The Online Domestic Goddess: An Analysis of Food Blog Femininities

Abstract

Scholars have explored how female food celebrities represent a realm of fantasy and desire, embodying attractive “domestic goddesses” who showcase the wonder and seduction of home-cooked meals. These studies have largely focused on television personalities and have overlooked the food blogosophere, a highly popular, digital realm of food media dominated by women. The blogosphere has its own prominent food personalities and occupies a central role as a source of information and inspiration for home cooks. This paper investigates how idealized food femininities manifest on popular food blogs by examining 426 blog posts written by twenty-two award-winning, female food bloggers. These bloggers forward a vision of idealized feminine domesticity that is glamorously seductive and rooted in the “real” life of everyday home cooks. This article illuminates food blogs’ paradoxical combination of idealization and mundanity. It argues that the online domestic goddess exemplifies women’s need to balance multiple, seemingly contradictory ideals: she must embody domestic success, while avoiding associations of perfectionism, excessive control, or laziness. This study of female bloggers nuances scholarly understanding of the domestic goddess fantasy by revealing the deep tensions in women’s food blogs, particularly the challenge of crafting a credible and appealing feminine voice in a postfeminist context.

Keywords:

• food blogs
• femininity
• postfeminism
• foodwork
• gender
• calibration

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the work of women bloggers whose contribution to the online foodscape provides us with endless hours of escapism and inspiration. They also thank Kate Cairns, and Amy Bentley, as well as anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture and Society for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Our focus is on media representations, but it is worth noting that scholars have also identified numerous food tensions in domestic kitchens: diet restriction versus indulgence/freedom, convenience versus home-cooked foods, healthy versus unhealthy foods, and cheap versus “proper” food (Cairns and Johnston 2015a, 2015b; Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann 2010; Lupton 1996; Parsons 2015).

2. Prior to 2014, winners were reader-selected but in 2014 Saveur began honoring “readers’ choice” and “editors’ choice” awards, selected by a committee of Saveur editors and contributors. See Saveur for more on the selection process: https://www.saveur.com/article/blog/SAVEUR-Best-Food-Blog-Awards-Frequently-Asked-Questions.

3. The quotations included within this paper reflect the text at the time it was coded in 2014 (blog posts may have been subsequently edited).

4. More pointed research is necessary to explore how race is presented in food blog femininities and to probe the implications of whiteness on the genre.

5. In one exceptional instance, What Katie Ate’s Katie Quinn Davis notes that she is anticipating going to her sister-in-law’s for Christmas dinner because it will be nice “to not do the cooking for a change. It doesn’t happen a lot for me, so when I can get it, I grab it with both hands!” (December 24, 2012).

6. See Harper (2014) and Elliott (2016) regarding the controversial Thug Kitchen authors, a white, upper-middle-class couple who draw from African American vernacular to create a “thug” voice.