‘Cooking with Gordon’: Food, Health, and the Elasticity of Evangelical Gender Roles (and Belt Sizes) on The 700 Club
In: Religion and GenderSearch for other papers by Travis Warren Cooper in
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This article examines evangelical gender paradigms as expressed through a 700 Club cooking segment facilitated by Gordon Robertson, the son of Pat Robertson – founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), The 700 Club, Christian Coalition, and one-time presidential candidate. Several themes converge within this cooking show, including health and nutrition, family ritual, and gender roles. Using the cooking segment as data, I draw on scholarship on body, gender, family and ritual to argue that evangelical discourses are labile in their responses to recent socio-cultural shifts and suggest that ‘Sunday Dinners: Cooking with Gordon’ defies caricatures of evangelical gender formation and signals a shift to soft-patriarchy and quasi-egalitarianism, at least within public, visual discourse. ‘Sunday Dinners’ underscores the centrality of the family in evangelical discourse – even as conceptions of gender are in flux – as it seeks to facilitate everyday rituals via cooking and eating together.
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‘Cooking with Gordon’: Food, Health, and the Elasticity of Evangelical Gender Roles (and Belt Sizes) on The 700 Club
In: Religion and GenderSearch for other papers by Travis Warren Cooper in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article examines evangelical gender paradigms as expressed through a 700 Club cooking segment facilitated by Gordon Robertson, the son of Pat Robertson – founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), The 700 Club, Christian Coalition, and one-time presidential candidate. Several themes converge within this cooking show, including health and nutrition, family ritual, and gender roles. Using the cooking segment as data, I draw on scholarship on body, gender, family and ritual to argue that evangelical discourses are labile in their responses to recent socio-cultural shifts and suggest that ‘Sunday Dinners: Cooking with Gordon’ defies caricatures of evangelical gender formation and signals a shift to soft-patriarchy and quasi-egalitarianism, at least within public, visual discourse. ‘Sunday Dinners’ underscores the centrality of the family in evangelical discourse – even as conceptions of gender are in flux – as it seeks to facilitate everyday rituals via cooking and eating together.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Full Text Views | 206 | 61 | 11 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 341 | 87 | 21 |