Gender Rolls: Bread and Resistance in The Hunger Games Trilogy

Gilbert-Hickey Meghan Gilbert-Hickey

St. John’s University

Gilbert-Hickey, Meghan. “Gender Rolls: Bread and Resistance in The Hunger

Games

Trilogy.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopias. Eds. Sara K. Day,

Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz. Burlington, VT: Ashgate,

2014. 95-106.

Gender Rolls: Bread and Resistance in The Hunger Games

Trilogy

An August 1947 headline in the Los Angeles Times warned,

“Bread: it is the first concern of a hungry world. Trouble

looms for the nations that can’t provide it” (qtd. in

Borrow-Strain 82). Throughout World War II and, as we see in

the headline, after its completion, the United States

closely monitored the varying states of hunger in their

conquered territories. Without food, subjects were less

likely to remain malleable in the face of occupation. Bread

seems to be of particular importance in terms of cultivating

a sense of security and peace. Cultural anthropologists, in

fact, have been thinking about the importance of bread for

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Gilbert-Hickey decades. Carole Counihan, for example, notes the “symbolic”

nature of bread in Sardinian culture, highlighting Sardinian

proverbs like the following: “‘Chie hat pane mai non morit’—‘one

who has bread never dies’ [and] ‘at least we have

bread’—‘pane nessi bi n’amus’” (Counihan 29-30).

Rachel Lauden calls this kind of sociophilosophical

exchange between food and life a “culinary philosophy,” and

Roland Barthes argues that food “signifies” (978). By this,

they mean, as Barthes writes, that food is “not only a

collection of products that can be used for statistical or

nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a

system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of

usages, situations, and behavior” (978). Food tells us

important information about a situation, an individual, a

group, or a nation. As an example, Barthes, like journalists

and anthropologists, highlights bread: “the changeover from

ordinary bread to pain de mie involves a difference in what

is signified: the former signifies day-to-day life, the

latter a party” (979). Bread signifies based on how it is

made. But it signifies in other ways as well.

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Gilbert-Hickey

In the first book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games

trilogy, alone, there are over one hundred references to

food: tough meats and creamy cheeses, juicy fruits and

flavorful sauces. And while the series’ protagonist ranks

the lamb stew as the best thing about her nation’s Capitol,

it’s not a surprise that no food is given more attention,

nor as much complicated clout, as bread. Bread appears in

the first novel as a means of survival. By book two, it is

an edible—and, thus, erasable— symbol of one’s support for

political rebellion. In the third, rationing bread is a

means of sociopolitical control. Bread, in the Hunger Games

trilogy, is the comfort of home. The warmth of love. A

marker of class. A means of communication. A test. A gift.

In an interview coinciding with the promotion of the

initial book, Collins told a journalist, “The sociopolitical

overtones of The Hunger Games were very intentionally created

to characterize current and past world events, including the

use of hunger as a weapon to control populations […]” (qtd

in Blasingame 726). To a generation of readers (largely

women) for whom a career as a soldier is as possible as a

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Gilbert-Hickey career as a teacher, Collins presents a political uprising

against this use of hunger as a weapon—a rebellion with a

female leader, the power-hungry Alma Coin, and a female

figurehead, the underfed, underprivileged, quietly defiant

Katniss Everdeen. But after demonstrating that President

Coin is just as unethically ruthless as the man she plots to

overthrow, Collins wreaks havoc upon that “girls will be

boys” attitude with an internal rebellion, one that

culminates in Coin’s assassination by Katniss herself. Along

the way, bread serves as a shorthand for what Katniss is

and, perhaps more importantly, what she isn’t. A case in

point: bread, in the trilogy, is not the work of women. The

baker is a man, and his son, Peeta Mellark, whose name alone

invokes doughy warmth, is the source of much of the series’

nurturing. That’s not to say, however, that Collins has done

a simple inversion of gender roles, coding the domestic as

male and the political, female. Rather, using bread as a

symbol, she details if not a post-feminist protagonist, then

certainly a young woman with no use for either feminist or

paternalistic ideology.

