Introduction: Food and Sovereignty

Deutsch, Tracey; Gengenbach, Heidi; Herbert, Amanda; Sweeney, Shauna

Abstract

This special issue had its origins in the spring and summer of 2020, a moment in which the stakes of food, gender and sovereignty were particularly visible. Pandemic-related shortages, shutdowns of restaurants, marketplaces and stores and sudden food insecurity for millions of people – all inescapably changed the daily experience of eating and provisioning. To get by, people created new networks to bypass the systems they had counted on in the past, sometimes retreating into their own DIY systems for producing food (e.g., home baking) and sometimes rediscovering local food systems. Food work was one significant source of the increased inequities of care and carework as lockdown made the tasks of cooking, provisioning and feeding that are traditionally considered ‘women's work’ more important, more visible in people's homes and more difficult. For many, these inequities, including barriers to food and precarity of supplies, were not new; they had been facts of life for a long time. In other, often wealthier, communities, the pandemic revealed and accelerated the impossibility of the status quo. It demanded new ways of thinking about food, gender and who has the right to exert authority over them.

Citation

Deutsch, T., Gengenbach, H., Herbert, A., & Sweeney, S. (2022). Introduction: Food and Sovereignty. Gender and History, 34(3), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12673

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Nov 18, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Mar 20, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 23, 2023
• Journal: Gender & History
• Print ISSN: 0953-5233
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-0424
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 34
• Issue: 3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12673