Course Spotlight: Food and Gender
Dr. Megan Elias will be teaching MET ML 706, Food and Gender, in the spring 2023 semester. Here is a preview of her plans for the class:
I am really excited to be teaching Food and Gender again after two years. It is my favorite class because every time I teach it I get to re-think some of our most basic assumptions about food and who we are. I see everything around me differently and students have told me that the same thing happens to them. We take an intersectional approach, so our conversations reach far into questions of identity and power.
Students assign half of our readings/viewings/activities and I have found myself watching Tamil sit coms, reading poetry about fermentation, and acting out an old family recipe, to name just a few of the student-designed assignments. We have wide ranging, challenging conversations in this class and the student projects always reflect that. I would say that of the classes I teach, it engages most with popular culture and media of the moment.
We will be reading some amazing classics, like Psyche Williams Forson’s Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, and some thrilling new work, like Diners, Dudes and Diets, by Gastronomy graduate Emily Contois, and Nurturing Masculinities, by Nefissa Naguib about food and masculinity in the Arab world. And, of course, at the end of the semester we’ll have one thought-provoking and probably also delicious thematic potluck to bring everything we have learned to the table and onto our plates.
MET ML 706, Food and Gender, will meet on Thursday evenings in the spring 2023 semester, starting on January 19. The course is open to graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Non-degree seeking students can find registration information here.