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Gilbert-Hickey

This essay will demonstrate, via its examination of the

treatment of bread throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, how

bread serves as a link between—but not a barrier to separate

—the masculine and the feminine, the domestic and the

political. Gender, in these texts, isn’t the elephant in

the room. It is, in the figure of Katniss Everdeen and the

symbol of bread, muddled to the point that the masculine and

feminine are temporarily indistinguishable, amidst a

rebellion that involves class, politics, and the ethics of a

national culture. Thus, this essay studies the symbol of

bread—its production, dissemination, and ingestion—as a mode

of dis-gendered political and cultural resistance in The

Hunger Games trilogy.

Pierre Bourdieu made a clear class contrast in terms of

not only the form of food, but also how it is eaten: “In

opposition to the free-and-easy working-class meal the

bourgeoisie is concerned to eat with all due form. Form is

first of all a matter of rhythm, which implies expectations,

pauses, restraints; waiting until the last person served has

started to eat, taking modest helpings, not appearing over-

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Gilbert-Hickey eager” (196). So when Katniss and her fellow tribute, Peeta,

are selected by lottery to serve in their nation, Panem’s,

Hunger Games, their Games hostess, Effie Trinket, takes

careful note of their eating habits. The games are a public

spectacle in which 24 children, aged 12 to 18, fight to the

death in an arena set with traps and tribulations—all

televised for the entertainment of the Capitol’s citizens.

Having spent her whole life in the Capitol, Effie considers

herself an individual of refined taste. She compares Katniss

and Peeta to the previous year’s tributes: “‘At least, you

two have decent manners,’ says Effie as we’re finishing the

main course. ‘The pair last year ate everything with their

hands like a couple of savages. It completely upset my

digestion’” (Hunger Games 44). Effie is a stickler for

manners, but Katniss’s response positions her immediately as

a social rebel. “The pair last year were two kids […] who’d

never, not one day of their lives, had enough to eat,” she

tells the reader. “And when they did have food, table

manners were surely the last thing on their minds” (Hunger

Games 44-45). She bucks against Effie’s affirmation of the

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Gilbert-Hickey class system through manners by “mak[ing] a point of eating

the rest of [her] meal with [her] fingers. Then [she]

wipe[s] [her] hands on the tablecloth. This makes [Effie]

purse her lips tightly together” (Hunger Games 45). Having

spent her adolescence learning the value of keeping quiet in

order to feed her widowed mother and orphaned sister via

illegal hunting outside District 12’s gated borders, Katniss

is not yet a political revolutionary. But, using food, she

takes an initial step, here, toward an individual rebellion

against class norms.

The next morning, though, Peeta demonstrates that,

although he’s more congenial and willing to appear to play

by the Capitol’s rules, he is a rebel, as well, albeit a

quiet one. At breakfast, he, too, breaks social norms by

“breaking off bits of roll and dipping them in hot

chocolate” (Hunger Games 56). Peeta, we can assume based on

his status as a baker’s son, having lived in the slightly

more privileged area of an exceptionally impoverished

district, knows that one shouldn’t dip one’s food in one’s

drink. But he’s also a baker’s son. And, we learn later,

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Gilbert-Hickey he’s an artist—the decorator of the bakery’s fancy cakes and

cookies and, after he and Katniss win the Hunger Games, a

painter. Peeta knows, then, that although what he’s doing

isn’t correct—formally, as Bourdieu would say—it is in fact

innovative. Dipping the bread in his very first cup of hot

chocolate makes the bread his own; it becomes a sweet,

bakery confection. In this culinary act, Peeta shows his

first sign of individual strength. No longer the “shocked”

boy, when his name was chosen in the lottery, whose “blue

eyes show[ed] the alarm [Katniss had] seen so often in prey”

(Hunger Games 26), he is beginning to become the Peeta who,

on their last night before the Games begin, would tell

Katniss, “‘I want to die as myself. […] I don’t want them to

change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that

I’m not’” (Hunger Games 141). At that time, Katniss doesn’t

comprehend the kind of personal rebellion Peeta wants to

stage. But here, in the train on the way to the Capitol and

with the use of bread, Peeta has already begun navigating

his Hunger Games experience in his own terms. The next

morning, having arrived in the Capitol, Katniss follows his

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Gilbert-Hickey lead: “I fill a plate with rolls and sit at the table,

breaking off bits and dipping them into hot chocolate, the

way Peeta did on the train” (Hunger Games 87). A two-person

rebellion begins with a plate of rolls.

