, however, the hosts are not rivals, and, importantly, unlike Dochi, they stand in a particular (power) relation to one another. The female host of Chūbō (Ikumi Kimura) is intro-duced at the outset of each show as an “announcer.” Moreover, she wears the same green and yellow sticker on her apron that all newly minted drivers in Japan affix to their car windows—signifier of a beginner. Tellingly, Ms. Kimura has worn that sticker for over three years. By contrast, the male host (formerly a popular singer named Masaaki Sakai) introduces himself as possessor of “three stars”—the highest rating that can be awarded to a prepared dish on the show—and “Master Chef.” Gender ranking does not end there. During the course of the half hour, Sakai provides directions to Kimura in the kitchen, during the interview segments, and at the dinner table when the time comes to ask the guest for his or her evaluation of the completed meal. Often Sakai will interrupt his work in the kitchen to engage the guest in conversation, leaving Kimura to toil on her own, making sure that the preparation moves toward completion. In addition, during the critical moments of the show, when a segment has to be concluded or a result announced, it is Sakai who takes the lead. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 125 Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. “This dish is finished!” he will intone after the casserole comes out of the oven. Or, as they consume the food, he will suggest, “Ms. Kimura, please ask the guest for his final evaluation.” Kimura-san will then dutifully inquire, “For this dish, how many stars will you give?” Once the guest has responded, it is left to Sakai to affirm the judgment. As the camera focuses tight on his face, he shouts theatrically toward the rafters, “for this dish . . . one and a half stars!” Chef There are numerous shows in which the chef also adopts the executive function by instructing the host and/or guests in the ways of food preparation. Chūbō is emblematic of this, introducing three chefs at the outset, who perform on their own premises. Having viewed three variations on the show’s selected meal, the three amateur cooks now follow one of the demonstrated recipes. At various stages of the preparation, the three loosely discuss the method they are following. In particular, though, once the meal has been completed and is being consumed, they discuss where they may have improved on the meal—what ingredient was in too little or too great supply, where the oven or stove was used for too long or too short a time. In short, the amateurs note their deviations from the chef’s instructions and chastise themselves for failing to conform to his direction. In addition, Chūbō features a short segment introducing a resident apprentice in one of the chef’s kitchens. Almost always, these chefs-in-training are young men in their early twenties. In every case to date, these young men are depicted receiving commands from elder male employers. Here again, then, Japan’s food shows cast men and masculinity in a discourse of authority. With but two exceptions, the featured chefs in all of Japan’s food show genres are men—the exceptions being the case of desserts and katei ryōri (home cooking).20 When these dishes are featured, female chefs consistently appear. However, because neither category of food is widely represented on food shows, the female presence tends to be overshadowed by that of the male. As a consequence, viewers are apt to perceive “chef” as a male role and, logically, see men as culinary authorities. It is not a stretch to assert that, on the other side of the gender equation, the significance that flows out of the two areas reserved for female expertise (desserts and home cooking) communicates that women are “sweet,” soft, peripheral or decentered (i.e., not associated with main courses), less sophisticated or elaborate, and also are specialists in meals served in private rather than out in the public sphere. Authority (II): Masculinity in Profession The executive function is not the only way in which status and authority are communicated in cooking shows. Another is the provision of expert knowledge. And like the direction of stage and culinary activity, this is another function that is performed predominantly by men. The recognition of a chef as an “expert” occurs in numerous ways in food shows. First, and most obviously, is the invocation of the title “chef” to those who are called upon to perform in these TV productions. The deference hosts show to these culinary workers—soliciting their opinion about preparation, allowing them to explain the peculiarities and secrets of each ingredient—goes a long way toward Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 126 T. J. M. Holden Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. elevating cooks to a position of authority. Clothes, too, serve as markers of professional association, and guest chefs never fail to appear in the starched white aprons and toques of those who cook for a living. Finally, and most importantly, is the chef’s resume. In Japan, where organizational affiliation is one of the significant