Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric of the New Culinary Male (original) (raw)

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. 1 Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call "common sense." 2 However, Isaac West argues that while cookbooks "invite readers into specific subject positions, some of which are more attainable than others", they provide cooks with "opportunities for communicating who they are and who they might want to be." 3 Critical/cultural scholars have documented how cookbooks, domestic advice manuals, and food television socialized women into the cult of feminine domesticity. 4 Meanwhile, if men were hailed by domestic food discourse it was as a caveman-like caricature of alpha males cooking large portions of meat over open flame. By and large, male cooking has taken place in professional kitchens, where a chef's credentials and a hypermasculine environment situate cooking as a manly vocation. Despite the recent growth in women ascending the ranks of professional kitchens, most women report the persistence of a male locker-room culture in the restaurant industry. 6 Meanwhile, a surge in men's interest in cooking has imported such cheflike machismo into home kitchens. While women still do a majority of household cooking, Generation X men are more involved in the kitchen than their fathers. 7 "Gastrosexual" men spend significantly more time shopping, preparing food, and consuming culinary media. 8 Jon Miller notes that the growing numbers of professional women who are equal or sole income-earners have contributed to "a