Once Collins demonstrates that bread will be central to

the trilogy’s revolutions, a reader finds it everywhere.

When Katniss tells her prep team and her mentor, Haymitch,

that she had gotten angry at the Gamemakers and Sponsors

(those in charge of the year’s Hunger Games) and shot an

arrow through the apple in their pig roast’s mouth, Haymitch

says, “‘Well, that’s that,’ […] and butters a roll” (Hunger

Games 105). Peeta, in a televised interview to win the

support of the Capitol citizens at the expense of their

leaders, cites a District 12 wedding ritual involving the

toasting of bread (Catching Fire 249). In order to show unity

against the other tributes, even when they don’t feel it,

Peeta and Katniss talk about the bread of the various

districts: “‘You certainly know a lot,’ I say. ‘Only about

bread,’ he says. ‘Okay, now laugh as if I’ve said something

funny’” (Hunger Games 98).

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Gilbert-Hickey

Bread comes to symbolize a rebellious mode of exchange

and underscores the sacrifices made to take and give it. As

a symbolic thanks for honoring the death of their tribute,

Rue, District 11 sends Katniss a loaf of bread: “What must

it have cost the people of District 11 who can’t even feed

themselves? How many would’ve had to do without to scrape up

a coin to put in the collection for this one loaf?” (Hunger

Games 239). The cost here isn’t only financial, although

readers have learned by this point in the novel that the

district’s poverty and hunger is overwhelming. There is also

—and much more importantly—a personal toll to be paid. The

sponsorship of this loaf of bread enables the people of

District 11 to say something they cannot safely say with

words. It is a dangerous, transgressive thanks, in that it

forges a unity between people who have been kept apart, by

virtue of geography but also of politics, with tall,

electrified gates keeping citizens inside of their districts

—safe from the wilderness and, truly, safe to a Capitol that

hoards power and control.

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Gilbert-Hickey

In fact, it seems that whenever Katniss is mulling over

an important social or political issue, the reader finds

bread of some sort being turned over and over, like the

issue itself, in her hands (Hunger Games 88 and Catching Fire

30). Bread, in the trilogy, is not just a foodstuff; it is

not merely, depending on its makeup, a cue for social norms.

Rather, it is a mode of strategic deception, a way to rouse

support, a shorthand for rebellion.

The giving and receiving of bread becomes a mode of

dialogue between those outside of the Hunger Games arena and

those within. Rolls from a particular district are

dispatched in varying amounts in the form of a code for the

time and source of rescue (Catching Fire 385). When Katniss

makes friends with another tribute in the arena, “a

parachute lands next to [them] with a fresh loaf of bread.

Remembering […] how Haymitch’s gifts are often timed to send

a message, [she] make[s] a note to [her]self. Be friends with

Finnick. You’ll get food” (Catching Fire 317). Katniss is rewarded for

making an important ally, and her reward is bread.

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Gilbert-Hickey

Bread, in this example and others, serves as an

incentive for various kinds of relationship-making in the

trilogy, the most prominent of which is the romantic

relationship between Katniss and Peeta—an unstable bond that

is sincere on Peeta’s behalf but initially strategic for

Katniss. Until the end of the trilogy, Katniss has little

time for romantic entanglements, which she perceives as

frivolous distractions from the care of, first, her family,

then, by Catching Fire, the second book of the series, her

fellow tributes and rebels, and finally, in Mockingjay, the

people of Panem. Romance is useful, to Katniss, only insofar

as it wins over sponsors, who will pay for the gifts, like

bread, that are sent to the tributes in the arena. Peeta has

already confessed his love for Katniss, a love that Katniss

pretends to return in front of cameras in order to maintain

fervent sponsor interest. So, when he says, “‘I wonder what

we’d have to do to get Haymitch to send us some bread,’”

Katniss knows the answer: “One kiss equals one pot of broth”