markers of legitimacy, food shows take pains to introduce their kitchen authorities not simply by name or age, but by pedigree. For example, they name the schools in which they have trained, the countries in which have they apprenticed, and under which banner they now wield a spatula. In a word, this discursive formation is framed institutionally, in terms of economy and social sanction. Dochi serves as exemplar of this intellectual construction, drawing its chefs exclusively from one corporate group, Tsuji in Osaka—arguably Japan’s most prestigious professional cooking academy. The title “Tsuji” (or its offshoot “Ecole Culinaire Nationale”) flashed beneath the in-studio chef or else on the food show’s web page is enough to communicate “expert.” To Japanese media consumers, “Tsuji” connotes “rigorous training,” “knowledge,” “competence,” “professionalism,” and “qualitycontrol.” As mentioned earlier, Dochi (not unlike most other food shows) calls upon its professionals to provide advice in between segments of host/guest repartee. Culinary experts explain the “dos and don’ts” associated with particular foods and tricks for preparing a meal to perfection. Hosts are careful to respond with affirmative noises, such as “Oh, I see” or “That makes sense,” or even “Incredible!”—clearly stressing the presence of a knowledge hierarchy. In this way, the message is communicated that chefs are “professionals,” not merely because they have a title and an impressive uniform, but because they are experts and leaders in their field. Status in a Binary Universe: The Comparison with Women One of the major areas of contestation in gender studies—appropriated from structuralism and ushered in large part, by Judith Butler (1990)—is the issue of language as totality, a closed system in which signs give rise, by inference, to (often invisible) paired opposites. On these terms, “man” begets “woman” as “feminine” conjures “masculine.” As Hughes (2002:15) has observed, “In the male-female binary, to be a woman requires us to have a corresponding concept of man. Without this relation, the terms alone would have no reference point from which to derive their meaning.” Butler’s influence—along with Foucault’s (1980)21—was to move analysis beyond simplistic binaries. At the same time, the structure of meaning in Japanese televisual productions is predominantly dualistic, creating sign-pairs of male/chef and female/ not chef. In this way, what is present, what is communicated, and what “exists,” is an absence of females in the role of “chief cook,” and the banishment of women from public kitchens as either professional or apprentice. All of this can produce the view that women are not cooking authorities, and that “chef” is a male identification, rather than a female one. Probing this possibility further, we find that women who appear as cooks in Japanese cooking shows are often featured in one of two ways: in the primary guise as “talento” (entertainer), or else in the capacity as “housewife.” In the case of the former, women seldom, if ever, offer culinary advice. Their cooking duties are mere props to their true identity, star, singer, sex symbol, or actress. In the case of Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 127 Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. the latter, women prepare foods and engage in activities associated with the private domain of the household. An example of the former is found in the Sunday afternoon show, “Iron Shufu.”22 A spin-off of Iron Chef, this variety show features female guests, all former entertainers who are now married. The show has a number of components: two rounds of quizzes (one centering on food customs, another concerning ingredients, nutrition, and calories), then a round in which kitchen skills are on display. For instance, housewives might have to run an obstacle course while flipping stir-fry in a wok, or grasp slippery konyaku with chopsticks. One week, there aired a task involving whipping cream, after which sticky hands and quivering fingers were made to thread three needles in succession. Following this ordeal, contestants were asked a battery of personal questions regarding life with their husbands (e.g., where was their first date, what was the first present they received from their husband, when is their wedding anniversary). Once all these tasks are completed, the two highest scoring guests (measured in terms of fastest time through the obstacle course and most correct quiz answers) are pitted against one another in a cook-off. They are given thirty minutes to prepare a meal in the katei (or “home-cooking”) style. Like its namesake, Iron Chef, one featured ingredient must be integrated into the menu. An additional stipulation (since it is katei style) is that one of the courses must be served with rice. A panel of celebrity judges—along with the president of a cooking school (i.e., a professional/expert)— offers evaluative comments and scores the two contestants. In numerous ways, then, Iron Shufu embodies elements of the masculine hegemonic discourse: competition, expert evaluation, and female cooks associated with private (home-made) food. It