STAGING THE EDIBLE: GENDER, CLASS, AND THE PERFORMATIVE POLITICS OF FOOD IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

This article reconceptualises the culinary sphere as a performative stage on which gender, class, race, and power are enacted, contested, and reconfigured. Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of performativity, feminist food studies, queer theory, and vegan ethics, this examination explores how food representations—across advertising, reality television, cookbooks, digital media, and memoirs—function as mechanisms of ideological inscription and potential subversion. The analysis moves beyond the kitchen as merely a site of domestic labour to frame food itself as a discursive apparatus that enacts, upholds, or disrupts normative hierarchies of taste, labour, and identity. Emphasising the concept of gastro-performativity, the article explores how cooking, eating, and narrating food become embodied rituals through which subjects are formed and regulated. Engaging intersectional critiques, critical race theory, and queer temporality, it investigates how consumption becomes a performance of belonging, otherness, visibility, and resistance. From the feminised aesthetics of "clean eating" to the queer politics of vegan refusal and the raced and sexualised coding of appetite, food emerges as a densely layered site of cultural production and contestation. Ultimately, the article argues for a new analysis of performative ingestion, theorising eating itself as an act of social reproduction, negotiation, and potential transformation.