(Hunger Games 296). In order to win a gift like bread,

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Gilbert-Hickey Katniss must exhibit feminine sexuality, a trait she shows a

vast discomfort displaying.1

But she does exhibit it, most notably to earn bread for

herself and Peeta, during the Games. Michel de Certeau knows

that bread “remains the indelible witness of a ‘gastronomy

of poverty’; it is less a basic food than a basic ‘cultural

symbol,’ a monument constantly restored to avert suffering

and hunger. It remains ‘what we would have really liked to

have during the war’” (86). Katniss knows that her audience,

the wealthy Capitol citizens glued to their television sets,

particularly those who may afford to sponsor gifts of bread,

are not at war. Rather, they hunger for entertainment. And

what could be more entertaining than new love? In order to

“restore the monument” and avert Peeta’s “suffering and

hunger”—in order to give Peeta the bread he would “really 1 Dresses are a particular way in which Collins showcases Katniss’s discomfort with femininity. When we see Katniss ina dress, it has never been chosen by Katniss and, through her words and body language, we are alerted almost immediately to that discomfort. “‘You look beautiful,’ Prim says in a hushed voice” the first time Katniss wears a dress, this time laid out by her mother. “And nothing like myself,” she replies (Hunger Games 15). Later, in a dress designed by Cinna, Katniss feels like “a silly girl spinningin a sparkling dress. Giggling” (Hunger Games 136).

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Gilbert-Hickey like to have”—Katniss gives the audience something to

watch2. When she kisses Peeta again, passionately this time,

they are rewarded with “a feast—fresh rolls, goat cheese,

apples and […] a tureen of that incredible lamb stew”

(Hunger Games 302).

This kiss, as well as the entirety of Katniss’s romance

with Peeta in the arena is, according to Jessica Miller,

“performative,” invoking Judith Butler’s discussion of the

performance of gender (156).3 And it is certainly true that

Katniss is more comfortable wearing her “soft, worn” hunting

boots and wielding a bow and arrow in the forest than 2 One could argue that Katniss acts, here, not so much to provide bread to Peeta as to feed herself. While it is true that Katniss performs for herself, as well as Peeta, she does so in large part to keep a promise to her sister—and, subsequently to Rue—to win the Games, thereby demonstrating her strong desire to protect and care for others (Hunger Games 36, 233). She promises to “‘Really, really try. I swear it.’ And I know, because of Prim, I’ll have to” (Hunger Games 36). When she fails to perform well in the lead-up to the Games, Katniss “remember[s] how [she] promised Prim that [she] would really try to win and [she] feels like a ton of coal has dropped on [her]” (Hunger Games106). Katniss earns bread for her own sustenance, to be sure, but that bread, even as she digests it, serves a larger purpose than sole self-interest.3 For more on Butler’s concept of gender performativity, seeher book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London andNew York: Routledge, 1996.

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Gilbert-Hickey walking through her district in the “expensive machine-made

shoes that [her] mother thinks are more appropriate for

someone of [her] status” (Catching Fire 6-7). This is a

commentary on class, of course, in that Katniss feels

solidarity with her working class roots and not her eventual

Hunger Games victor iconic status.4 But it speaks to gender,

as well. Katniss is more comfortable wearing her

masculinity. Katniss and Peeta, in fact, invert gender roles

often. Miller writes that, in Katniss and Peeta, “Collins

has given us characters who invite us to reflect on the

categories of sex and gender” (146). Not surprisingly, bread

acts as a marker in these exchanges. “‘I’ll kill and you

cook,’” she tells him. “‘And you can always gather’” (Hunger

Games 295). When Katniss instructs Peeta to take on what we

would consider the traditionally feminine role—the cook and

gatherer—he wistfully wishes he could gather from “some sort

of bread bush” (Hunger Games 295). Here, bread acts not only

4 Although it is not within the scope of this essay, the fact that Katniss makes specific mention of her formal shoesbeing machine-made may point to a distrust of industrialization. The frequent mining accidents in her district bolster this claim.

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Gilbert-Hickey as Certeau’s “what we would have really liked to have,” but

also as Barthes’ “signifier.” The bread becomes a desire for

a return to the time when bread was abundant and,

simultaneously, an indication that the present and future

blurring of gender make that return to the past impossible,

even after the Games have ended.

