Men Eating

Text and Performance Quarterly Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 77Á93

Metrosexuality can Stuff it: Beef Consumption as (Heteromasculine) Fortification
C. Wesley Buerkle

In this essay I explore the importance of beef consumption in performing a traditional masculinity that defies the supposed effeminization embodied in the image of the metrosexual. Research on perceptions of men and women eating demonstrates cultural visions of eating as a masculine activity. Furthermore, cultural analysis bears out the link between meat consumption and masculine identity. The recent popularization of metrosexual masculinity has challenged the harsh dichotomies between masculine and feminine gender performances. Against such a trend, burger franchise advertising portrays burger consumption as men’s symbolic return to their supposed essence, namely, personal and relational independence, nonfemininity, and virile heterosexuality. In all, I demonstrate the relationship between men and food as productive of a masculinity that perpetuates a male-dominant ideology in juxtaposition to women and metrosexual masculinity. Keywords: Food Studies; Masculinity; Meat; Metrosexual; Gender Performance My father once recounted to me that some acquaintances of his felt the need to drive off gay-male clientele from their family-style restaurant. The restaurateurs in question changed their establishment to a steak house because, as my father explained to me, ‘‘they [homosexuals] don’t eat meat.’’ He spoke as though he were citing the 1975 World Book encyclopedias we had as children: ‘‘Homosexual: . . . non-carnivorous.’’ To my father, the assumed lack of meat consumption was simply one more sign that homosexuals*especially, gay men*defied normality. In his understanding of the world, gay men had senselessly denounced their God-given right to social dominance
C. Wesley Buerkle (PhD, Louisiana State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at East Tennessee State

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