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Is this Lady-like? The Portrayal of Women's Relationship with Food in American "Working Girl" Sitcoms between 1966 and 2017

Davis, Tristan A
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1588251948629127

Abstract Details

2020, BA, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Sociology and Criminology.
Exposure to popular culture is an important dimension of gender role socialization. The literature shows that there are specific gender norms that are reflected in the way individuals consume, choose, and think about food (Counihan, 1992; Oakes and Slotterbeck, 2005). In this paper, I report the results of a content analysis of six popular and influential American television situation comedies depicting a single, working woman. We are interested in the main character and the supporting cast's eating habits and attitudes toward food. We are also interested in how the female protagonists eating habits and relationship with food changes between the first major TV sitcom starring an employed single woman, That Girl in 1966, and the most recent TV sitcom in our sample, The Mindy Project. My findings indicate a paucity of food in TV programs portraying single working women, especially in more recent programs. Women are rarely shown eating, and when they do eat, they are shown consuming "feminine foods" such as salads. I also observe a change in the portrayal of women's domestic roles, with a gradual shedding of any domestic roles or skills in more recent programs and an emphasis on role reversal, with men depicted as more skilled in cooking and self-care. This project contributes to the literature on the portrayal of women in popular culture by using the lens of eating and domestic roles in TV sitcoms to study gender roles.
Susan Roxburgh, Dr. (Advisor)
Christopher Dum, Dr. (Committee Member)
David Kaplan, Dr. (Committee Member)
Kimberly Winebrenner, Dr. (Committee Member)
74 p.
Communication; Food Science; Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Motion Pictures; Multimedia Communications; Social Psychology; Social Research; Sociology; Womens Studies
Gender, Food, Women, Media, Socialization, Sociology of Food, Television, Culture, Feminist Theory, Foodways, Sit-Coms, Work, Working Women

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Davis, T. A. (2020). Is this Lady-like? The Portrayal of Women's Relationship with Food in American "Working Girl" Sitcoms between 1966 and 2017 [Undergraduate thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1588251948629127

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Davis, Tristan. Is this Lady-like? The Portrayal of Women's Relationship with Food in American "Working Girl" Sitcoms between 1966 and 2017. 2020. Kent State University, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1588251948629127.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Davis, Tristan. "Is this Lady-like? The Portrayal of Women's Relationship with Food in American "Working Girl" Sitcoms between 1966 and 2017." Undergraduate thesis, Kent State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1588251948629127

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ksuhonors1588251948629127
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© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Is this Lady-like? The Portrayal of Women's Relationship with Food in American "Working Girl" Sitcoms between 1966 and 2017 by Tristan A Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University Honors College and OhioLINK.