also casts women in overtly-domesticated roles that differ in multiple, stereotypical ways from those accorded to men. In this way, patriarchal gendered discourse is reproduced.23 Markers of Masculine Identity It should be observed that there are a few food shows in which female chefs prepare foods other than desserts or home cooking. In these cases, however, an interesting designation is attached to the cooks; an appellation that appears to undercut their status as authority. Their title is “riyōri kenkyu ka”—literally “food researchers.” One tangible effect of this title is that it tends to soften the impression left when a woman is offering advice to a male announcer or host. This is not so in reverse, of course. Where women are being instructed and a man is in the tutelary role, there is no shying away from affixing the title “chef” or “sensei” (teacher), providing his professional affiliation, and clothing him in the garb of the professional cook. A prime example is the after-hours entertainment (Saturday 12:30 a.m.), Ai no Ēpuron 3 (The Love of Three Aprons), in which three young (generally sexy) talento are assigned the task of preparing a particular dish (for instance, apple pie) without the benefit of a recipe. The final product is then presented to a panel of (generally) male entertainers. The program’s website explains that the “women must make the dishes for these men with love.” The bulk of the show involves the heaping of (generally critical) judgments by the male hosts upon each of the women’s food productions. Thereafter, the dishes are assessed by a professional (male) chef. His comments, though generally respectful, Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 128 T. J. M. Holden aim at improving the women’s effort next time out (with the implicit assumption that there will be a next time). Due to the deference paid to him by the guests and hosts, as well as his uniform and title, he comes across as an authority possessing special knowledge; his words are treated as insights beyond reproach. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Possession: Masculinity as Ownership Punctuating and possibly stoking the go-go era of Japanese socioeconomic development were distinct epochs in which particular trinities of goods were sought. Thus, there were the three Ss of the late 1950s and early 1960s: senpūki, sentakuki, and suihanki (fan, washing machine, and electric rice cooker); the three Cs of the late 1960s: kā, kūr ā, and karā terebi (car, air conditioner, and color TV); and the three Js of the late 1970s: jūeru, jetto, and jūtaku (jewels, jetting, and house).24 Aside from travel by jet, all of these items were goods to be owned. They were statuses secured through acquisition and were communicated via conspicuous display. Of course, these trinities center on consumption; however, they also reflect a discourse of possession. It is this rhetoric that can also be spied in Japanese food productions, particularly in relation to the chefs who appear. In numerous shows, the chefs are introduced on the premises of restaurants they have founded, manage, and maintain. Cameras capture them either outside the door of their business or else inside, in the dining area. Invariably, they proudly bow in greeting and offer some remarks of invitation. Viewers are treated not only to tours of their kitchens, but are shown menus, sample the décor, drink in the ambiance, and even watch the chef as he prepares and then consumes his product. Chūbō, previously mentioned, is noted for such excursions to the owner-chef ’s domain. So, too, though, are the numerous shows in which hosts travel to a particular locale (perhaps in a village off the beaten path) or else seek out a particularly special dish. In such cases, the chef becomes something more than a food preparer; he becomes host in his own right, commander of a world of his own invention, and interviewee. His status as owner lends an additional power to his countenance. He is not only executive, not only employer, not only expert, he is also landholder, proprietor, and business owner. In Japan, for historical (social class-based) reasons, these are quite powerful statuses to hold. And, of course, it goes without saying, these are roles that are almost exclusively held by men, at least in the Japanese televisual universe. Alternative Conceptions of Televisual Masculinity Thus far, we have explored how masculinity in TV food programming is consistent with past conceptions of Japanese masculinity; in a word, it embodies a hegemonic discourse of authority, power, and possession. Here, I wish to briefly identify two elements that suggest alternative, though not necessarily inconsistent, conceptions of gender identity. