By treating food as both an aesthetic medium of knowledge production and an epistemology, this collaborative panel between LLC Korean Forum and LLC Japan since 1900 Forum explores how representations of the most mundane yet essential, and intensely political practices of food in literature generate critical insights into precarity associated with gender roles and identities, domesticity, (im)mobility, migration, body normativity, and embodied subjectivities. Drawing on the scholarship of food studies that highlights signs of depravity such as hunger as a gendered sensory register (Deborah Lupton, 1996) and that explore the relationship between gender and food in literature to bring forth the need for gender empowerment (Tomoko Aoyama, 1999), this panel presents four papers that explore aesthetics of food by addressing various forms of gendered precarity in literary works.

Food studies in Japanese contexts have experienced significant growth in the English-speaking world. More recently, the global popularity of South Korean media has also sparked increasing scholarly interest in Korean food. While researchers in fields such as history, sociology, and anthropology have played a central role in advancing this scholarship, the rich traditions and practices surrounding food in literature remain largely underexplored in both contexts. This panel brings together scholars from the US., Japan, and Australia with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, alongside gender diversity. They specialize in Japanese, Korean, Asian-American, Zainichi Korean literature, whose work also considers other Asian, European, and American literatures through multinational perspectives. Given their shared historical experiences—compressed modernity, imperial violence, the Cold War, and U.S. hegemony—the works examined by the presenters offer rich examples of how material, sensorial, and affective representations of food can illuminate forms of gendered precarity.

Pedro Bassoe examines stories by one of the most important food critics in early-to-mid twentieth-century Japan, author Okamoto Kanoko, including “The House Spirit” (Karei, 1939), “Sushi” (1939), and “The Food Demon” (Shokuma, 1941, posthumous). Through a close reading of her works, Bassoe demonstrates how Okamoto’s complex treatment of food functions as a literary device that simultaneously evokes horror, hunger, and a desire for philosophical insight as well as a matter of vitality and survival by frequently employing the theme of biological competition, particularly as it relates to gender. Ji-Yeon O. Jo analyzes Korean American writers Chang-rae Lee’s Coming Home Again (2016) and Grace M. Cho’s Taste Like War: A Memoir (2021) through the concept of “affective gastronomy.” In both works, suffering mothers are central figures, with food serving as a site of memory, care, and relational repair. Through the concept of affective gastronomy, Jo’s paper highlights how diasporic subjects engage food as a sensory and emotional medium for negotiating illness, care, and memory. By adopting Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” to illuminate a precarious mode of living, Yumi Tanaka compares two main female characters in Yuzuki Asako’s Butter, Kaiji and Rika, a female serial killer and a journalist, respectively. Through this comparison, Tanaka argues that food fundamentally transforms the quality and structure of precarity. Jonathan Glade explores how food operates as a marker of Koreanness in three texts, Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (Huiraebo sigan, 2011), Fukazawa Ushio’s Green and Red (Midori to aka, 2015), and Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart (2021). Glade attends to characters’ efforts to overcome stringent social, racial, and linguistic barriers in these works, arguing that these texts engage in a dialogue of horizontal exchange grounded in a shared struggle against alienation and marginalization.