Education, Faculty of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Way, Keenan
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This study critically analyzes how and why women’s work in the home matters, and how women make sense and meaning of their domestic identities. Feminist discourse has often favoured the public sphere as a site of inquiry, overlooking the value of the private sphere and resulting in a tension between ‘the feminist’ and ‘the housewife.’ This research explores the ways that women have negotiated their domestic identities in the spaces between, and how domestic work can foster empowerment and community for women. This study uses feminist research and analysis methods to give insight into women’s relationship to domesticity, exploring and acknowledging the value of domestic work. To honour the subjective realities and narratives of the participants, data was gathered from three qualitative sources: participant observation through online cooking sessions, semi-structured interviews, and participant documentation. Analysis methods included content, narrative, and discourse analysis to generate meaning for the study. The focus of this study is on domestic foodwork, reflective of women’s responsibility for planning, procuring, preparing, and managing the tasks of feeding the family. The results indicate that domesticity is experienced differently throughout a woman’s life, and that domestic work is inherently relational. The emotional labour of domestic foodwork was identified as the most difficult and stressful element of the task, and despite feeling the burden of responsibility for domestic foodwork, the women in this study are invested in their domestic identities, for the key role they play in sustaining familial relationships. Additionally, the kitchen is indicated as an important space of connection and empowerment for the participants, and should be noted as a valid site of inquiry. To deny the value of domestic skills dismisses the transformative potential of everyday spaces and acts. Essentializing as ‘women’s work’ the caring and relational tasks that women do through work in the home sustains the gendered division of labour, and limits the expectation that men participate in both domestic work and emotional labour to an equal degree. Domestic skills, especially the associated emotional labour tasks, should be understood as a learned knowledge system that everyone can participate in.
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING, EMPOWERMENT AND CONNECTING THROUGH DOMESTIC COOKING by Keenan Way B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2003 B.Ed., The University of Toronto, 2009 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Home Economics Education) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) September 2021 © Keenan Way, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Women’s experiences of knowledge sharing, empowerment, and connecting through domestic cooking. submitted by Keenan Way in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Home Economics Education Examining Committee: Dr. Kerry Renwick, Curriculum & Pedagogy, UBC Supervisor Dr. LeAnne Petherick, Curriculum & Pedagogy, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract This study critically analyzes how and why women’s work in the home matters, and how women make sense and meaning of their domestic identities. Feminist discourse has often favoured the public sphere as a site of inquiry, overlooking the value of the private sphere and resulting in a tension between ‘the feminist’ and ‘the housewife.’ This research explores the ways that women have negotiated their domestic identities in the spaces between, and how domestic work can foster empowerment and community for women. This study uses feminist research and analysis methods to give insight into women’s relationship to domesticity, exploring and acknowledging the value of domestic work. To honour the subjective realities and narratives of the participants, data was gathered from three qualitative sources: participant observation through online cooking sessions, semi-structured interviews, and participant documentation. Analysis methods included content, narrative, and discourse analysis to generate meaning for the study. The focus of this study is on domestic foodwork, reflective of women’s responsibility for planning, procuring, preparing, and managing the tasks of feeding the family. The results indicate that domesticity is experienced differently throughout a woman’s life, and that domestic work is inherently relational. The emotional labour of domestic foodwork was identified as the most difficult and stressful element of the task, and despite feeling the burden of responsibility for domestic foodwork, the women in this study are invested in their domestic identities, for the key role they play in sustaining familial relationships. Additionally, the kitchen is indicated as an important space of connection and empowerment for the participants, and should be noted as a valid site of inquiry. iv To deny the value of domestic skills dismisses the transformative potential of everyday spaces and acts. Essentializing as ‘women’s work’ the caring and relational tasks that women do through work in the home sustains the gendered division of labour, and limits the expectation that men participate in both domestic work and emotional labour to an equal degree. Domestic skills, especially the associated emotional labour tasks, should be understood as a learned knowledge system that everyone can participate in. v Lay Summary This research explores how women feel about their relationship to cooking in the home, including ways it may feel like a burden, and also how it can be empowering. I was inspired to search for examples of how women find meaning and value in their everyday lives through domesticity. With reference to feminism, gender, the division of labour, and the importance of home, my research involved interviewing women about their personal experiences with cooking and domesticity. After analyzing the interviews, I discovered that women have varied relationships to cooking, that often change throughout their lives. Also, the caring work that women do in their homes should be considered an important way that women take care of their families. Women also nurture their personal relationships through caring work. Women’s work in the home has not always been fully appreciated, but given its significance in maintaining relationships, deserves to be. vi Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished, independent work of the author, Keenan Way. The data reported and discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 was approved by the University of British Columbia Behaviour Research Ethics Board (H18-01271). vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xii Dedication ................................................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 Research questions .......................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Significance of the study ................................................................................................. 3 1.3 Research positionality ..................................................................................................... 4 1.4 Organization of thesis ..................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review .......................................................................................................6 2.1 Historical context ............................................................................................................ 7 2.2 The feminist and the housewife .................................................................................... 10 2.3 Communities of practice ............................................................................................... 12 2.3.1 Domesticity as nostalgia ....................................................................................... 13 2.3.2 Domesticity as self-sufficiency ............................................................................. 14 2.3.3 Domesticity as pleasure ........................................................................................ 15 2.3.4 Domesticity as community & empowerment ....................................................... 16 2.4 Gendered domestic identities ........................................................................................ 18 viii 2.5 Women’s emotional labour ........................................................................................... 20 2.6 The everyday as sacred ................................................................................................. 21 2.6.1 Women in community ........................................................................................... 22 2.7 Theoretical framework .................................................................................................. 23 2.8 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 3: Method and Methodology ........................................................................................27 3.1 Methodological approach and epistemological position ............................................... 27 3.2 Research design and data collection ............................................................................. 30 3.3 Ethical considerations ................................................................................................... 34 3.4 Data analysis and evaluation ......................................................................................... 34 3.5 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 36 Chapter 4: Data Analysis ............................................................................................................38 4.1 Women’s Relationship to Domesticity ......................................................................... 38 4.1.1 A mother’s influence ............................................................................................. 40 4.1.2 Learning to cook ................................................................................................... 42 4.1.3 Cooking as chore vs. leisure ................................................................................. 45 4.1.4 Domestic identities as fluid ................................................................................... 49 4.1.5 Summary ............................................................................................................... 52 4.2 Emotional Labour and Men .......................................................................................... 53 4.2.1 Women’s emotional labour ................................................................................... 55 4.2.2 We love through food ........................................................................................... 56 4.2.3 Caring through nutrition ....................................................................................... 58 4.2.4 “Cooking is a woman’s job!” ................................................................................ 60 ix 4.2.5 Men in the kitchen ................................................................................................ 63 4.2.6 Food and masculinity ............................................................................................ 67 4.2.7 Summary ............................................................................................................... 68 4.3 Domesticity and Feminism ........................................................................................... 69 4.3.1 Having it all and the second shift .......................................................................... 70 4.3.2 The trouble with feminism .................................................................................... 72 4.3.3 Summary ............................................................................................................... 