The sugary crazy with the gendered glaze: The Ottawa Cupcakery's Fairy Princess Pink cupcake
By Ondine Park and Tonya Davidson
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010
In the summer of 2009, on a humdrum Edmonton afternoon, three of us went out for cupcakes. Fellow sociologists, knitting buddies and feminist reading group pals, we found ourselves at Fuss, a cupcake, gelato and coffee shop all rolled into one. It was there that we began to ponder the phenomenon of cupcake shops that seem to be popping up everywhere.
Cupcake shops are proliferating wildly, marketed to adults but with a frosting of childhood nostalgia. Sweet, pretty desserts adorned with opulent icing, cupcakes are the pinnacle of childhood treats, and embody the “sugar and spice and everything nice” notion of girliness. But rather than just representing a sweet indulgence for a sugar-addicted culture, does the nostalgia fuelling the cupcakes craze signal a broad cultural yearning for another time and another way of being – the seemingly glamorous Mad Men life when women hand-crafted little cakes for every single one of their bambinos? As we licked the ganache off our lips and the sugar crash hit, the question sent a twinge through our feminist political sensibilities. We asked ourselves: was this trend sexist and infantilizing? Or is it a case of third wave feminist entrepreneurs reclaiming and celebrating kitchen craftiness?
