The Crazy Organic Mother as 21st Century Hysteric: Calibrating Extreme Femininities in Family Foodwork

• In Event: 3247 - Gender/Sex and Emotional Labor in Work and/or Family

Abstract

Feminist scholars have written about the reproduction of gender and investment of invisible labor that goes into feeding the family. But as the standards of healthy eating intensify over time to emphasize fresh, home-cooked, and certified-organic meals, the labor of family foodwork has intensified in unprecedented ways, requiring close scrutiny of every ingredient that goes onto a child’s plate. While scholars have written at length about women’s contributions to family foodwork, less recognized is the emotional labor associated with performing family foodwork in this environment of extreme dietary surveillance. How do mothers attempt to meet the strict expectations of the perfect twenty-first century family meal, distancing themselves from the dreaded fast food mother who cares little about heirloom tomatoes and only about convenience, while avoiding the trap of the obsessive ‘helicopter parent’ of children’s eating? In this paper, we report on interviews with 30 mothers describing how women contend with these two figures of extreme food femininities, investing considerable invisible, emotional labor into caring for and feeding children. Women were particularly wary of being viewed as a “crazy organic mother,” an extreme figure who feeds her child only wholesome, certified-organic meals, thereby violating the norm of the laid-back health food mother. Drawing inspiration from sociological and feminist analyses of the Victorian-era hysteric, we argue that the crazy organic mother emerges from the harsh social surveillance and judgment at a time of unreasonably high standards of heterosexual, middle-class mothering. The mothers in our sample were aware of the dangers of becoming too crazy in their foodwork, and spoke of ‘calibrating’ their approach to feeding in relation to these two opposing figures of fast-food-mom and crazy-organic-mom. Our findings contribute to the literature on foodwork and feeding the family, and have theoretical implications for the study of femininity and ‘doing’ gender.

Authors

• Norah MacKendrick, Rutgers University

• Teja Pristavec, Rutgers University