74 4.4 Domesticity and women’s knowledge .......................................................................... 74 4.4.1 The kitchen as women’s domain ........................................................................... 75 4.4.2 Cooking in community ......................................................................................... 79 4.4.3 Women’s knowledge ............................................................................................ 80 4.4.4 Summary ............................................................................................................... 83 4.5 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion ......................................................................................85 5.1 Summary of key findings .............................................................................................. 85 5.2 Response to research questions ..................................................................................... 86 5.2.1 Research question: Does a women’s knowledge of domesticity exist? Do women have a sense of their knowledge in the kitchen as specialized? ............................................ 86 5.2.2 Research question: How do women conceive of and negotiate their domestic identities? .............................................................................................................................. 87 5.2.3 Research question: Do women experience a sense of community through domestic kitchen work? What are women’s experiences of cooking in community? ........................... 88 5.3 Discussion of findings................................................................................................... 89 x 5.3.1 Domestic knowledge as subjugated knowledge ................................................... 89 5.3.2 Doing gender and women’s emotional capital ...................................................... 93 5.3.3 Undoing gendered domestic identities .................................................................. 98 5.3.4 Summary ............................................................................................................. 101 5.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 102 5.4.1 Limitations of the study ...................................................................................... 102 5.4.2 Implications for practice and pedagogy .............................................................. 103 5.4.3 Recommendations for future research ................................................................ 105 5.4.4 Final words.......................................................................................................... 107 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................109 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................121 Appendix A - Adult informed consent .................................................................................... 121 Appendix B - Conversation prompts ...................................................................................... 124 Appendix C - Journal prompts ................................................................................................ 125 Appendix D - Group interview questions ............................................................................... 127 xi List of Tables Table 3.2 Participant demographic information ........................................................................... 31 . xii Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Kerry Renwick for your patience and support, for putting on many hats to get me through this project, even when I disappeared on you. Your stories, insights and guidance helped me feel supported, capable, and seen. Thank you to Mary-Leah deZwart & Gale Smith for getting me truly jazzed about home economics. Thank you to Nick, Antony & Vicki for believing in me whole-heartedly and for seeing the value in home economics and what I do in the classroom. Thank you to the women that gave me their time, energy, and support by participating in this project. I had so much fun with all of you. Special thanks to my parents, who knew when to ask how this project was going, and when not to. Also, for your infallible safety net and unwavering love and support. xiii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to all the amazing and inspiring women in my life that have held me up, and held space, while holding it all together. …and to my best cheerleaders, Danny & Loreen, who taught me the immense pleasure of food, what it means to be a family, and to believe in a world that’s full of love. I’m truly blessed to have you on this journey. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction A contemporary revival in domesticity is underway, where both women and men are engaging in domestic skills as a way to find purpose and meaning in their lives. A timely example is how, during the early stages of the pandemic, folks were coping with the lockdown by turning to hands-on, domestic activities: baking sourdough bread, gardening, cooking with their families, and taking up embroidery. The pandemic brought with it uncertainty, increased anxiety, and reflective time at home. As life slowed down, people filled their time and eased their minds with tangible, concrete, productive work. That people turned to domestic tasks as a form of self-care during this time of collective upheaval alludes to the continued relevance and value of domestic skills, even in today’s busy, technology-driven world. Despite this, critical discourse on domesticity and women’s work in the home remains peripheral to discourse on work that happens in the public sphere (Scicluna, 2017). Ideologies about work, gender, and the home often essentialize domestic work as women’s work, and it remains true that in the family home, women disproportionately assume the responsibility for food procurement, meal-planning and meal preparation for their families. Yet this critical domestic work that women do often remains invisible and undervalued, speaking to a larger context of devaluing feminized skills and work because of their perceived lack of contribution to the capitalist economy (DeVault, 1991). Discourse on domesticity should include reflection on and analysis of how a patriarchal paradigm subjugates women’s knowledge and experiences (Code, 2007; Foucault, 1980). This research is informed by thinking critically about the ways that women’s lives continue to be marginalized, influenced by structural dualism that creates an opposition between male/female, public/private, work/home (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Thompson, 1992). While I present a feminist analysis of domesticity, there is a central tension in feminist theory that relates to 2 domesticity. Second-wave feminism found women’s association with and responsibility for the home problematic, and that narrative has endured, resulting in a dissonance around women who value their domestic identities (Friedan, 1963; Gillis & Hollows, 2009). Further, while I aim to unveil the personal and social value of women’s work in the home, I also want to be careful about not presenting an argument that says domestic work is ‘who women are’ but that domestic work should be understood as work that women do (Erickson, 2005; Thompson, 1986). 1.1 Research questions This research explores the relationship between women and domesticity, the potential presence of a ‘women’s knowledge’ of domesticity, and how knowledge sharing in a domestic context can foster empowerment and connection between women. The study is structured around three central research questions: Does a women’s knowledge of domesticity exist? How do women conceive of and negotiate their domestic identities? Do women experience a sense of community through domestic kitchen work? I use a feminist analysis of and insight into women’s unique relationship to domesticity, exploring and acknowledging the value of domestic skills, without essentializing domesticity as women’s work. Critical research on domesticity is limited in its exploration of women’s domestic identities other than ‘feminist’ or ‘housewife’ (Friedan, 1963; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; C.J. Smith, 2019), but I am curious about what is happening in the spaces in between. My research is informed by interpretivism and constructivism, where knowledge and reality are subjective, socially situated, and interactionally bound (Hultgren, 1989; Given, 2012). To honour the individual life histories and narratives of the participants in this study, I use qualitative methods for gathering data through online cooking sessions and interviews. 3 1.2 Significance of the study Home economics and domesticity are not the same thing; though I do want to refer briefly to home economics history to situate the significance of this research. Following industrialization of the 19th century, a public/private split affected homes and families, where men went out to work, and women became responsible for the home (Caroll, 2016; Folbre, 1991). Domestic work thus became feminized, and considered less important than the paid labour of the public sphere (Gillis & Hollows, 2009). First-wave feminists at the time were advocating for women’s access to higher education, and it was through home economics programs that women were first able to go to university (Smith & deZwart, 2011). This was a unique convergence of the public/private and male/female, in which feminine domestic activities gained acceptance and legitimacy in a masculine domain (Peterat, 1983). Even the rebranding of home economics as ‘domestic science’ speaks to the efforts made to bring home economics (and thus, domestic skills) in from the margins. However, I want to explore domesticity is for its own epistemic value, not within the confines of how it contributes to the public/masculine world. Globally, domestic work, and especially feeding the family, continues to be work that women do. How have women made sense and meaning in their personal lives of the responsibility for taking care of their families? The self-sufficiency, collaboration, and knowledge required of domestic skills is surely valuable in and of itself, and to deny that dismisses the transformative potential of everyday actions (Genz, 2009; Hollows, 2005; Vaines, 2004). If domesticity can be reframed as a knowledge system, and not a gendered system (Thompson, 1986), then perhaps the skills and tasks undertaken by women in domestic spaces can become more valued and more equitably shared. 4 1.3 Research positionality As a home economics teacher, I usually get one of two responses when I tell people what I do: “Oh wow, that’s so cool! You must have so much fun. I loved home ec!” and, “They still offer home ec? Cooking and sewing?” These responses seem apt – home economics is fun, and also misunderstood and marginalized. Despite the content of home economics being the bedrock of humanity – food, family, community – it is often a class taken ‘just for fun.’ Home economics may be considered “one of the earliest forms of modern feminism” (Smith & deZwart, 2011, p. 3), its pioneers concerned with the same issues that we are today: connecting home, school and community; thinking critically about women’s lives; and the need for holistic education that honours life’s connections. However, situating home economics within a wider context of contemporary feminist discourse suggests a narrative that home economics and its associated domestic skills is problematic to feminist endeavours. Through my coursework in the Human Ecology and Everyday Living master’s program, I learnt about the tension felt by feminists around traditionally feminine domestic skills (Friedan, 1963; Johnson, 2000). Skills that I find inherently meaningful, comforting, empowering, fun, and feminist. I found myself exploring the intersection of home economics, feminism and domesticity as I wondered about the questions, “Is home economics feminist?” and “Can domesticity be empowering?” I also employ feminist research principles by centering women’s experiences, and locating myself within the research (Hesse-Biber, 2014). As a white, middle-class, heterosexual, professional woman living in western Canada, I appreciate that I have a lot of privilege, most of which is likely imperceptible to me. My connection to domesticity is pleasurable: I cook for others only when I’ve invited them over, I grew up in a family that celebrates food, and I am not impeded by food insecurity or limited access to resources, such as time and money. It is through 5 these lenses that I embarked on this project, seeking examples of how women make meaning in their everyday, domestic lives. 