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 129 Creation: Masculinity as Production When Sherry Ortner offered the now-famous assertion (1974) that women are nature and men are culture, she was referring to the notion that the male world is “made”; it is a world invented, produced, rendered, and controlled. Certainly, this is the message from Japan’s food shows—where the key producers are generally all male. Production transpires within an institutional context (media) and, within that context, an (generally) organizational structure. Such a structure is “man-made”; it is a humanly constructed, artificial environment, configured to confer status and facilitate the expression of power. The tools wielded and the products crafted on these shows, may or may not belong to the cooks, but the fact that they are produced in audio-visual spaces generally presided over by men and filtered through rhetorical strategies that are often regarded as “hegemonic masculinity” suggests that these productions are, in fact, male; they are possessions of the male producer world and, hence, can be associated with masculine identity. By contrast, for women—who are so often associated with the “natural realm”— their televisual role is generally one of nurturer or consumer. As such, their job is to facilitate food production (as hosts) or else serve as end-users (as guests).25 Certainly, exceptions can be located as in the case of the Three Aprons or the Iron Shufu shows, previously described. In each case, however, production is for purposes supportive of a patriarchal frame, namely, satisfying the dictates of male hosts or else proving one’s wherewithal in providing an amenable home for a husband. Because competition is involved, the women in these shows subrogate themselves to and adopt the logic of hegemonic male discourse. Even when they are not governed by the male world, they seek to uphold and reproduce the logic of that world. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. Freedom: Masculinity as Agency If the message of some TV food shows is that women exist within a clearly delineated, bounded structure, the same could obviously be said of men. As previously mentioned, chefs are often depicted as members of organizations (as in the case of the Tsuji performers) or else (as in the case of the Chūbō chefs and a wealth of other shop proprietors) as proud possessors (creators, owners, executives) of structures that, incidentally, are “man-made.” At the same time, this image of attachment must be counterbalanced with the impressions of independence often communicated by Japanese media productions. As Gill (2003:145) has written, “Japanese male fantasies frequently stress the mobile: the sportsman, the traveler, the man of action, the magically endowed superhero.” For men, and especially television viewers, the majority are tied to structures of “permanence and stasis” (Ibid:146) and, so, pine for an alternative model of existence—a model offered by the television shows. This is not so much embodied by the chefs who have hung out their shingle and run their own businesses; rather, it is in the aegis of the entertainers and guests who saunter onto the food show stage seemingly unencumbered and free of institutional affiliation or organizational layering. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 130 T. J. M. Holden This is a version of Japanese masculinity that is less well known—one that has few exemplars out in the free world, one that is often relegated to the realm of wish fulfillment (for instance, movies centering on the vagabond peddler “Tora-san,” leaderless samurai, like the “47 Ronin,” or meandering monks like “Zatoichi,” or, more recently, daily news about highly-publicized “free agents” who have migrated to play baseball in America). It is a version of masculinity that, far from the quintessential salaryman, views male identity in terms of autonomy and individually-oriented existence. It is a disparate image of masculinity, one which may have little referent in reality, but is, nonetheless, persistently cropping up in televisual productions. Alternative Masculinities While the general argument on these pages has been that, with regard to Japan’s televisual food shows, little alternative discourse circulates concerning masculinity, this is not completely the case. As we saw in the previous passage, discrepant masculinities do exist. And, in fact, these discrepant versions are greater—more extensive and farther reaching—than simply that of the autonomous agent just described. Here, I’d like to consider a few of these deviations, and also what that may tell us about contemporary Japanese society. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. TV’s Widest Angle: Masculinity’s “Multiplicity” It is not infrequent that alternative genders—transgendered men and female masculinities—surface on Japanese TV.26 Food shows and food advertising, in particular, often feature performances of multiple genders.27 Consider, for example, Dochi. Generally, six of the seven invitees rotate weekly,28 often striking a numerical balance between men and women. Among the former, past episodes have included a transvestite, numerous rikishi (sumo wrestlers), retired baseball and tennis players, actors, singers, comedians, writers, and producers. The transvestite, in particular, warrants mention here. His name is Akihiro Miwa, and he is a cultural icon. A former cabaret singer, Miwa is as famous for his elegant gowns as he is for his silky singing voice and his romantic involvement with a famous novelist, the