16 - Blogging Food, Performing Gender

Summary

Much scholarship on food blogs has turned attention to new forms of domesticity. This chapter focuses instead on men and masculinities, examining how US bloggers navigate gendered dynamics of power on food blogs, particularly when they approach a highly gendered genre: dude food. After defining and situating this genre within the broader US foodscape, this chapter analyzes the text and visuals on four dude food blogs: the professionally produced Men’s Health food blog, two amateur blogs written by men (Dude Food and Buff Dudes), and one female-authored blog (Domesticate Me!), which includes a “Dude Diet” section. This chapter examines the different ways that these bloggers communicate the culinary characteristics and paradoxical concerns of dude food through a variable set of authorial personae and narrative styles fashioned through prose, recipes, and food photography. Whether produced by men or women, calorie-laden or macronutrient-centric, oriented positively or negatively around fat and muscular male bodies, dude food – and dude food blogs – demonstrate the contradictions of performing masculinity in the twenty-first century, in the blogosphere and beyond.