Gluttonous crimes: Chew, comic books, and the ingestion of masculinity

Abstract

Synopsis Food-related embodied experiences are entangled in all aspects of subject positions, from ethnicity to class, from age to gender. When it comes to masculinity, food plays a very important role as an arena where various models of masculinity are negotiated. Representations of men around food in a specific medium – comic books and detective stories – can establish, question, reinforce, reproduce or destroy cultural assumptions about masculinity and gender relations. The comic book Chew employs irony and tropes from horror, detective, and action genres to blur gender and ethnic stereotypes about eating and ingestion that are otherwise prevalent in many forms of popular culture, from movies to cookbooks.