late Yukio Mishima. A writer and TV personality, as well as a regular on variety shows, Miwa is accorded respect, with little hint of derision or disdain. The same can also be said for the homosexual twins “Píco” and “Osugi,” the “new half,” “Pítā,” and the ubiquitous and enormously popular transvestite, Ken’ichi Mikawa. While one would be hard-pressed to claim that transgendered men are widely represented on Japanese television, it would also be impossible to deny their presence. Rarely does a day pass without the appearance of a person embodying an alternative conception of gender on mass-distributed, mass-consumed Japanese television. Alongside these versions of masculinity are also other “models.” On Dochi alone, one encounters an obese wrestler from Hawaii; a waif-like singer from Japan’s longest-running boy’s band, SMAP; a forty-something producer in scruffy beard, blue jeans, signature cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat; a Japan-raised, blond-haired, Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. The Overcooked and Underdone 131 grungy, earring-studded Canadian; an elderly actor with assiduously trimmed goatee, adorned in yukata (traditional male kimono). In short, one can hardly claim that what is broadcast is the narrow, repetitive discourse of masculinity embodied by salarymen in gray suits and conservative ties. So, too, could one hardly assert that this motley mélange of free agents fits the profile of power wielding, authoritative, possessive hegemonists—at least on the surface. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. The Illusion of Freedom It must be recognized, however, that while such “models” of masculinity may materialize on-screen, good reasons exist to view their social impact with caution. As guests, these men stand in an asymmetric relationship to those who manage the show, specifically, the hosts and chefs in front of the cameras. For these latter groups, invariably, action is wrapped in the vernacular of masculine hegemony. Significantly, no matter what model of masculinity hosts and chefs may appear to communicate via their appearance, they uniformly manage to channel food talk into discourse concerning authority, power, and possession. It also must be noted that a disjuncture exists between the televisual and the real worlds. Food shows place a plethora of free agents on display and communicate alternative masculinities and femininities in far greater measure than the stereotypical types comprising the world beyond the screen. To wit, in Japan today, organizational work still accounts for upwards of 70% of those employed;29 day laborers and casual or part-time workers also comprise a significant sector of workers. Nonetheless, in show after show, from the food-centered Dochi, Chubo Desu Yo, and Kakurea Gohan, to the weekly cooking segments on SMAPXSMAP, Tonnerus’ (Minasan no Okage Deshita) and Gotchi Battaru, workers—both within and on the margins of “organizational society”—are never invited to sit at the TV table. What’s more, while the actors and actresses, athletes, singers, comedians, and the like appear to be “free agents,” it is also apparent that this is mere illusion; they are far from free. Almost all of the food consuming-performers on screen belong to invisible corporate structures that book them onto these shows, not only to reap money, but more importantly, to gain further exposure for them, their popular cultural product. As such, the consumer-performers on food shows offer the illusion of independence, reproducing a myth of masculine and feminine freedom that in actually doesn’t exist. In its stead stands the more hegemonic, structurated model of masculinity that pervades almost all of Japanese society today. The Absence of Vision In the same way, although transgendered and alternative masculinities are represented on these shows, it is generally only through the aegis of a handful of prominent entertainers, the few, established well-known, accepted “others” who make the perpetual rounds in what is a finite, hermetic, televisual universe. Today, these performers who began as public curiosities rotate from show to show, appearing Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. 132 T. J. M. Holden in a variety of genres equally distributed across the four major channels and spread throughout the seven day viewing week. The consequence is that the message that they might embody of alternative versions of masculinity stands a very real likelihood of being absorbed into, and even overshadowed by, the intimacy cultivated through repetitive exposures of star and host and encounters between viewer and performer.30 It is this affective bond, I would aver, that may easily lead to the emotional embrace of the one or three or five alternatively masculine “regulars,” without having to inculcate the ontological potentials they actually embody. The result may be that viewers become desensitized to, or even come to ignore, the performativities that these personalities signify, the various transgender potentials of “transvestite,” “drag queen,” “new half,” or “homosexual.”31 Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. The