“How Beautiful Women Eat”: Feminine Hunger in American Popular Culture

The article examines representations of women and food in contemporary popular visual culture and identifies a common type: an overeating thin woman. This type exists in many locations, and the article will focus on the character Liz Lemon from the television show 30 Rock and on the paintings of American artist Lee Price. It will also explore their online reception, especially on the popular women’s blog Jezebel. I argue that these hungry women are challenging conventions of the regulated feminine body by indulgently eating, resisting the tie between restriction and women’s eating habits by enacting a woman empowered through food. The women’s resistance is represented as a pop-feminist intervention into the way that women consume, and are consumed, in contemporary media. The hungry woman reveals fantasies about female pleasure and the assertion of will, and sometimes it represents an ambivalent or fraught relationship to both food and power. However, these representations explore self-expression through food, and the article examines how empowerment through eating often consolidates whiteness. This form of power is being accessed by upwardly mobile white women, and the article shows how eating most often becomes empowering when the body that is consuming that food is marked as individually successful, beautiful, thin, and white.