ABSTRACT
This chapter will engage with the genre of the confessional food narrative and its connections to specific discourses of modern and post-modern masculinities and sexual identities. Confessional narratives are autobiographically informed texts which are developed as, and centre on, discourses of transgressive deviancy as a mode to establish the relationship between narrator and reader. Deeply embedded into its specific cultural framework – in this case the production and consumption of food – the confessional mode “represents an attempt to understand the terms and the limits by which the people are defined, both as they listen to the confessions of others and as they recount their own transgressions” (Foster 1987, 7). While books, articles, and stories by female writers on their complicated and complex relationship with food have become an established part of literary, cultural, and sociological studies (Orbach 1978; Chernin 1985; Cline 1990; Shute 1992; Ellmann 1993; Probyn 2000; Sceats 2000; Cairns and Johnston 2015), confessional food narratives by male writers, exploring links between masculinity and food, are a relatively new phenomenon. Masculinity as a specific focus of interrogation has gained ground in critical studies since the 1990s as an interdisciplinary field and has offered a wide range of approaches to the ways in which male gender identity is performed in relation to issues such as class, race, and sexuality. As Bryce Traister has argued, the foremost task of a critical enquiry based on masculinity is to demonstrate its “materiality, its ‘constructedness’” in order to question it as “the transcendental anchor and guarantor of cultural authority and ‘truth’” (2000, 281). While masculinity studies has opened up many new avenues in relation to male gender studies, food and eating as a specific site of the critical interrogation of gender identity is still relatively new. Major publications in the field of masculinity studies do not engage with the culinary, nor do they scrutinize the ways in which male gender identity is performed via the production and consumption of food (Adams and Savran 2002; Whitehead and Barrett 2004; Connell 2005), and studies that do so often focus on the relationship between meat eating and masculinity (Sobal 2006; Ruby and Heine 2011; Calvert 2014).