Tight Focus of Televisual Masculine Identity There is no end to food shows on Japanese television. No two are exactly identical, but all are broadcast for a purpose. To be sure, they exist to educate and entertain. Occasionally they may carry some deep unspoken or less motivated purpose, for instance, the mediation of identity. When this occurs it might be identity defined in terms of the nation, interest group, or individual (Holden 2001, 2003). Or, as shown here, it may be identity cast in terms of gender. Televisual food shows clearly play a powerful role in communicating masculine identity in contemporary Japan.32 Clearly, too, such shows are not amenable to the representation of all aspects of masculinity. Beyond the gender performativities previously mentioned, a number of contexts are absent from the screen in which masculinities are generally reproduced. For instance, save for the simulated kitchens in which chefs toil, workplaces are almost entirely absent. Also missing are homes, sites where parenting occurs.33 Class also is invisible, as are men who are unemployed or else under-employed. Not surprisingly, the homeless are non-existent. In short, there is so much that bears on masculinity that televisual productions ignore, deny, or banish from public view. The discourse that does appear in these productions serves to present, interpret, translate, and/or modify masculinities. Interestingly, as pervasive as gendered identifications are, the emblematic masculinity for Japan, the salaryman, is entirely pulled from the frame. In his place are other figures—numerous tropes, codes, characters, social processes, institutions, organizational structures, and human agents—both visible and invisible, who are employed to communicate masculine identity. It is a certain kind of identity, a singular kind of identity that is consistently organized and communicated in terms of authority, power, possession, production, and—only seemingly—autonomy. Notes ** I wish to thank Takako Tsuruki for the invaluable assistance she provided throughout this research. In particular, her wise counsel, cultural and linguistic interpretations, and apt examples immeasurably improved the original paper. Food and Culture : A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan, et al., Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=1097808. Created from uoregon on 2018-10-21 19:08:42. Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved. The Overcooked and Underdone 133 1. This work, like two precursors (Holden 1999, 2001), is based on a systematic sampling of the universe of Japanese TV shows. As explained in that earlier work, recording transpired over the course of an entire month and was supplemented with new programming as some shows were retired and others debuted. Analysis was based on the construction of three distinguishable data sets: (1) an “ideal week” of prime time food shows, (2) food-related advertising, and (3) regular programming in which “inadvertent food discourse” was regularly introduced. Especially considering the extensive amount of air-time accorded to the last category, it was concluded that food discourse is ubiquitous on Japanese television, playing virtually every hour, on every channel, every day. 2. Ito’s concept was developed in association with his introduction to men’s studies—written in Japanese. Clearly, however, the concept is not culturally bound and can be applied to other contexts. 3. Presaging this work, perhaps, was McLelland’s (2000), which argues that homosexuality in Japan does not reduce to a neat, unitary discourse. 4. Among a chorus of writers Lebra and Lebra (1986), Moeur and Sugimoto (1986), Harootunian (1989), and Befu (2000) have observed that there is no homogenous Japan, comprised of a single class, gender, geography, ethnicity, occupation, or generation. 5. Iwao (1993:271), while arguing that Japan has witnessed a dramatic opening up of the public sphere (and, attendant institutional sites) for women, discusses how family has remained one institution which an earlier generation of women use to define their identity. 6. In my conceptualization, “mediated identity” is interactive and institutional, involving: (1) significations, (2) conveyed through representations of sameness and difference, (3) by media, and (4) brought into relief by: (a) references to (socially constructed) group-based traits, and (b) the depiction of relationships between: (i) individuals and/or (ii) groups. Even more recent work on cell phone users (Holden forthcoming) suggests that the above definition requires modification to allow for the power of users to communicate representations of themselves and actively construct identities by consciously utilizing media. 7. Japan: Profile of a Nation, Kodansha (1995:247). See also Kazuo Kaifu, “Japan’s Broadcasting Digitization Enters the Second Stage: Its present state and prospects,” NHK Culture Broadcasting Institute, No.11 (New Year, 2000). In fact, the diffusion rate as early as 1965 was 95%. 8. 95% of the population according to Shuichi Kamimura and Mieko Ida. 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