1.4 Organization of thesis Chapter 1 introduces the topic of study, the central research questions, as well as the context for and significance of the study. In Chapter 2, I present a review of the relevant literature, citing sources related to feminist theory, home economics and feminist histories, contemporary domesticities, women’s identity and gender constructionism, and theories of knowledge and power. The methodological position, and qualitative methods used to gather data are described in Chapter 3, followed by the data analysis in Chapter 4. Finally, in Chapter 5, I respond to the research questions, provide a discussion of the findings, and identify limitations of the study and recommendations for future research and practice. 6 Chapter 2: Literature Review The last 20 years have seen a resurgence in homemaking skills, and both women and men are engaging in homemaking practices in exponentially growing numbers. ‘Old fashioned’ pursuits like canning, knitting, baking bread, and mending clothes are ‘hip’ again, and many women are finding meaning and purpose in their domestic skills. This is a noticeable cultural and identity shift from the narrative of second-wave feminism that imagines the home as uniformly oppressive to women, constructing a dichotomy between the feminist and the housewife, and claiming that a woman could not be both (Friedan, 1963; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Genz, 2009; Hollows, 2003). My interest in domesticity arose out of research into the intersection between home economics and feminism, and more specifically about how domestic skills can act as a site of empowerment, feminism, identity-building, and connection between women. Reasons people are gravitating towards traditional domestic skills and practices are varied. They include disillusionment with the industrialization of our food system; nostalgia for the way things ‘used to be’; hands-on respite from our technology- and work-driven lives; and simply taking pleasure in homemaking (Carroll, 2016; Hayes, 2010; Genz, 2009; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003; Matchar, 2013; Scicluna, 2017). Integral to the new domesticity is a sense of community, and the opportunity for women (and men) to participate in their craftwork together, to connect over the shared experience of domesticity (Carroll, 2016; Groeneveld, 2010; Hayes, 2010; Stovall, et al., 2015; Zimmerman, 2003). The potential for growth from connections between women, built through shared understanding of and responsibility to the home, has been historically unacknowledged because women’s experiences remain largely marginalized (Code, 2015; Zimmerman, 2003). Despite a complicated relationship with feminism, domesticity has the potential for subverting gender norms, and relationship-building 7 through domestic spaces and activities where women can engage in a home economics that is inherently feminist for its do-it-yourself attitude that espouses self-sufficiency, independence, and connection to each other and community (Carroll, 2003; Hayes, 2010; Grace & Gandolfo, 2014). I found my literature through library searches with a combination of terms, including domesticity, feminism, reclaiming domesticity, women, gender, domestic skills, traditional female skills, feminized skills, home economics, gendered division of labour, community kitchens, gendered identities, and women’s knowledge. Several titles and authors showed up frequently, and a further mining of reference lists from common works and authors led me to additional texts. Nearly every article and book referenced and traces the second-wave feminist backlash against homemaking to Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique, on the disillusionment, malaise and ennui felt by mid-20th century women stuck in their homes. Any text exploring the gendered division of domestic labour and women’s emotional work cited Marjorie DeVault’s Feeding the Family (1991). I included texts that analyzed the current revival of domestic skills, those with a feminist analysis of domesticity, others that offered a reimagining of the housewife/feminist dichotomy, and those that explored gendered domestic identities. What follows is a review of the literature that situates the current domestic revival within the historical context of the gendered division of labour, first- and second-wave feminist history, and home economics education. 2.1 Historical context Connections exist between the history of industrialization, the emergence of a capitalist economy and the social response to domestic work (Folbre, 1991; Genz, 2009; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Matthews, 1987). As industrialization matured at the end of the 19th century, families 8 transitioned away from an agrarian, self-sustaining lifestyle to one of consumption, where household goods and services were increasingly purchased outside the home (Hayes, 2010; Hollows, 2003; Matthews, 1987; Norton, 2011; Williams, 2016). Prior to this transition, men and women worked together to produce and maintain what the family needed, but as paid-work in industry became available, and greater wealth was attainable for individual families, men left the domestic space to join the paid work force, leaving the domestic sphere solely in the hands of women (Carroll, 2016; Folbre, 1991; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hollows, 2003; Matchar, 2013; Matthews, 1987). This shift gave rise to the ideology of separate spheres, and the cult of domesticity, two pervasive discourses on gender, work and domesticity, often considered historically and gender bound, even prior to the industrial revolution, and foundational to the second-wave feminist backlash against domesticity (Folbre, 1991; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hollows, 2003; Hunt, 2014). The separate sphere ideology is based on essentialist ideas about gender, and while iterations have existed throughout history, ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle’s, writings describe mind/body dualism in which public, political spaces are coded masculine and the private space of the home is coded feminine (Thompson, 1992). The work-gender dichotomy was reasserted during the Industrial Revolution, when a visible split occurred between work that was done in the home (private), and work that was done outside of the home (public) (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hollows, 2003), echoing Aristotle’s public/private, male/ female division. That different types of work were happening in different spaces was not problematic, as much as that both the spaces themselves, and the work found therein, had become gendered (Bratich & Brush, 2011; Carroll, 2016; Hollows, 2003). While men were able to transition from the private to public realm, retaining their access to economic and social power, women were relegated to the 9 private/home space. Part of the fervour for domesticity in this era was in response to the collective religious and ideological fears about how the new capitalist economy and subsequent changes to the family structure would destabilize traditional family values (Folbre, 1991). In order to maintain a sense of agency and control during rapid social, economic and political changes, while not upsetting the new capitalist economy that had men working outside of the home, the responsibility for the sanctity of the home and family fell solely on women’s shoulders (Folbre, 1991; Hollows, 2003). The idealization of the homemaker shaped the cult of domesticity discourse that romanticized women as inherently more equipped to effectively manage the household and care for children, and as having higher moral standards with which to do so (Folbre, 1991; Hollows, 2003; Hunt, 2014). Many pioneering feminists advocated for the recognition and respect of women’s work in the home, and women’s early access to post-secondary education was largely facilitated through home economics programs (East, 1980; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Smith & deZwart, 2011). Catherine Beecher, foundational home economist, was a proponent for women’s education and participant in the domestic feminist movement, and sought to advance women’s role in society by legitimizing their superior domestic capabilities (Folbre, 1991; Norton, 2011; Smith & deZwart, 2011). The field of home economics emerged around this time, both as a response to changes in the traditional family structure, as well as an effort to legitimize domestic work through the respected fields of science and technology (Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Norton, 2011; Smith & deZwart, 2011; Thompson, 1986). While “deeply essentialist, [domestic feminists] demonstrate how domesticity has been imagined as compatible with feminism rather than its antithesis” (Gillis & Hollows, 2009, pg. 5), challenging the 10 housewife/feminist binary that would later come to pervade second-wave feminist thought (Carroll, 2016; Friedan, 1963; Genz, 2009; Gillis & Hollows, 2009). 2.2 The feminist and the housewife An unintended consequence in the establishment of home economics as an academic field was the hierarchy produced, resulting in a divide between the expert home economist and the housewife (de Zwart, 2005; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Norton, 2011). Some argue that the institutionalization of home economics actually resulted in a deskilling of women in domestic tasks (Friedan, 1963; Hayes, 2010; Norton, 2011). As home economists championed nutrition, hygiene, and food safety, and expectations about home management grew, women learned to mistrust their personal knowledge and collective wisdom relating to household skills, instead relying on the advice and guidance of professional home economists (de Zwart, 2005; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013) and the increased marketing of supposed labour saving consumer goods and services (Hayes, 2010; Norton, 2011). The continued move from production towards consumption throughout the early 20th century has meant that households have become more mechanized, resulting in less technical homemaking skills, and over time housework may have lost its sense of purpose (Friedan, 1963; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Norton, 2011). Contrary to domestic feminists who championed women’s association with domesticity, popular second-wave feminist thought saw the private sphere as a “site of unrecognized and unpaid labour for women” (Hollows, 2003, p. 5), and thus as part of women’s continued marginalization and subjugation (Friedan, 1963; Genz, 2009; Hayes, 2010; Norton, 2011). This assessment may be especially pertinent because, despite gaining access to paid work outside of the home, women continue to remain responsible for also taking care of the home, resulting in a ‘second shift’ at home following a full workday (Hochschild, 2012). Arising out of the second- 11 wave criticism of domesticity is a perceived separation between the housewife and the feminist. The narrative ‘to be a housewife is to not be a feminist’ limits women to only one of two opposing identity choices. The feminist in this dichotomy is constructed as the ideal of a self-actualized woman, one who has thrown off the shackles of