Kitchen Culture in America ─ Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race

Inness (English, Miami U.) has gathered 11 essays that investigate ways that ethnic and gender roles in America have been informed by popular representations having to do with food. The contributors are professors and graduate students of Afro-American studies, American and women's history, literature, English, and cultural studies. Topics include: candy, gender, and consumer culture from 1895-1920; gender and long shelf life; black women cooks as fetish in American ads in the first half of the 20th c.; cookbooks and racial prejudice; gender and processed foods in the 1950s; frozen foods and postwar families; and culinary autobiographies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sherrie A. Inness is Distinguished Laura C. Harris Chair of Women's Studies at Denison University. She is the author of Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life; and Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women's College Fiction, 1895-1910.