Throughout the first text, in fact, Peeta frequently

exhibits what we might, if we were not more careful, tag as

“feminine” nurturing. Katniss’s first, and most retold,

memory of Peeta involves him saving her life by giving her

two loaves of bread from the bakery hearth. She calls him

“the boy with the bread” throughout the trilogy and notes

that he was as “solid and warm as those loaves of bread”

(Hunger Games 32-33). Whereas Peeta is warm and thoughtful,

Katniss’s nurturing exhibits less kindness. But when Miller

writes, “The stereotype of the nurturing mother tends to be

associated with warmth and kindness[, and, i]n contrast,

Katniss’s protectiveness requires actions more typically

with masculinity,” she’s not entirely correct (147). True,

Katniss hunts and Peeta bakes. Whereas he is warm, she is

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Gilbert-Hickey gruff. Lindsay Issow Averill, however, notes that, in the

wake of their father’s death, when Katniss takes over the

responsibility of her young sister and her nearly catatonic,

mourning mother, she acts in alignment with “women [who]

have traditionally taken on most of the responsibility for

the care of children and other highly vulnerable members of

society” (168). So when Katniss begrudgingly performs

femininity, thereby exposing to us, as readers, the extent

to which her femininity is an act, she is doing so in

accordance with what we have traditionally labeled feminine

reasoning: the desire to win bread for not just herself, but

the vulnerable, kind Peeta. It is circular and very muddled:

her femininity is performed, but the very fact that she’s

willing to perform it is an act of “feminine” nurturing.

While it is easy to argue that Collins inverts gender

norms throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, it is more

accurate to say that she complicates them. As Miller notes,

the outrageous fashion and beauty standards in the Capitol

seem to be the same for men and women (152). Peeta, who is,

emotionally, as “solid and warm” as a loaf of bread is also

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Gilbert-Hickey “broad-shouldered and strong” from “years of […] hauling

bread trays around” (Hunger Games 41). Further, the

Capitol’s gamemakers are of both genders, and the only

storyline involving prostitution centers on Finnick Odair, a

man widely held as the most beautiful person in Panem, who

is prostituted by the government in exchange for the safety

of his female fiancée (Miller 152). Finnick serves as an

interesting counterpoint to Katniss’s performance of love in

the arena in that, whereas she enacts an emotion—love—with

the use of very little performance of physical intimacy, he

sells sexual favors that are desired solely based on his

pleasing appearance.

Whereas Finnick’s appeal is based largely on his

appearance, Katniss’s performance has little to do with her

looks—“‘[Peeta] made you look desirable,’” Haymitch tells

Katniss early on; “‘And let’s face it, you can use all the

help you can get in that department. You were about as

romantic as dirt until he said he wanted you” (Hunger Games

135). At first, Haymitch’s critique may seem gender-based:

Katniss fails at femininity because she is not beautiful or

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Gilbert-Hickey desirable. But, in actuality, Haymitch is less interested in

Katniss’s looks than her likeability, and that only insofar

as it will keep her alive by winning over sponsors. Earlier,

he tells her she has “about as much charm as a dead slug,”

while Peeta has charm to spare (Hunger Games 117). The

comparison shows that charm isn’t necessarily feminine or

masculine. It can be either and, perhaps, should be both.

Ultimately, Katniss’s performance is strategic angling,

unlike Finnick’s externally-compelled, desperate sexual

acts. Both, though, sell themselves to protect another, a

deed that becomes neither masculine nor feminine in context.

In performing love to earn bread, Katniss is actually

quite different from Susan Bordo’s famous description of

women who are never fed by another and eat only in secret

(21). In “Hunger as Ideology,” Bordo details the plight of

women who sacrifice their own comforts to those in their

charge, much like the “Angel in the House” Virginia Woolf

scathingly describes, who “sacrificed herself daily. If

there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught

she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never

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Gilbert-Hickey had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize

always with the minds of others” (237). On the other hand,

Katniss is, in effect, post-gender, particularly in terms of

food. Yes, she provides it, cooks it, uses it to feed and

nurture others. She’s not only willing to hunt for it, but

is highly skilled with her weapon of choice. She also takes

food, however, when it’s offered by Rue, the 12-year-old

tribute from District 11 who is arguably in her protection

(Hunger Games 201). When ill, Katniss allows Peeta to feed

her in the arena, on camera, demonstrating her weakness and

need to be nurtured, as well (Hunger Games 291). Collins

seems to be arguing that rigid gender norms don’t work and

will, in the end, prove to be an insurmountable detriment.