domestic servitude in favour of applying herself to paid work outside of the home, leaving the housewife to be imagined as ‘Other,’ a pale reflection of an idealized feminist (Friedan, 1963; Genz, 2009; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hollows, 2003, 2007; Johnson, 2000; C.J. Smith, 2019). Through this assessment, ‘the housewife’ is conceived of as a static, gendered identity, rather than as performing gendered labour (Hollows, 2003). Part of the problem of Friedan’s reductive assessment of domesticity is the position that women’s domestic work is not real work. This asserts the value of paid/productive, ‘male’ labour, while simultaneously devaluing work that women do in the home, and is reflective of modernist ideals of progress in which self-development occurs in a straight line from unpaid to paid, private to public, housewife to feminist (Hollows, 2007; Johnson, 2000). Betty Friedan opens her influential second wave text, The Feminine Mystique (1963), with a chapter titled “The Problem That Has No Name,” which describes the malaise and intellectual atrophy suffered by women at the hands of their obligation to and responsibility for domestic and household duties. This ‘problem’ applied almost exclusively to white, middle-class women in the United States and the United Kingdom, and yet pervaded feminist rhetoric as an essential female experience, denying the complex and varied relationships women have with domestic duties (Budgeon, 2015; Bowen, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991; Hollows, 2006; Meah, 2014). The ‘problem that has no name’ fails to acknowledge the women that have been left out of discourses on domesticity, namely working-class women and women of colour, 12 many of whom had to work outside of the home in order to support their families. Much of that work was as domestic help, preserving the ideals of white domesticity in the homes of middle- and upper-class families (Bowen, et al., 2014; Folbre, 1991; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003; hooks, 2014; Kendall, 2020; Matchar, 2013; Meah, 2014; Williams-Forson, 2011). Other narratives from the second-wave era exist – women using cooking in cooperation with subversive, political acts (Williams, 2016); women of colour finding cultural meaning in their ability to feed their families (Hollows, 2003; hooks, 1990); and the exclusion from idealized domesticity working-class women experienced because they were busy taking care of other women’s homes and children (Folbre, 1991; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003; hooks, 1990; Kendall, 2020). Friedan offers a one-dimensional view of the housewife that exists only within the binary of public/private spheres, where the feminist/housewife narrative is an oversimplified and historically inaccurate discourse on a more nuanced issue. What remains missing in the discourse is a critical analysis of “what emerges between the feminist and the housewife” (Gillis & Hollows, 2009, p. 2). 2.3 Communities of practice If domestic duties are symbolic of women’s oppression, what is driving women to reconnect so profoundly with the domestic sphere? Gillis & Hollows (2009) ask if the new domesticity is “evidence of a [continued] backlash against feminism or whether academic feminism might learn from the questions being posed within the popular about women’s relationship to home and the wider value of domestic life” (p. 3). To explore this idea requires a reimagining of the feminist/housewife binary, and a greater breadth of discourse on how and why women connect with their domestic roles. Some literature suggests that the erasure of women’s domestic identities in feminist theorizing is due to the disconnect between idealized 13 feminist objectives of productive work and domestic femininities in which women find meaning in the home (Budgeon, 2015; Hollows, 2007). 2.3.1 Domesticity as nostalgia Literature on the motivators for the modern re-engagement with domesticity often references a collective nostalgia for the past, for the ‘olden days’ in which families and communities lived harmoniously (Groeneveld, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Myzelev, 2009; Zimmerman, 2003). While the nostalgia analysis largely centres on the textile-based crafts of domesticity, it also peripherally applies to the ‘back to basics’ food movement. This longing for a time when life was simpler is largely attributed to shifting social and economic factors, and the resulting uncertainties about work, family, food security, and women’s roles (Hayes, 2010; Groeneveld, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Scicluna, 2017; Zimmerman, 2003). This became particularly evident in the heavier impact on women’s working lives after the global financial crisis of 2008 (Karamessini & Rubery, 2013; Seguino et al., 2009; Trades Union Congress, 2009). Frustrated by the glass ceiling, often looking for side gigs, and craving meaningful social connections, women are finding community and value in contemporary domesticity (Groeneveld, 2010; Hayes, 2010; Hollows, 2006; Matchar, 2013; Myzelev, 2009). Hollows (2006) refers to this as ‘downshifting’ – where professional women are escaping “the realities and pressures of the modern experience” (p. 106) to participate in slower, more pleasurable domestic tasks. To ‘downshift’ in this way is a classed opportunity that necessitates acknowledging who exactly has access to opting out of the paid economy. Another critique of domesticity as nostalgia is that it imagines a past that may have never been, romanticizing the ‘olden days’ as a time when everyone lived harmoniously and as part of a nuclear family. This potentially skewed understanding and interpretation of domesticity, family 14 and women’s work leads to the erasure of the social, political and economic realities of the time (Genz, 2009; Groeneveld, 2010; Scicluna, 2017; Vachhani & Pullen, 2011). The privileges associated with the traditional, idealized family and home life often remain unnamed, and women do not have equal access to choices related to work both in and out of the home (Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2006). There exists a parallel between contemporary shifting family realities and the rise in nostalgia for the traditional (Scicluna, 2017). However, idealizing a white, middle-class domesticity requires critical analysis for its inaccessibility and exclusion of women of colour and working-class women (Budgeon, 2015; Bowen, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991; hooks, 2014; Oleschuk, 2019, 2020). 2.3.2 Domesticity as self-sufficiency Literature suggests that the new domesticity is not simply about personal satisfaction and empowerment, but is borne out of greater political, economic and ecological movements (Carroll, 2016; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013; Norton, 2011; Stovall, et al., 2015). These analyses construct the new domesticity as subversive and disruptive to the status quo of extractive capitalism and patriarchy (Hayes, 2010; Carroll, 2016; Matchar, 2013; Groeneveld, 2010). Changing political and economic realities such as access to child-care, unstable employment, and food security have left families searching for agency over their own lives (Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013). In the self-sufficiency model of domesticity, homemaking is established as radical, where everyday acts are carried out untethered to a market economy, and value is derived from community engagement rather than individual achievement, expanding the potential for relationship- and community-building (Carroll, 2016; Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013). As a reaction to fluctuating income opportunities, many women are turning to homemade and craft-based side jobs to supplement their household income (Hayes, 2010; Matchar, 2013). 15 In some ways, these women are ditching the traditional economy in favour of a gig economy that allows them greater agency and control over their hours, work-life balance, and income. Contrary to the subjugated housewife, the radical homemaker is an activist: she is intentional, resourceful, and invested in family, home and community, and central to contemporary gender and environmental movements (Carroll, 2016; Hayes 2010; Matchar, 2013; Stovall, et al., 2015). Rather than operating within the dichotomy of homemaker/feminist, the domesticity of self-sufficiency approaches the conversation from a feminist perspective, where institutional hierarchies are challenged (Carroll, 2016; Stovall, et al., 2015). 2.3.3 Domesticity as pleasure For some, there is a sensual pleasure inherent in the new domesticity associated with the ideology of the ‘domestic goddess.’ Following the second-wave backlash against domesticity whereby many women (notably, white and middle-class) rejected traditionally feminized skills in favour of paid work, the pleasure and meaning of caring for a home was potentially lost to an entire generation (Carroll, 2016; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003; Norton, 2011; Williams, 2016). How universal this phenomenon actually was remains unclear, as literature from and about that era is disproportionately centered on the privileged class. Alternative narratives by or about women of colour or working-class women are conspicuously absent as are the perspectives of women living in or coming from non-Western, Judeo-Christian contexts. However, research does show that some women of the post-Friedan generation are picking up where their mothers left off and referencing missing out on the pleasure and leisure of domestic tasks that they did not learn from their mothers or grandmothers (Matchar, 2013; Cairns, et al., 2010; Groeneveld, 2010). Insofar as the domestic goddess takes pleasure in the indulgence in food (both its creation 16 and consumption), she has the potential to subvert this traditional gendered identity (Cairns, et al., 2010; Hollows, 2003). The emerging ‘domestic goddess’ ideology exists in the space between the feminist and the housewife by imagining a domesticity imbued with sensuality, pleasure, and art, while simultaneously giving meaning and value to the everyday acts of domesticity (Hollows, 2003, 2007; Myzelev, 2009; Genz, 2009; Groeneveld, 2010). Removed from everyday family foodwork, the domestic goddess identity can slow down and invest time in domestic activities such as baking pies and cakes (Hollows, 2006, 2007). In this model, rather than drudgery, domestic acts become almost meditative, where one can disengage from the daily grind and focus on the specialized skills and tasks associated with certain types of domestic work. Hollows (2005) labels domesticity for the sake of pleasure as a privilege of the ‘single girl’ to do what she wants with her time and energy, while acknowledging that others – mothers, wives and caretakers – still have to fulfill the duties of care for the family, which take on a significantly different meaning. How, for example, does the discourse of pleasure interact with the day-to-day burden of housework that so many women are responsible for (Hollows, 2003; Groeneveld, 2010)? While many find taking care of the family and home gratifying, the domestic goddess as an ideal may add pressure to women who are most likely juggling multiple roles and responsibilities (Hollows, 2003; Zimmerman, 2003). 