Being One’s Own Honoured Guest: Eating Out Alone as Gendered Sociality in Public Spaces

Abstract

For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depending on location and time, there are attendant risks of being subject to negative moral discourses, surveillance, and unwelcome sexual attention. This article uses an autoethnographic account to examine an instance of ‘eating out’ alone as constitutive of the gendered nature of sociality in public spaces. It supplements emerging analyses of lone female dining in a context of ‘single’ women being an increasingly significant demographic category by offering further differentiation in terms of age and venue type.