When the revolution finally comes, the characters in

the Hunger Games universe that conform to strict

interpretation of gender, whether or not that gender is in

alignment with their sex, end the series lonely or dead.

Gale, for example, Katniss’s best friend and would-be lover,

exudes a hyper-masculinity that makes the girls of District

12 swoon and translates to prowess on the battlefield.

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Gilbert-Hickey Readers know from chapter one that Gale is coded as

masculine: “‘Look what I shot.’ Gale holds up a loaf of

bread with an arrow stuck in it, and [Katniss] laugh[s]”

(Hunger Games 7). In this passage, the gouging of the bread

foreshadows the very violent, very calculated form Gale’s

rebellion takes. Whereas Katniss sees the failure of a

ruthless regime, Gale’s fury toward the Capitol blinds him

to notions of justice and the protection of civilians and

sends him full-throttle into a high-ranking position in the

rebel army. This warrior, having failed at winning the love

of the series’ protagonist, not despite, but because of his

military prowess, ends the fictional series successful in

government service, but far from Katniss in District 2

Mockingjay 383).

Far worse than Gale’s fate is that of Katniss’s sister,

Prim, fair-haired and prone to tears, particularly over

injustice and the mistreatment of animals. Like women of the

Victorian era—Woolf’s “Angel” figure—Prim uses her status

and relative wealth (as the sister of a Hunger Games victor)

in the service of the sick and wounded. A healer by

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Gilbert-Hickey vocation, and one with delicate sensibilities, Prim

ultimately dies rescuing children from a similar scheme of

bombs that Gale designed on behalf of the rebel army.

But Collins doesn’t just demonstrate the fallibility of

ultra-masculine men and ultra-feminine women. In fact,

perhaps her biggest target in the Hunger Games series is

President Coin, the leader of District 13 and the movement

to overthrow the government of Panem. Coin is everything

that Miller might describe in terms of masculinity: she

looks after the people of her district with a ruthless

utilitarianism and commands her army into battles to the

death. Her “masculine” care ethic is particularly evident—

and oft commented upon by Katniss and numerous others from

outside of District 13—in the strict rationing of food:

“They have nutrition down to a science. You leave with

enough calories to take you to the next meal, no more, no

less. Serving size is based on your age, height, body type,

health, and amount of physical labor required by your

schedule” (Mockingjay 35). There is no foodsharing—Katniss

says, “It’s probably illegal”—and no food is allowed to

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Gilbert-Hickey leave the dining hall because, as Katniss tells it,

“Apparently, in the early days, there was some incident of

food hoarding” (Mockingjay 36). Hoarding is one issue, a

concern about individuals grafting power away from

government decision-making. It is compounded, however, by a

watchfulness regarding foodsharing. Amy Shuman calls this

communication via food a “rhetoric of portions” and argues

that “[t]he offering of portions as a part of foodsharing

may be intended, and often is taken to be, an act of

communication” (73). The rebel government seeks to avoid

this type of communicative act insofar as it might foster

the creation of subgroups within the whole. Subgroups are

dangerous because they are more powerful than any one

individual, and the rebel leaders maintain a tight grasp on

all levels of power within the group. So what Katniss sees

as a utilitarian obsession with maximum physical efficiency

is only partly true. Foodsharing is also dangerous in

political terms.

This is somewhat similar, and Katniss makes the

comparison, to a rare incident of rationing in the Capitol

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Gilbert-Hickey after her Hunger Games victory. After her victory in the

arena, Katniss gets “a real meal—roast beef and peas and

soft rolls—although [her] portions are […] being strictly

controlled” (Hunger Games 353). She asks for more, but is

refused, a first for her time in the Capitol, which has thus

far been marked by decadence and overeating: “‘No, no, no.