2.3.4 Domesticity as community & empowerment Despite often being characterized as oppressive to women, many find community and empowerment through participation in domestic work. Identity is bound to gender, race and class, and despite the functions of structural power not being in their favour, many women of colour and working-class women find pride and agency in their ability to care for their home and 17 family (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; hooks, 1990; Sukovic, et al., 2011). If we decolonize the narrative of gender and foodwork, a more robust picture emerges about how women engage in domesticity in empowering ways. For women of colour, the home is a place where families and communities are taken care of, away from white hegemony (hooks, 2014; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Meah, 2014; Williams-Forson, 2011). In this context, there is power within the home domain, where the ability to “[teach] critical consciousness in domestic spaces” (hooks, 2014, p. 47) affirms the communal role undertaken by women of colour. For example, Meah (2014) shares cases from the global South of women participating in foodwork in ways that allow them to re-imagine and negotiate both their gendered and racialized identities. For marginalized women, the home and the activities within may offer their only sense of control and stability from external and institutional disadvantages (Sukovic, et al., 2011). Despite pressures to live up to an idealized femininity through domesticity, some studies highlight how working-class women attain “pleasure and power through producing ‘good homes’” (Meah, 2014, p. 12). Even feminist histories provide examples of cooking as subversive, and ways that feminist groups used cooking to enact change through politics (Scicluna, 2017; Williams, 2016). Through these narratives of domesticity, we can see a space emerging where women create the capacity and means to negotiate and challenge oppressive gendered roles within domestic spaces and tasks (Meah, 2014; Williams, 2016). The concept of a singular experience of domesticity results in the erasure of the diversity of women’s lives and experiences in relation to domestic work. Exercising control and agency over one’s kitchen space and food decisions plays an important role in defining one’s identity (Sukovic, et al., 2011). This can be especially true for marginalized women who, in more static spaces and places, have less access to assert agency and control (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; hooks, 2014; Sukovic, et al., 2011). 18 2.4 Gendered domestic identities How people make sense of and negotiate their identities is complex, and one must recognize the limitations of conceptualizing identity as fixed and static, rather than fluid and contingent on social location and life circumstances. Through a postmodern lens, identity is a do-it-yourself project rather than simply a choice between established, culturally available roles (Bauman, 2001; Johnson, 2000). Bauman (2001) conceptualizes identity as a choice, and links the rise in contemporary identity politics to the dissolution of true community. In Bauman’s appraisal, class and gender have become malleable aspects of one’s identity where ‘anything goes.’ The postmodern influence on gendered identity politics gave rise to post-feminist understandings of identity as subjective. Green (1998) highlights the tension between the essentialism of early feminism that was fighting the monolith of patriarchy and the postmodern concept of subjective identities. Where postmodern feminism has “engaged with paradigms of difference and emphasized diversity” (Green, 1998, p. 174), there has been a lack of attention to the structural and social factors that continue to disadvantage women, especially women of colour and those with limited means (Budgeon, 2015; Green, 1998; Kendall, 2020). To balance these differing perspectives, “many feminists retain the concept of patriarchy as the conceptual link which signifies the gendered nature of power relations, whilst at the same time recognizing its inadequacy to theorize the complexity of [the] relations between women and men and between women themselves” (Green, 1998, p. 174). West & Zimmerman (1987) introduce the concept of ‘doing gender,’ in which gender is socially constructed and interactionally-bound. In their model of gender, people engage in behaviour coded as masculine or feminine in order to successfully perform gender. For women, the successful performance of femininity intersects deeply with nurturing and caring as feminine 19 traits that are regularly enacted through domestic work (Cairns, et al., 2010; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Grace & Gandolfo, 2014; Hollows, 2005). Doing gender reinforces the essentialness of femininity, so the more competently women engage in domestic femininities, the more those traits are perceived as intrinsic to women (West & Zimmerman, 1987). The perception that women are inherently more caring than men also contributes to the continued justification of the gendered division of labour in which women take on an inequitable portion of domestic work (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Marsh, 2013). Part of the process of performing gender involves self- and other-monitoring to ensure adherence to conventional domestic femininities (DeVault, 1991; West & Zimmerman, 1987; Williams, 2016). Rezeanu (2015) writes that “through a self-regulating process, women are legitimizing the traditional gender” expectations of domesticity (p. 18). West & Zimmerman’s constructionist model of gender suggests that gendered identities are bound by the acceptable ways one can ‘do’ gender. Applying these concepts to women’s domestic identities emphasizes the explicit connection between gender, food and identity. Traditional feminine domestic identities are bound to dominant gender ideologies that associate women with caring and nurturing through food, and sustaining familial relationships (Beagan, et al., 2014; Cairns, et al., 2010; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hollows, 2003). While women can, to varying degrees, negotiate and construct their own subjective identities, they are also affected by power structures that privilege masculine ways of being (Code, 2007; Huppatz, 2009; Johnson, 2000). Despite this privileging, men are also affected by discourses of gender, identity and masculinity (McPhail, et al., 2012; Meah, 2014; Meah & Jackson, 2013; Rezeanu, 2015; Sobal, 2005; Szabo, 2012, 2013). However, masculinity is not similarly connected to nurturing and caring, which allows men to 20 maintain more distance from domestic work while also not constructing their identities around how well they are caring for others (Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Reay, 2004; Szabo, 2012). Feminist theorizing has found it problematic when women are encouraged to see themselves only in relation to their domestic identities, where they may lose sense of themselves as an individual, however, women continue to find value and meaning in their care work and domestic identities (Beagan, et al., 2008; Budgeon, 2015; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hayes, 2010; Thompson, 1986). 2.5 Women’s emotional labour One of the most salient ways women establish femininity is through their responsibility for emotional labour in the home (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cooke, 2005; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Hollows, 2007). Marjorie DeVault turned her graduate research on women’s domestic emotional labour into a book that remains relevant to the discussion today. Feeding the Family (1991) explores the caring work inherent to domestic foodwork that women are disproportionately responsible for. The emotional labour of family foodwork encompasses a wide range of tasks that often remain invisible to and taken for granted by other family members (DeVault, 1991). The work that women do to maintain relationships can also be understood as emotional labour, one aspect of which is the desire to avoid conflict. Conflict avoidance when negotiating family roles and jobs may further strengthen the gendered division of labour (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; McKeown, 2015; Marsh, 2013). Despite emotional labour being gendered, literature examining the connection between emotion work and the gendered division of labour in the home is limited (Erickson, 2005). 21 Since the skills associated with emotional labour tend to be perceived as inherently feminine, emotional labour remains undervalued and undertaken almost entirely by women (Huppatz, 2009; Stovall, et al., 2015). When emotional labour is essentialized as feminine, women are thought to do it simply out of love and not because they have been taught to (Erickson, 2005; Huppatz, 2009). Men engage in significantly less emotional labour, and are not expected to, because to do so would compromise rather than uphold their masculinity. Caring for and about others in the home fosters a sense of connectedness that also becomes coded as feminine, as the focus on others is primarily expected of women, while men are permitted to maintain emotional distance, and focus on the self (DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Peterat, 1989; Reay, 2004; Szabo, 2012). In fact, this is the crux of the second-wave feminist tension with domesticity – that in service to others, women are excluded from the self-actualization available to men who do not have to focus on loved ones (Friedan, 1963; Huppatz, 2009). 2.6 The everyday as sacred Domestic tasks are not often perceived as worthy of deeper analysis, as feminist discourse about the everyday lived experience of the private/home sphere is neglected in favour of the public/work sphere. However, personal lives are given meaning through everyday practices and actions, however, as foundational to how we spend our lives, the everyday merits closer examination for its potential to be transformative and subversive (hooks, 2014; Scicluna, 2017; Vaines, 2004; Williams, 2016). Disregarding the everyday is an oversight in feminist discourse that fails to recognize the inherent value in the daily interactional dynamics of the home (Budgeon, 2015; Code, 2007; Hollows, 2003, 2007). The erasure of the everyday may be considered a classed omission, as Kendall (2020) highlights the way in which feminism has 22 framed its concerns not on survival but on increasing privilege. Thus, for women of colour or those who cannot be defined as upper- or middle-class, there is a greater everyday concern for basic needs such as “food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighbourhoods, a living wage, and medical care [as] feminist issues” (p. xv). Eleanore Vaines has had a profound impact on the philosophy of home economics, and one of the central tenets of her contribution is honouring the everyday as sacred, where to deny the meaning and value of the everyday denies the livelihood of families and communities (Vaines, 1994, 2004). Vaines (2004) calls for a “re-enchanting of our everyday life” (p. 135) by re-engaging with multiple ways of knowing that have been lost to the dominance of scientific modes of inquiry (Vaines, 2004). These multiple ways of knowing include knowledge of the everyday, which should be recognized for its cultural value that should not lie with women alone, but also within families and communities (Adkins, 2002; Harding, 2004; hooks, 2014; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; McKeown, 2015; Vaines, 2004). 