DONE!

I finished my first draft of the last chapter today. when I realized what I had done, I just sat back and laughed for a bit. It's been a long ride.

More later, for now, celebration~~bye!

revisions

After re-reading the previously posted outline and retyping it this morning, I think I'm going to lighten up on the Foucault and not worry so much about using a specific theorist to make my transitions there. After all, I already have the overall framework, the issue of the body/mind split and the loss of the body in rhetoric, and I'm able to explore this problem through food TV, so I think that adding in Foucault stuff would be too much extra, like I feel I have to justify everything I say.

Also, I think it will be odd to try and cite these TV shows in my chapter, since they aren't scholarly texts, and I can't be very specific when I talk about them. No page numbers, for instance, no article or chapter titles. I want to talk about some of the shows as a series--talk more in general about the set design, or what often happens during the show, or what the host acts like--and some of the shows more specifically, as in citing an event in an episode. Even so, it seems to me more like hearsay or, worse, like "I just saw this show last night on TV and I wanna talk about it..."

tentative outline, chapter 5

Okay, so I've been reading through my notes and looking at the last of my DVD cooking shows, all in an attempt to focus this last chapter. It's hard because with this text (the TV cooking show) there's so much to talk about that I find it hard to resist. But I think I've come up with a focus that will work, not too different from my original idea but worded a bit clearer this time:

I. Opening anecdote/introduction
II. Cooking as a gestural act
~from oral tradition
~lit review
III. connect to multimodal argument--gestural is a key mode
IV. gestural act in print: cooking acts remediated on the page/recipes as prompts for action/recipe language/measurements (bodily and precise)
V. logical remediation: TV--overview of cooking as performance on TV
~example: Julia Child
VI. cooking TV as spectacle (appearance/style over recipe)
~Ray, DeLaurentiis, Flay, Food Network
VII. rhetorical lens applied to cooking shows
~Foucault on Martha and others
~produces discourse in response to Martha's and food network's unrealistic perfection/rejection of Martha etc.
VIII. demonstrates persistence of the body in the act of cooking, and, in rhetoric (rhetoric is material, connect to Blair's work and other rhetorical scholarship)
==
IX. Wrap-up: goals of this project
X. Wrap-up: limitations/possibilities for future study
XI. Conclusion (return to anecdote)

theoretical framework

Now I'm trying to decide what sort of framework I need to use here in Ch. 5. I think to explore the TV cooking show's obsession with perfection and surfaces, Kristeva's theory of abjection will be useful. It helps explain how this obsession really demonstrates the fragility of the boundary construction. Martha Stewart and other TV hosts attempt to construct clean, perfect boundaries using language (and not bodies), which establishes the precision of the recipe and anticipated perfection of the dish. This construction ends up producing new discourse regarding the use of one's body in cooking. (the previous sentence is from Foucault, another part of this framework, which will match nicely with Dasler-Johnson's and Rohan's work in this regard.)

No matter how often Stewart or others reinforce boundaries, TV screens can not begin to represent the act of cooking as it takes place in a "live" kitchen. The body-free demonstrations--where Stewart is seen pouring pre-measured ingredients from tiny prep bowls into a stand mixer, scooping the dough with an ice-cream scoop onto parchment-lined baking sheets, removing the finished cookies with a spatula, beginning and completing the recipe without ever touching the ingredients herself--only serve to highlight the lack of the body and lack of necessary gestures used in live cooking: the measuring, the messes, the cleaning up, the physical engagement of the hands, arms, eyes, nose, ears in live cooking. It makes for good TV, but it's not "real" cooking.

I may make this a secondary point, when I talk about the problems of remediation from act to screen, especially since I think Julia Child's engagement with the food is a better point to make. Child's demonstration more closely approaches the act itself, even as she seeks to entertain and educate (which is most often absent from the act of cooking).

Still trying to figure out how to open the chapter. As I've opened all the others with a story or some narrative link to my own presence in the text, I know I need to do that...but also I need to quickly transition from previous chapters into this one, and talk about how this chapter relates to my main point in the project, AND get to the main point of chapter 5, all relatively soon in the chapter. I could talk about my watching Julia Child and then trying her omelette recipe (which is really more of a gesture/skill than a recipe)...

more...

As I get further into watching cooking shows and researching them, I realize that they are much more complex than I assumed in earlier postings. I can't just exhibit them (even Julia Child) as an example of cooking performance, because there is so much ambiguity and gloss to a TV cooking show. Despite my earlier postings which assumed TV food shows would engage the body and demonstrate a direct relationship between the physical body and food in the exact same way that the experience or performance of cooking does, in fact it seems that TV cooking shows do more to reject or control the body rather than showing the embodiment of cooking discourse. As a result, the shows' focus on appearance/surfaces and perfection/idealization of cooking end up being highly conscious of its lack, the human/physical element. Because the body is so essential to cooking, it finds its way in to texts, surreptitiously.

For this, I'm thinking of a range of shows, particularly Martha Stewart, but also comments by Paula Deen and Giada deLaurentiis are useful to talk about concerning appearance.

I also want to bring in Julia Child to contrast somewhat against the above, but still to establish her focus on appearance and perfection as well, even though many of her episodes engage more physically with the ingredients and often show her making mistakes. This only endeared her to her audience.