They don’t want it all coming back up on the stage,’ says

Octavia, [a member of the prep team,] but she secretly slips

me an extra roll under the table to let me know she’s on my

side” (Hunger Games 353). Certeau says that bread “allows

one to know if someone is ‘with us or against us’” in terms

of class understanding and culture (87). If one wastes

bread, it is an insult to those who go without. So Octavia’s

act of slipping bread to Katniss goes further than a bit of

sympathetic warmth. Rather, it speaks to shared—and, it

turns out, revolutionary—ideas about the avoidance of going

without. That, in a Capitol marked by excess, a citizen

would sympathize with an outsider who had long suffered

hunger is not only rare, but also dangerous.5

5 There are numerous additional instances of breadsharing asa way to forge discreet alliances. In Catching Fire, for

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Gilbert-Hickey

It is also somewhat surprising since, in the Capitol of

Panem, food is used in a conciliatory manner. The very name

of the nation references Panem et Circenses, the ancient Roman

proverb that doubled as a governing philosophy. Bread and

circuses. As it is explained to Katniss, “in return for full

bellies and entertainment, […] people had given up their

political responsibilities and therefore their power’”

(Mockingjay 223). In Panem’s outlying districts, food is

used as a weapon, as well, but to different effect. In the

districts, citizens’ relationship to food is characterized

by starvation, rather than excess; they are kept quiet not

because they are pacified, but because they are powerless.

District 13’s rebellion aims to change that. Bread is

provided, but not in excess. President Coin’s utilitarian

rationing in District 13, however, is marked by a rigidity

and enforcement that betrays her intentions: she is not

“with” her citizens, as she might claim. Rather, as Katniss

example, Katniss gives bread to two traveling rebels she finds in the forest (143). In The Hunger Games, she cements apartnership with the young, crafty Rue with the exchange of food (202). Even Peeta’s initial gift of bread to the young,starving Katniss forges a bond that later enables their alliance in the Hunger Games arena.

25

Gilbert-Hickey is well aware, she is using her citizens as workers to

further her own political power: “I guess bony shoulders

tire too quickly,” Katniss surmises (Mockingjay 35).

Further, a member of Katniss’s prep team, all of whom

have been taken hostage by the government of District 13,

plays a key role in underscoring the injustice of Coin’s

harsh rationing of bread. Octavia had shared her bread with

Katniss, covertly demonstrating whose side she was on. When,

later on in District 13, Octavia is severely beaten for

attempting to steal additional helpings of bread, her

suffering becomes the impetus for Katniss’s rebellion

against Coin—her version of side-taking—a rebellion that

culminates in the leader’s assassination. Katniss’s

rebellion against Coin begins as a response to the militant

rationing of bread: “‘I guess I’m defending anyone who’s

treated like that for taking a slice of bread’” (Mockingjay

54). And, as it began with her individual rebellion against

the Hunger Games, bread continues to serve as a signifier, a

mode of communication, and “what we would have really liked

to have during the war” (Certeau 86).

26

Gilbert-Hickey

Katniss is not entirely unlike Coin, which makes for an

interesting discomfort for the protagonist. She, like the

rebel leader, tends toward opportunism. In front of a

District 13 camera crew, for example, Katniss tells the

story of Peeta and the bread for a propaganda video to be

distributed throughout Panem. And it works: “I’ve been

sufficient, if not dazzling. Everyone loves the bread story”

(Mockingjay 169). Katniss participates in the rebellion by

commodifying the story of the bread, just like she once

commodified her sexuality to earn bread from the Capitol

sponsors. And if it makes Katniss uncomfortable to open up

like this, to finally do “what Haymitch has wanted since

[her] first interview” when he called her a slug, Katniss

knows, once again, that she does it to save Peeta’s life

(Mockingjay 166). As she did in the arena, Katniss has a

strict line she will not cross for the good of the

rebellion, or even herself. “Even if it meant losing food,”

she reasons in the arena, “Whatever I’m feeling, it’s no

one’s business but mine” (Hunger Games 298). But, before the

line is reached, Katniss willingly engages in

27

Gilbert-Hickey commodification. The difference then, between Katniss and

Coin is that Coin engages in the act in order to promote her

own interests, while Katniss’s motives more closely align

with the “feminine” care ethic. Coin is ruthless, a

“masculine” head of a military government, while Katniss

combines that ruthlessness with a nurturing that is so

masked it is almost invisible.