2.6.1 Women in community Women’s only spaces can become safe spaces where women engage in feminine ways of being and knowing that focus on connections, intimacy, creativity, and healing (Green, 1998; McKeown, 2015; Meah & Jackson, 2013). If the home is understood as a feminized space, then as the hub of the home, the kitchen, is where women may experience the greatest sense of autonomy, empowerment and agency. Feminism has largely ignored the kitchen as a valuable site of inquiry despite it being “a place [that] brings out deep social and dynamic relations which are concerned with cultural constructs, roles and positions of women in Western society” (Scicluna, 2017, p. 244). Women take part in care work, domestic labour, and intimate relationships in the kitchen, which can be understood as a place where dominant gendered 23 ideologies are resisted, disrupted and challenged (Meah, 2014; Scicluna, 2017). The kitchen can also be a political space, where coming together to participate in “socially sanctioned gendered activities such as cooking” (Schroeder, 2006, p. 665) can help build capacity for women (Stovall, et al., 2015). Private, domestic spaces – like the kitchen – are also where female friendships are regularly built and maintained (Green, 1998). Through group participation in everyday tasks, such as cooking, women have the opportunity to negotiate and disrupt their gendered identities, and the connecting that women do in community is facilitated by ‘women’s talk,’ which is unique in both style and content (Green, 1998; McKeown, 2015). Women talking together, while frequently characterized as gossip, is integral to how women do friendships. Gendered talk often takes place during women’s leisure activities, and when such leisure happens in women’s only contexts, as it often does around domestic work, there is a chance to resist gender stereotypes (Green, 1998). The interactions between women in leisure spaces happen away from the expectations of heteronormative and patriarchal dynamics, “[facilitating] autonomy and freedom from caring responsibilities” (p. 175), and fostering a sense of community in which women can relate to each other as subjects (McKeown, 2015). McKeown (2015) highlights that the very process of women being and talking in community together is foundational to women’s capacity and skillset for emotional labour. Women’s relational ways of being and knowing honour narrative interactions as a valuable source of information and a legitimate way of creating and sharing knowledge (Adkins, 2002; Harding, 2004; McKeown, 2015). 2.7 Theoretical framework In feminist theory and research, women’s lived experiences and subjective realities are valid forms of knowledge. However, women’s epistemologies are subjugated by scientific 24 theories of knowledge that are presented as universal and neutral by those with privilege and power (Code, 2007; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Harding, 2004; Meah & Jackson, 2013; Peterat, 1989; Thompson, 1989; Williams, 2016). Some feminist research investigates the relationship between knowledge and power, and seeks to center voices from the margins, specifically women’s (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2011; Harding, 2004; Peterat, 1989; Thompson, 1989). Knowledge is ideologically-bound, and therefore woman-centred theories of knowledge are inherently disruptive to the positivist concept of objective truth, as they destabilize the primacy of masculine, scientific knowing. A central tenet of feminist inquiry for Hesse-Biber (2014) is decentering the hegemonic male experience, while seeking out and highlighting women’s subjugated knowledge. In so doing, the woman’s experience is no longer marginalized but rather centred in the research process. Women’s knowing is characterized as holistic, relational, situational and not separate from body or emotion, which is antithetical to conventional perceptions of knowledge (Code, 2007; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Peterat, 1989). As creators of their own knowledge, women “[can] produce knowledge that answered their questions about nature and social relations” (Harding, 2004, p. 4). However, there is a tension within feminist theory about the universality of women’s experiences, where intersectional theory and research is necessary to avoid essentialism and to decenter the idea of a ‘collective group consciousness’ (Harding, 2004). Women are positioned differently on the margins. However, in moving the feminist agenda forward, Code (2007) writes that “collaborative, engaged, politically committed inquiries can yield knowledge more responsive to human diversity than those derived from assumptions of sameness” (p. 217). To situate women’s theories of knowledge in a wider context, feminist theorists refer to the Foucauldian distinction between scientific and ‘folk’ knowledge to explain how women’s 25 knowledge has been subjugated (Code, 2007; Harding, 2004; Pendergast, 1996). Foucault (1980) writes about knowledge as interactional and constructivist, where individuals create their own knowledge realities based on their relationship to power. Foucault’s theories are related to structuralism, in which oppositional binaries are used to make sense of structural power dynamics. Knowledge that is further away from power is inevitably subjugated. Scientific knowledge, as a masculine way of knowing, is presented as neutral and objective not because it is, but because of masculine power. In contrast, women’s ‘folk’ knowledge is rejected as irrational and subjective (Code, 2007). While drawing on Foucault’s theories of knowledge, it is worth mentioning the feminist tension around Foucault, centering primarily on his omission of gender, women, or sex distinction in his work (McLaren, 2002). Further, some feminist critics find fault with Foucault’s postmodern concepts of power and subjectivity for their erasure of “the possibility for a unified politics” (p. 173) through which agency and resistance is possible. Another theoretical lens through which to analyze women’s ways of knowing and being is Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (1986). If cultural capital is understood to be what one knows and can do, women potentially have access to a unique form of cultural capital related to what they know and do as women. Reay (2004) applies this concept to emotional labour, as women engage in it to a far greater degree than men, and therefore have access to more emotional capital than men. Huppatz (2009) makes a similar argument for women’s feminine capital that is “derived from disposition or skill set learned via socialization” (p. 50). The embodied state of cultural capital is acquired over time through a long-term investment (Bourdieu, 1986). Women engaging in unique ways of being and knowing can therefore be considered an investment in their emotional or feminine cultural capital. 26 2.8 Summary Several key ideas emerged from the literature on women, feminism and domesticity. Despite certain narratives about domesticity as oppressive, women cross-contextually continue to find meaning and value in their domestic work and lives. This was challenging for second-wave feminism, as the idealized woman in second-wave feminist discourse is one that has access to, and thrives in the public/masculine sphere. When women either reject that vision, or simply choose to thrive in the private/feminine sphere, they are considered to be rejecting the possibility of self-actualization. However, to conceive of a self-actualized woman as only one static identity obscures both the diversity of women’s lived experiences, and the reasons they connect with domesticity. Dominant gender ideologies influence how women are expected to be, and this means that the caring work women do in domestic spaces is perceived as intrinsic, however, it should be understood as a learned skillset. While an essentialist vision of ‘how women are’ is problematic, the skills associated with the everyday are most regularly undertaken by women and do denote a unique way of being and knowing in the world that remains marginalized and undervalued. 27 Chapter 3: Method and Methodology In this section, I introduce my epistemological position, and the methods I used to conduct and analyze the research, which were interpretive and phenomenological. I collected data from three qualitative sources: participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and participant documentation. Informing my research are constructivist, feminist and poststructural theory, where open-ended questions, and participants’ reflections and narratives about their experiences generated meaning for the study. The epistemological and ontological stance of this research focuses on questions concerning interpretation and understanding of specific phenomenon as “communication between two subjects, rather than as understanding developed by a subject about an object” (Vincenti, 1989, p. 83). The analysis methods included content, narrative and discourse analysis to generate themes and meaning for the study. 3.1 Methodological approach and epistemological position Interpretive research views reality as socially constructed and subjective, and in an interpretive paradigm, researchers are not seeking to uncover an objective truth, but rather to make sense and meaning out of the everyday lived experiences of their subjects (Brown, 1989; Hultgren, 1989; Ryan, et al., 2007). Interpretive research uses a central phenomenon of everyday, social life as the main focus of the study (Creswell, 2015), and the purpose of the research is to develop a rich, contextual understanding of the phenomenon at hand. In this research model, the data and meaning are derived through dialogue between the researcher and the study participants. The subjective lived experiences of each participant are considered valuable data (Brown, 1989; Sipe & Constable, 1996; Peterat, 1989; Vincenti, 1989). In interpretive research, “there are many truths…and discourse assumes the form of a dialogue between various knowers” (Sipe & Constable, 1996, p. 158). The participants of the study, then, 28 are the actors generating both the data and the meaning of the data, and the goal of the research is to understand through the point of view of the actor (Sipe & Constable, 1996). In an effort to honour the connection between home economics, everyday living and women’s lived experiences, I employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to this research, which seeks to find a deeper meaning in the everyday (Hultgren, 1989). Phenomenology is concerned with interpretation of the shared experiences of a group, and understanding “life world as it is experienced, rather than as it is conceptualized” (p. 51). A phenomenological epistemology and method values the perspective of those experiencing the situation of study, and calls into action a conversation between subjects, and an exploration of human interactions (Brown, 1989; Vincenti, 1989). Phenomenology blends well with interpretive research in that both are seeking to uncover multiple ways of being and knowing, where subjectivities produce knowledge and shape experience. In a constructivist paradigm, knowledge is interactional, and people create their own meaning and knowledge based on their personal experiences (Given, 2012). Constructivism understands social phenomena as a human construction rather than a natural event, and therefore requires different theories and methodologies than the empirical science of positivism (Coomer & Hultgren, 1989). While positivism seeks objectivity and knowable truths, constructivism pays attention to subjective realities and “the intersection of politics, values, ideologies, religious beliefs, language” in the construction and interpretation of knowledge (Given, 2012, p. 120). In applying “a lens of analysis informed by female experience” (Thompson, 1989, p. 97), feminist research both centres and validates women’s voices, knowledge and experiences, which often remain marginalized in traditional, positivist research (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2011; Code, 2007; Hesse-Biber, 2013; Peterat, 1989; Thompson, 1989). Feminist research acknowledges that 29 women’s epistemologies often challenge positivist constructions of knowledge, the dominance of which can be attributed to structures of power and objective realities (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2011; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Mills et al., 2012). Irrelevant to the data collection mode, feminist research seeks to uncover and reclaim subjugated knowledge, “[incorporating] interpretation, subjectivity, emotion and embodiment in the knowledge-building process” (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 10). The positionality of both researcher and subject is explicit in feminist research, to avoid considering the studied phenomenon as a valued aspect in all women’s lives. Because of its inherent challenge to hegemonic gender ideologies, feminist research is subversive, and concerned with enacting social change (Hesse-Biber, 2014; Mills et al., 2012; Peterat, 1989; Thompson, 1989). Hesse-Biber (2014) posits that feminist research has the two mains goals of supporting “social justice and social transformation” (p. 3) by drawing from women’s experiences that are both varied and unique. It is critical that feminist research and analysis recognizes that ‘women’ does not represent a single, unified group, and that race, class, sexuality, geography and ability significantly impact women’s life experiences (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2011; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Mills et al., 2012; Peterat, 1989). Poststructural feminism is concerned with discourses of power, the ways power dynamics intersect with women’s different lived realities, and that “power and knowledge shift with the context and participants involved” (Mills, et al., 2012, p. 711). Second-wave feminist research is criticized for only telling the stories of white, middle- and upper-class women, while third-wave feminists have brought to light the intersections of race, class and gender that affect women of colour and working-class women in unique ways (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2011; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Mills, et al., 2012). 