Ch. 5 thoughts

Right now I've been doing a lot of research in food studies, television studies, and even into performance art as well as in body rhetoric. As is usual at this point, I have a lot of ideas that keep expanding the possibilities of Chapter 5, and none that quite fit together yet. From the rhetorical space of the "kitchen" set to the way the body works within that space, to how the recipe is remediated for televisual audiences, to cooking as performance, to the issue of liveness and intimacy on TV...all are possibilities.

I'd also like to broaden my work to make it have larger implications, and for that reason I'm considering putting it within a larger framework of responding to Carole Blair's article in the anthology Rhetorical Bodies, which discusses how rhetoric is often understood in a narrow sense, appealing only to the audiences' minds--but in fact Blair argues that rhetoric acts on the person's whole body as well as their mind (46). Then again, I don't know if this is all that new anymore.

If I take Blair's theory concerning rhetoric as acting on the whole person and link it to Rohan's argument (implied) that rhetoric is not a product but is instead productive (Dasler-Johnson says this, too), I can argue that rhetoric is not produced by performance in these food TV shows, but instead rhetoric is used to construct the goals of the TV food shows by engaging the body. As for what the goals are, they are ambiguous as of yet...which is characteristic and important here, as food shows use ambiguities to entice and entertain (Adema).

What does food TV do?

• demonstrates cooking skills/techniques
• demonstrates recipe
• entertains/entices
• allows viewer to relate

I think I want to focus most on how food TV demonstrates bodily interaction with food and tools and that the more relatable (not necessarily the most popular) are the ones in which the body is most fully engaged with the food--this makes it more parallel to the primarily oral cooking discourse shared between women originally. Use of estimated measures, of bodily movements to determine ingredient amount, and use of visual cues and smells rather than cooking time and temperature recall a bodily skill, an embodied knowledge of women from generation to generation. TV is an excellent way to recapture this oral culture, even as it has been repackaged for the new medium.

Though I'm looking at a wide range of DVD cooking shows, I do plan to focus on just one cooking series, or two to contrast against each other. I'm most taken with Julia Child, though I'll watch the rest of my DVDs to make sure.

I think my main goal in this chapter is to establish physical performance/gestures as a significant rhetorical mode, specifically through how it is essential to the discourse of cooking. This is best demonstrated in the TV cooking show. My goal is NOT to analyze the rhetoric of cooking shows, or consider the differences between entertainment food TV like Iron Chef and traditional cooking shows like Martha Stewart, etc. I'm using the TV cooking show to illustrate my beliefs about the gestural mode as essential to cooking discourse. I'll begin, also, with a discussion of how cooking is embodied in print--even in my dissertation, as I use my own experiences to weave together my argument. I may briefly discuss the issue of measurements, as they didn't come about until the Victorian era, when they were first standardized.

I think I forget my goal often when I'm doing my research, and I panic and think, "how can I focus my argument? what can I choose to say about TV cooking shows?" When really, what I need to be doing is thinking about my overall argument and seeing how TV cooking shows can illustrate/complicate/interrogate it. Which it absolutely does, because on TV, as in real life, bodies get in the way. Messes happen. TV, as a medium, works to cover those messes up, which in turn erases the body from the interaction, and the cycle continues.

Then there's the question of editing. Editing is used completely through other shows, especially pre-taped programs like most food TV is. Not so for food TV shows--comments are made regarding time (for time's sake, I have a completed dish here...) imply an acknowledgement of itself as false cooking, or cooking for show. Yet at the same time, the kitchen set looks real, and the cook sits down at the end of the show to their "meal" they've cooked, when all of us know it's just for show. I don't know what I want to say about that yet (or even if it's necessary), but it is something that keeps coming up in my research and observations.

Thoughts, Chapter 5

(...STILL can't believe I'm on the last chapter. Anyway...)

I've been looking at TV cooking shows, and have requested lots of DVDs from the library to watch for examples, as I think my primary text will be the television cooking show as a way to interrogate the physical act of cooking. I'll begin the chapter by discussing cooking as rooted in the body, as a performance. After looking back at this blog I remember Liz Rohan coming up with the idea that the recipe is a prompt for performance, as the reader of a recipe brings their bodily/lived experience to the page, and is called by the text to perform and engage their body.

And this is a big issue, because many TV cooking shows do NOT ask the viewer/reader to engage their bodies and are more of a display of bodies instead...possibly the TV show as substitute for the body? Some scholars call TV cooking shows "gastroporn"--pure entertainment to substitute for actual cooking. Or, are there select examples of TV cooking shows which do prompt the viewer to engage their bodies with the visual text? Such as, Julia Child--I've read a lot about her very physical way of cooking and how it inspired/engaged readers.

Much of this is about ethos...if not all. I just skimmed over Connors' article from the 80s about actio (delivery, the fifth canon), and how it is based in ethos. This is incredibly important for TV, and determines whether a show lives or dies.

These are just some initial ideas after two days' worth of research-gathering. For the next few days I'll begin to read through the huge amount of books and articles I've found already, and from there decide where to go next.

At the moment I'm finding sources from body rhetoric, feminist theories of the body, food and performance, cooking on television, Julia Child, the food network and celebrity chefs, and studies of reality TV.