Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts: Bodies, Politics, Ecologies

Event Type
Seminar
Starts
11 November 2026
Ends
8 June 2027
Attendance Mode
Online
Website

Virtual Seminar Series

"Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts: Bodies, Politics, Ecologies"

Convened by Dr Phoebe Chetwynd and Dr Poulomi Choudhury, and hosted in association with the research unit Héritages. This will be a series of 8 seminars, to be held online once a month from November 2026 to June 2027.

Each session will host two speakers, on topics ranging from eating disorders to postcolonial identities and the ethics of food in ecological crisis.

The full programme and the links to register for each session can be found here;  https://sites.google.com/view/eating-well-seminar-series/home  

Injunctions to eat well have become ubiquitous, tightly binding eating practices to ethical and political imaginaries. Food can both nourish and harm, and choices about what and how much to eat are often perceived through normative discourses about health, bodies, and personal responsibility. Food choices are also politically charged, from the conservative resonances of gastronationalism to the neoliberal underpinnings of responsible consumerism and the radical aspirations of boycotts and food sovereignty. The Derridean echoes of “eating well” also point to complex questions about the consumption of animal and vegetal life in times of ecological crisis. 

This seminar series invites researchers to explore and problematise these discourses through literature and visual and performing arts by women, non-binary and trans* people. Food cuts across binary oppositions like self and other, culture and nature, material and symbolic, making its representation in the arts a particularly fruitful, if still under-studied field. The myriad gendered inflections of eating practices – such as the surveillance of bodies, the feminisation of social reproduction, and the insights of intersectional (eco)feminism – highlight the distinctive importance of the perspectives of artists from gender and sexual minorities.

Seminar One: Eating Disorders and the Challenge of Representation 

Wednesday 11 November, 5.00 - 6.30 pm GMT

  • Ruth Cruickshank, Royal Holloway, University of London : "Not About Eating: Deconstructing Eating Disorder Science with Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille/A Girl’s Story (2016)"

  • Vanja Qvardfordt, Independent artist and researcher: "Bulimic Filmmaking as Feminist Methodology: Reimagining Eating Disorders Through Experimental Film Practice"

Seminar Two: Consuming Patriarchy

Thursday, 3 December, 5.00 - 6.30 pm GMT 

Please note the change in date

  • Francesca Calamita, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing of the University of London: "Between Food and the Body: The Complex Relationship of Italian Women with Eating, Embodiment, and Self-Image in Ti trovo cambiata [You have changed] (2026)"

  • Josephine Taylor, Birkbeck, University of London: "Hyperfemininity, Cars, and Consumption Politics in Contemporary Women's Pop Music"

Seminar Three: Resisting and Reviving Food Cultures

Wednesday, 13 January, 5.00 - 6.30 pm GMT

  • Claire Chambers, University of York: "Textual and Culinary Collection: Anthologizing the Forgotten Foods and Desi Delicacies of Muslim South Asia"

  • Valentine Lacoste, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle: "The Cook, the Writer, and the Painter: Women’s Creative Practices in the Bloomsbury Group"

Seminar Four: Food and Placemaking

Wednesday, 10 February, 5.00 - 6.30 pm GMT

  • Sohni Chakrabarti, University of Kurdistan-Hewler: "Preserving Memories of Resistance: The Politics of 'Eating Well' in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night"

  • Shweta Ramsay, University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry: "What Food Can—and Cannot—Fix: Care, Displacement and Female Agency in Ladies Coupé (Margaret’s story) and 'Mrs. Sen’s'"

Seminar Five: Cannibal Appetites

Wednesday, 10 March, 5.00 - 6.30 pm GMT

  • Emma Flynn, University of Glasgow: "'I watch them all devour my demon and I join in': Sexual Violence, the Victim Cannibal and #MeToo"

  • Poulomi Choudhury, University College Dublin

Seminar Six: Entangled Life on a Damaged Planet

Wednesday, 14 April, 5.00 - 6.30 pm BST

  • Katarina Labudová, University of Ostrava: "Survival Appetites: Women's Dystopian Writing and Contemporary Catastrophe"

  • Méliné Kasparian-Le Fèvre, Independent Researcher: "'What does loss taste like?' Recovering Traditional Food and Ecological Knowledge through Contemporary Poetry"

Seminar Seven: Eating Well in Multispecies Worlds

Wednesday, 12 May, 5.00 - 6.30 pm BST

  • Liza B. Bauer, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen: "'You Are Not the Friend of Those Who Turn You into a Smelly Bone': Reconfiguring Dining Table Constellations in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam" 

  • Phoebe Chetwynd, CY Cergy Paris Université: "Veg*ns Living Through Ecocollapse: Interdependence and Survival in Rachel Atalla’s Thirsty Animals (2023) and Alison Layland’s After the Clearances (2025)"

Seminar Eight: The Politics and Power of Meat-Eating

Tuesday, 8 June, 5.00 - 6.30 pm BST

  • Emelia Quinn, University of Ottawa: "Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature and Culture"

  • Gabrielle Pozzo di Borgo, Trinity College Dublin: "The Power Granted by Meat: Eating Flesh and Physical Prowess in a Fantasy World"