In fact, the only person Katniss harms via the giving

or withholding of food is herself. In the arena, when she

and Peeta ingest poisonous berries in order to call the

Gamemakers’ bluff and be declared joint victors, Katniss is

certain Peeta will not die. Because it is her idea, however,

the act puts Katniss in continuous physical danger as a

fugitive from the brutal President Snow, who sees her

rebellion as a political threat to his ultimate authority.

When, at the end of the series, Katniss is being held

prisoner for assassinating Coin, she attempts to rebel via

starvation: “I continue with my own annihilation. My body’s

thinner than it’s ever been and my battle against hunger is

so fierce that sometimes the animal part of my gives in to

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Gilbert-Hickey the temptation of buttered bread or roasted meat. But still,

I’m winning” (Mockingjay 376-77). Unlike President Snow and

his revolutionary counterpoint, President Coin, the only

person Katniss ever rations (or starves) is herself. But her

act in no way resembles Bordo’s—or Woolf’s—frail, hungry

woman. Katniss’s starvation is grounded in a strong, un-

gendered, personal rebellion, not feminine mores. The same

goes for her numerous decisions to eat. “My appetite has

returned with my desire to fight back”, she says, a desire

that is rekindled by the sight of the people of District 11,

those quiet rebels who sent Katniss that gift in the arena

and who pay for that gift dearly, with loss of freedoms and,

ultimately, life (Catching Fire 77, 62). “‘Thank you for your

children,’” she tells them. “‘And thank you all for the

bread’” (Catching Fire 61).

In the hands of individuals, those not involved in

government control and manipulation, bread comes not only to

signify rebellion, at large, but also to serve as the

physical symbol of the particular rebellion at hand. Katniss

learns that members of the rebellion not living under the

29

Gilbert-Hickey control of District 13 carry crackers with her symbol as a

sort of identification card to show other members. That

they’re using crackers is quite smart: “a wafer of bread

that can be eaten in a second if necessary” (Catching Fire

190). But the crackers are stamped with an image of a

mockingjay, the hybrid breed of bird that becomes linked in

the minds of the public to Katniss, after she uses their

song in the Hunger Games arena as a way to communicate with

an ally.6 “‘My bird, baked into bread,’” Katniss calls it

(Catching Fire 139).

Here is Collins’s masterstroke, the culmination of

personal rebellion straining toward the political and using,

6 The mockingjay is, itself, an interesting symbol of rebellion in that it derives from the jabberjay, a Capitol-engineered bird that served as a sort of spy breed during anearlier rebellion: “It took people awhile to realize what was going on in the districts, how private conversations were being transmitted. Then, of course, the rebels fed the Capitol endless lies, and the joke was on it” (Hunger Games 43). That first generation of rebels used the Capitol’s creation for it’s own cause in a method similar to the second generation of grassroots rebels and their use of bread. Further, “the jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds, creating a whole new species that could replicate both bird whistles and human melodies” (Hunger Games 43). Mockingjays, like the crackers with their image,became a physical enactment of “both/and.”

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Gilbert-Hickey as its symbol, not only her own signpost for rebellion but

one that combines Peeta, the nurturing baker, and Katniss,

the gruff hunter. In this symbol, we see individual courage

and conviction. We see the outlying members of District 13’s

rebellion carrying the part of it that is still good and

true: freedom from outlandish restrictions, as well as

excess at the expense of others. And, finally, we see the

blurring together of these two characters, Peeta and

Katniss, who have by this time become for us, as readers,

symbolic in their own right—symbolic of new gender norms and

a future in which a person need not choose either/or but

might make her own way using both/and. “‘What is it? What

does it mean?’” Katniss asks the two young women she finds

carrying the wafers. And the response, to an enormous

audience of mostly young, female readers, is clear: “‘It

means we’re on your side’” (Catching Fire 139).

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Gilbert-Hickey

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