30 3.2 Research design and data collection Given my epistemological positions, interest in the complex, social phenomenon of domesticity, belief in subjective realities, and desire to centre women’s lived experiences, I chose to use qualitative methodology for this study. My goal was to connect meaningfully and engage in dialogue with the research participants, both to learn from them how they were making sense and meaning of their experiences with domesticity, and the ways in which they were creating and negotiating their domestic identities and communities. I wanted to situate myself in the research, and co-construct knowledge with the participants. I acknowledge that interpretation of the data is influenced by my situated realities. I gathered data in this study from qualitative sources: participant observation and semi-structured interviews during group cooking sessions, a focus group, and participant documentation (i.e. a written journal). Participants were recruited through word-of-mouth, posting flyers in shops, cafes, and community centres in Squamish, BC, and a Facebook community board for women in Squamish. Despite attempting to seek out participants through community posters and the Facebook page, all the women who participated were recruited through word-of-mouth, and all were previously acquainted with me. Prospective participants reached out to me if they were interested, at which time they were emailed further details about the study, including consent forms (Appendix A: Adult informed consent). Fourteen women between the ages of 25-68 volunteered for the study, all of whom live in British Columbia. Of the fourteen participants, 8 took part in the online cooking sessions, 8 participated in the focus group interview, and 3 women who participated in the online cooking sessions also submitted written journals. Table 3.2 includes further participant demographic information. 31 Name Age Marital Status Living Situation Location Ethnicity Ani 38 Married 2 adults, 2 children under 10 Summerland White Bonita 56 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Consuela 36 Married 2 adults, pregnant Vancouver Latina Dee 55 Married 4 adults (two parents, two adult children) Squamish White/ Aboriginal Indigo 25 Single 4 adults (two parents, two adult children) Squamish White/ Aboriginal Kolby 67 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Lily 64 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Lisa 42 Married 2 adults, 2 children under 10 Dawson Creek White Louise 62 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Maria 46 Married 2 adults Vancouver White Mary 52 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Rebecca 30 Single 3 adults Squamish White Reenie 65 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Velma 68 Married 2 adults Kelowna White Table 3.1 Participant demographic information Participant observation and semi-structured interviews occurred while participants took part in six weekly online cooking sessions, which I facilitated. The communal nature of the online cooking sessions also provided an opportunity for knowledge sharing through cooking. The online cooking sessions took place Monday evenings from late July to early September, 2020. I had intended to facilitate the cooking sessions in person, but due to Covid-19 restrictions on in-person research, they were moved to Zoom, where they were recorded for later transcription. My inspiration for the cooking sessions was the “community kitchen,” in which participants cook together and then share a meal while chatting, potentially creating a sense of community and empowerment (Engler-Stringer & Berenbaum, 2005). Hosting the cooking sessions online changed the dynamic of a traditional community kitchen, in which participants work together on one recipe and eat at a communal table. Instead, each person was in their own kitchen making an individual recipe and then eating ‘together’ over the computer. One advantage to the online model was that participants who lived in different towns were able to take part. Attendance in the cooking sessions varied week-to-week, with the highest number of participants being six, and the lowest being only one. Prior to each cooking session, I emailed the participants 32 a recipe, and grocery and equipment lists so they could prepare ahead of time. I chose the first recipe, and subsequently asked for input from participants in choosing the following week’s recipe, encouraging recipes that used seasonal produce. As the cooking session facilitator, I occupied a participant observer role, in which I was equally immersed in the observational activity alongside the participants (Creswell, 2015). Because of my participatory role, I did not take notes, but referred later to the recorded video of the cooking session to extract themes and meaning. I chose a weekly conversational theme for participants to discuss at the end of the cooking session, either while we were all eating, or while the food was cooking or baking. These themes related to my central research questions, and included: cooking in community, memory and tradition, connection, knowledge sharing and cooking as a chore (Appendix B: Conversation prompts). These conversations took the form of a semi-structured interview, in which I asked one initial question, and further clarification and elaboration was generated through probe and follow-up questions. The semi-structured interview style allowed for an in-depth understanding of participants’ experiences and motivations. Participants could provide information and anecdotes that they felt were relevant to the topic, and to contribute as much or as little as they were comfortable with (Creswell, 2015). Participants in the cooking sessions were also asked to keep a journal to document their reflections of the study, and three participant journals were collected for analysis following the study. Reflective journals offer an important heuristic perspective, where participants can reflect on and make meaning of their own experiences in the study. Weekly journal prompts were given to each participant to guide their reflections, and these prompts were complementary to the weekly cooking discussion questions (Appendix C: Journal prompts). I wanted to include an option for participants to submit a written document, as extra time to reflect could potentially 33 generate more thoughtful responses (Creswell, 2015). Because the journal prompts were so similar to the discussion questions, most participants did not complete the journal in addition to participating in the online cooking sessions, feeling like it was a burden during the busy summer. However, the three participants that also submitted journals took the time to answer thoughtfully and the journals did generate additional valuable data. I also conducted one focus group interview with eight participants, two of whom also participated in the weekly cooking sessions. I recorded the focus group on Zoom for later transcription, and because it was an audio-video recording, I could easily identify each speaker. Munday (2014) writes that focus group research is as much about the process and its collective and interactive nature, as it is about the content, making focus groups a compatible method for feminist research. The focus group allows the researcher to chat with many participants at once, making it an efficient way to gather data. The participants in my focus group were all known to each other, which helped break the ice and generated ease in the conversation. I handed out a list of interview questions for participants to follow along with, and then asked them in consecutive order (Appendix D: Group interview questions). The focus group was casual, with participants sharing when and what they wanted to. I did not elicit answers from every participant for every question. A drawback to the focus group method is that some participants are more extroverted and comfortable speaking out, while others may feel intimidated by sharing not only with the researcher, but with other participants (Creswell, 2015; Munday, 2014). Because everyone in my focus group knew each other, I did not have to navigate such group dynamics, however some participants did share significantly more than others. 34 3.3 Ethical considerations Human ethics approval for a behavioural study was granted by the University of British Columbia Behaviour Research Ethics Board (H18-01271). The ethical guidelines were followed when developing the application to ensure the participants’ rights and privacy. Participation was voluntary, consent was obtained from potential participants at the time they were provided a description of the research, and participants retained a digital copy of their signed consent forms (Appendix A: Adult informed consent). Ongoing verbal consent was obtained prior to each interview, and participants could withdraw from the study at any time prior to its conclusion without repercussions or inclusion in the study. The results were kept confidential, and participants are identified within this thesis using pseudonyms. Best efforts were made to avoid researcher bias, the multiple sources of data allowed for triangulation, and many of the results of this study were consistent with existing literature and other studies in the field. The nature of the inductive methodology used means that it is possible that others would find different interpretations and come to different conclusions. 