“Dainty, Sparkling, Delicious”: Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity

ABSTRACT

Joining the growing scholarly conversation on food rhetorics and technical and professional communication (TPC), this rhetorical analysis addresses two themes that arise in a Jell-O booklet (circa 1913): 1) constructing white femininity through women’s frustration and technical failure related to cooking and 2) asserting the Black mammy stereotype as a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy. Such analysis illustrates how food-related artifacts construct ideologies as they simultaneously offer technical instruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminisms/Gender studies
• racial studies/ethnic studies/cultural studies
• food
• cookbook
• recipes
• femininity
• rhetorical analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Nan Johnson sent me this booklet in the mail after the 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference at Arizona State University, at which I presented on feminist food rhetoric. Pages from this booklet and similar booklets can be accessed online via the University of Michigan’s exhibit Jell-O: America’s Most Famous Dessert: At Home Everywhere (Tarulevicz, Jacobson, & Curators, 2015).

2. For example, Impossible Foods, the company that produces the vegetarian Impossible Burger, has a whole ad campaign entitled “We Are Meat,” creating a new context for vegetarian burgers for non-vegetarians and rejecting the normative definition of meat as animal protein. Refer to Foods (2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abby M. Dubisar

Abby M. Dubisar is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies and sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, where she teaches classes on feminist rhetoric, gender and communication, and popular culture analysis. Her recent research analyzes rhetorical strategies related to food, farming, and gender. These recent studies include women students’ attempts to critique the university industrial agriculture complex and one farmer’s complex process to close her farm and communicate that closure. Her work has been published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development; College English; Community Literacy Journal; Rhetoric Review; Rhetoric of Health and Medicine; and other venues.