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Explores recent animated films that embrace the idea that belonging to a community does not require conformity to social expectations, but rather builds on the protagonist’s individuality and seeming queerness. In box office hits like Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborn and Stevenson, 2008), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), and in the lesser known Bee Movie (Hickner and Smith. 2007), The Tale of Desperaux (Fell and Stevenhagen, 2008), character development connects closely with food, which becomes the instrument of the heroes’ redemption even when it would initially appear to be the very cause of their social isolation. This raises the question: What models of acceptable adulthood – in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and body image - does the interaction with food present to viewers, in particular children, who are arguably among the main marketing targets of these productions? Although cooking is still often culturally framed as an element of the domestic and feminine sphere, in these films food is not domestic or related to care work, and as such appears as more culturally acceptable for males.

Chapter 5 concerns the dilemmas that female shamans face in their quest for power. By exploring the rise and fall of Chimeg, a female shaman, the chapter unpacks the discrepancy between egalitarian rules and hierarchical practice and asks why female shamans’ skills as shamanic practitioners do not translate into political and material empowerment. The author explores how multiple gender systems in domestic, local, national, and state contexts impede female shamans’ ascent to power both during socialism and a market economy. Female shamans are betwixt and between: they need to be married and maintain households in order to fit the moral standards of womanhood, but their marriages and homes become obstacles to their advancement. If female shamans leave their households in order to pursue their shamanic practices, their lack of kinship and household support also impede their empowerment. They encounter a glass ceiling in either case, and so many tend to resort to unconventional sexual unions and creative strategies to maintain their audiences. Most broadly, the author argues that shamanism might give women a temporary escape from the tyranny of household patriarchy, but at the price of making them victims of patriarchy in the public sphere.