Women and Culinary from Domestic to Public Kitchen (original) (raw)

Television As a Trattoria: Constructing the Woman in the Kitchen on Italian Food Shows

European Journal of Communication, 2014

This article analyses the gender issues raised by the representation of the woman in the kitchen on Italian food TV. In Italy, food and women have always been constructed as a whole, but today this model seems to be redundant. Controversial postfeminist readings of Nigella's cooking shows and William's categories of dominant, emergent and residual help investigate, in a constructivist sense, how Italian TV deals with this social change. Through qualitative, semiotic and gender analysis, the article focuses on three Italian food shows broadcast at noon. Results show that the three programmes mediate the role of the woman, drawing on the model of trattorie, traditional Italian restaurants in which the women cook and the men serve the tables. This negotiation helps balance gender relations without revolutionary outcomes. In fact, at the same time, it modernises the old model of the housewife and does not move the woman out of the kitchen.

The Sexual Politics of Cooking: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Hierarchy in Western Culture

It is often assumed that culinary influence has been 'top down' – that is, that haute cuisine and professional cooking by male chefs has influenced popular cooking, especially once literacy became commonplace, and particularly with the publication of cookery books directed at the middle-class 'housewife'. Whilst it is certainly true that professional cooking has influenced domestic cooking as a 'trickle-down' effect, there is an area of serious neglect or oversight – namely, the denial or ignoring of the culinary influence in the other direction, that is, the influence of female domestic cooking on haute cuisine.

What's Cooking, Man? Masculinity in European Cooking shows after The Naked Chef

The article examines masculinity constructions in European food television in the 21 st century. It is informed by poststructural gender theory and it understands "doing food" and "doing masculinity" as two mutually constituting practices. The analyses identify four new tendencies in the construction of masculinity in cooking shows at the beginning of the 21st century: 1) Rechefisation; 2) The TV chef as a moral entrepreneur; 3) The TV chef and the revitalization of the national myth; 4) Cooking as masculine escapism. The article concludes that the innovation of the masculine identity that could be read into The Naked Chef (1999-2001) has not continued. Rather, the genre has become a platform for the revitalization of traditional masculinity discourses.

The cook, the cooker and the gendering of the kitchen

Sociological Review, 2000

This article combines the approaches of actor-network theory and poststructuralism to consider how a household technology has interacted with patterns of gender hierarchies over time. Two major innovations in cooking technologies are analysed in relation to cooking activities and the related conceptions of women's roles in families, which are central to these concerns. The first technological development is the thermostat oven control, introduced in the 1920s and 1930s; the second is the microwave oven, introduced in the late 1980s and 1990s. Important conceptions of the cook's performance are examined and various implicit roles that have been tacitly assumed by innovating agents in the use of cookers are made explicit. The study contributes to discussions of gender and technology in the context of domestic life.

Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric of the New Culinary Male

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

CARING ABOUT FOOD Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen - Gender & Society

Gender & Society

This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis sug- gests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implica- tions for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequi- ties persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.

Women in the Kitchen: The Performativity of Modern Living

SPACE International Journal of Conference Proceedings

It may be presumed that today's ‘modern’ woman is no longer tethered to the domestic realm. However, at the end of 2020, a UN report stated that as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, women were spending an increased amount of time within the home, setting back gender-equality progress by ‘at least 25 years’ (Lungumbu & Butterly, 2020) (UN Women, 2020). This paper will identify and examine the complexities surrounding the ‘modern’ woman’s relationship with her kitchen and the roles of women in today’s modern homes. Does the ‘modern’, open-plan kitchen design construct domestic roles within the house – are they as labour-saving as we may think? The paper will analyse promotional imagery from the 20th and 21st centuries as well as elements of popular culture. This analysis will occur alongside the main research source of the paper, which is a focus group detailing the experiences of five women examining their relationships with their kitchens. Open to all identifying genders...