A chicken with the outline of a bikini browned onto its crispy skin sticks its legs into the air. A woman’s naked body is labeled with the names for meat cuts. A plump pig with lipstick and an apron is serving BBQ.
“Sexy Salad and Manly Meat” is part of our “At the Table” Speaker Series in conjunction with “The Art of Food” exhibition.
Carol Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) has shown how often meat is sexualized in modern advertising visuals. In these images, both women and animals are depicted as commodities for consumption by men. How do gender and sexuality factor into expectations around eating? And if meat is code for sex, then what about plants? Let’s find out how the sausage is made in this talk about sex, food, and interspecies relations.
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies, and she is an affiliate faculty at the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for the Environment and Society, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program on Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. Dr. Jacobs’ research focuses on the intersection of 19th-21st century German literature and film with Plant Studies, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science.
