Kayla A. Bruce - Food memoirs, identity formation, rhetorical analysis, embodiment in texts

Kayla A. Bruce - "Embodied Rhetoric: Women’s Food Writing"

Abstract
I think that the explosion in food memoir is saying and doing something significant in our current cultural and societal climate. I believe that the work that food memoirs are doing in the field of life writing is significant in three ways. The first is the way that writing about food can help the author, and the reader, process experiences and memories by giving them a tangible object on which to focus thoughts and emotions. The second is that they legitimize these everyday personal and communal experiences, and reveal that the truths of those situations are worth being communicated to a larger audience. The third is that they challenge different cultural scripts than other texts such as: pleasurable experiences are not valuable experiences to study, or experiences of food do not significantly impact our constructions of self and the world. They way that food memoirs help “consumers” process, legitimize, and challenge their own experiences and identities is significant because few texts allow this kind of exploration in such a seemingly familiar space that readers can relate to. I want to examine the significance of food memoirs in general by looking at two specific texts: Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites and Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table. These two texts are significant to the food memoir explosion through their autobiographical food experiences that show the construction, as well as construct, their individual and communal identities.