Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

Autor(en)

Judith Ehlert

Abstrakt

This article draws on Bourdieu's concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food-body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Internationale Entwicklung

Journal

The Sociological Review

Band

69

Seiten

681-701

Anzahl der Seiten

21

ISSN

0038-0261

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261211009793

Publikationsdatum

05-2021

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

504027 Spezielle Soziologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Sociology and Political Science

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/9f15d5c1-e244-4303-83fb-45bdd04863f9