Distinguished cuisines: food, status, and the disintegration of character in high society youth fiction

Expanding on current scholarship exploring consumerism in popular Alloy works, this thesis analyzes discourses surrounding food choices and eating in Gossip Girl (2002), The Insiders (2004), and The Clique (2004) through a lens of taste and gender theory in an effort to elucidate how materialism has become a stand-in for traditional markers of literary character that model identity for young readers. Distinguished Cuisines illustrates how the performative consumption of food-as-status leads to a disintegration of character as characters’ senses of self are replaced by reiterated acts of superficial ingestion, ultimately raising particular questions concerning the place of “identity” in contemporary consumer society.