Exploring the Looking-Glass Food: Doing Masculinities among Adolescents and Young Men

Abstract

The paper explores the interpretative repertoires with which adolescents and young men give sense to their everyday food practices, as well as they shape their masculinities. Through the use of Photovoice, participatory technique that implies the subjective production of images, we illustrate the different positioning and distancing from the available repertoires about the social construction of food and gender. Adolescents and young men seem to swing between asceticism and hedonism, between self-control and self-reflection project. Moreover, in both groups the effects of self-care, namely the impact of the perceived respondents’ responsibility over their own health, are noticeable. What differ most adolescents from young adults are the ways and tools through which they construct a distinctive masculinity, mainly on the basis of cultural capital, by distancing from adult masculine role models for adolescents and by adhering to foodie culture for young men.

Keywords: food, masculinities, youth, doing gender, photovoice.