3.4 Data analysis and evaluation The data from this study, attained through analysis of participant observation in the online cooking sessions, participant interviews and documents, addresses themes such as feminism, domesticity, community, empowerment, connectedness, and identity. Each cooking session, as well as the interviews, were recorded on Zoom, and then transcribed. The visual component of the recordings facilitated easy identification of each speaker. The data was analyzed using content, narrative, and discourse analysis to develop a rich understanding of themes and how they interrelate, and how participants make sense and meaning of their domestic 35 lives. The research in this study generated extensive data, reflective of “the complexity of the phenomenon” of study (Creswell, 2015, p. 18). Content analysis involves coding and categorizing the transcripts into main themes and ideas, reducing large amounts of material into more manageable data (Schreier, 2014). Following transcription, I coded the data into emergent themes relating to the central research questions. As I read the transcripts, I developed a coding frame by highlighting key words, labelling them with associated codes in the margins, and then segmenting key ideas into an initial twelve overarching themes, or sub-categories (Schreier, 2014). I then created thematic documents into which I copied relevant data from the transcripts. At this point, I reduced the themes to the four that are presented in this study: women’s relationship to domesticity, emotional labour and men, feminism and domesticity, and women’s knowledge. The research in this study was conversational and interactional, and therefore I also employed a narrative analysis. Narrative analysis partners with constructionist research, in that the conversational interactions of participants are viewed as contributing to the construction of meaning for the study, where both the storyteller and the audience take part in a reciprocal social phenomenon (Esin, et al., 2014). I employed narrative analysis following content analysis by extracting dialogue and quotes from the transcripts, which I added to the thematic documents, and which was especially relevant when the participants were in conversation with each other. Another method of analysis associated with a constructionist approach is discourse analysis, in which choice of words used by participants are as relevant as their content, and “the aim of the research is to generate an understanding of what people are doing when they talk about something in a particular way” (Wittig, 2014, p. 344). 36 Qualitative data, with its focus on social phenomenon and interpretation of experience and narrative, may be critiqued as “subjective [and] anecdotal” (Ryan, et al., 2007, p. 742), and therefore must identify methods by which to assess the validity and credibility of the study. There are various ways to assert the credibility of qualitative data, including precise documentation of the research process, asking a participant to verify descriptions, and using multiple sources of data (Creswell, 2015; Ryan, et al., 2007). Further, in qualitative research, the researcher should locate herself in the context of the study, and be reflexive about how situational positionalities can affect interaction with participants, and interpretation of data. Poststructuralism understands “reality, language and discourse [as] all under continuous construction,” (Mills, et al., 2012, p. 213) and shifting based on the participants involved. As such, researcher reflexivity becomes especially relevant in qualitative context. The procedural documentation of this research establishes dependability and transferability of the study, as another researcher could use my documents to replicate this study in another context (Creswell, 2015). I also invited some of the participants to read the data analysis and garnered their approval of its accuracy, while the use of three different sources of data in this study corroborated the validity of each. 3.5 Summary This chapter introduced the methodological approach to this research as interpretive phenomenology, informed by constructionist and feminist theory. This epistemological position guided my research methods and analysis. I used qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews, focus group interview and document collection to gather data, the validity of which is affirmed through rigorous documentation and participant confirmation. Limitations of 37 the study include small participant group, and homogenous demographics. Results of the research are presented in the following chapter. 38 Chapter 4: Data Analysis This chapter presents the data of this study, attained through analysis of participant observation in the group cooking sessions, participant interview transcripts and participant journals. I coded the data into emergent themes related to the three central research questions, which are as follows: does a specialized ‘women’s knowledge’ of domesticity exist?; how do women conceive of and negotiate their domestic identities?; and, do women experience a sense of community through domestic kitchen work? My research was informed by feminist, constructivist and post-structural theory, where participant reflections and narratives generated meaning for the study. I analyzed the data using an interpretive, phenomenological approach and organized it into four sections: women’s relationship to domesticity; emotional labour; domesticity and feminism; and women’s knowledge. Each section is further divided, exploring the ideas of women’s specialized knowledge in the kitchen; the lineage of women’s knowledge; the tension between feminism and domesticity; women’s emotional labour; notions of self and identity within the feminist/ housewife model; the gendered division of labour; the kitchen as a site of empowerment; and community and connectedness. 4.1 Women’s Relationship to Domesticity While domesticity encompasses a wide range of daily chores and tasks undertaken in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, family scheduling, hosting, and home decorating, the conversations I had with participants centred primarily on cooking as domesticity and women’s role as the primary food-provider. I focused on cooking as the entry point to conversations about domesticity, as cooking is perceived to be more pleasurable, more satisfying and more creative than other, more drudging domestic duties (Meah, 2014; Stovall, et al., 2015; Whitbourne, 1986). 39 One of the most resonant themes that came out of the interviews was that of mothers as being integral to the experience of domesticity, despite none of the interview questions referring to mothers, and only one making direct reference to cooking with other women. Mothers were identified as highly influential to how the participants conceived of their relationship to cooking, which applied regardless of whether that relationship was described as positive or negative. Though mothers were established as the most significant presence in the participants’ formative kitchen years, a clear distinction was made between learning about the value of food and learning technical cooking skills (Oleschuk, 2019). Most participants described having learned technical cooking skills not from their mothers, but after leaving their childhood homes. The participants named a clear difference between cooking as a chore and cooking for leisure (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991). Some of the creativity and energy available in cooking disappears with the everyday responsibility for feeding a family, and the extra planning and preparation required for special occasion cooking such as holidays, birthdays, and dinner parties, allow for a more thoughtful and enjoyable cooking experience. In contrast, the daily chore of cooking was characterized as mechanical and thankless by several participants. Because of the varied components that factor into a woman’s relationship to domesticity, the corresponding identity is defined as fluid, and will vary depending on why and for whom she is cooking, life circumstances, stage of life, between generations, and socio-economic status. The participants are continually integrating new elements into their perceptions of both self and domesticity. The flexibility established around identities as constructed facilitates a more nuanced discourse on domesticity than is often presented in the fixed identities of housewife or feminist. 40 4.1.1 A mother’s influence When asked about their relationship to cooking, many of the women I interviewed responded immediately with references to their mothers (Cairns, et al., 2010; DeVault, 1991; Oleschuk, 2019). Observing their mothers in the kitchen was a formative experience that laid the foundation for how these women would come to feel about their own domestic responsibilities. The results of their mother’s influence varied amongst the participants; cooking could be merely a means to an end, an opportunity to recreate through cooking positive familial experiences, or to establish a new set of practices, separate from what had been modeled at home. The most deeply rooted teachings were not technical cooking skills, but the values associated with food and family. Along with cooking-specific knowledge and skills, mothers also inevitably passed down underlying messages about gender and identity (Oleschuk, 2019). Women who saw their mothers toiling and uninspired in the kitchen felt ambivalent about cooking, while those that had mothers that were positively engaged in the kitchen have correspondingly developed a passion for and comfort in cooking. For those to whom cooking had been perfunctory, food never achieved a truly pleasurable status, affecting how cooking would be experienced later in life. This does not take into account the inevitably less pleasurable day-to-day cooking undertaken by most mothers, or individual family composition and dynamics, such as size of family, or help from other adults. In addition to having had a mother that primarily cooked for the outcome rather than the process, Louise’s mediocre relationship to cooking is also influenced by having internalized insecurities held by her mother about not being a good enough cook. 41 Louise: My relationship to cooking is mediocre. I don’t love it, but you gotta do it. I’m very much like my mother who never thought she was a good cook. My mom influenced how I feel about cooking. Other participants expressed more agency in curating their relationship to cooking once they had moved out of the family home. Dee explained that learning to cook and building the ensuing skill-set was about diverging from what she had observed in her family home. Realizing that there could be more to the experience of cooking than what she had been exposed to at home, Dee intentionally sought out new culinary experiences to construct a different cooking identity to that of her mother’s. Dee: When I was growing up in my mother’s house, there was no joy in [food], she didn’t like to cook. When I was about 12 or 13, I did all the cooking in the house. I thought I’m just going to die if I have to eat this all the time. I wanted to have a crunch, maybe, or an herb, flavour differentiation, maybe a different colour. For some, the connection between their mother and cooking equaled a desire to recreate practices of domesticity they observed growing up, whether through carrying on family traditions or more explicitly through recreating a family recipe exactly as they had eaten it as a child. This desire created a positive relationship to cooking for some of the participants. Bonita’s experience was that of watching someone skilled and interested in cooking, and for her, that translated to a future passion. Bonita: My mom wasn’t a teacher, but I’d stand around the kitchen and I’d watch. My mom was a fantastic cook. I have a huge passion for cooking. 42 Another factor in developing a positive relationship to cooking was the desire to spend time alone with mom in the kitchen. For Reenie, having grown up in a large farm family, helping out in the kitchen offered special private time with her mother, a time to cultivate a close relationship that positively influenced her relationship to domesticity. When a mother’s commitments are spread amongst husband, children and other family responsibilities, the chance to deepen a one-on-one bond with her was facilitated through time spent together in the kitchen. Kolby reflected that her older sister was the one that got the ‘special time for talking’ in the kitchen with their mother. Reenie: I like being a domestic. I liked working with my mom and helping her because I liked being with her alone. It was special to help my mom. I grew up on a farm, and my mom was really busy, there were four kids and hired men and my mom often had to help dad. As evidenced by the predominance of the mother figure in our conversations, cooking is inherently relational, and relationship dynamics are formative to the experience of domesticity. Participants’ reflections about their own concept of domesticity reflect the fluidity and variability of the domestic experience, despite all of the women having similar demographic backgrounds. 4.1.2 Learning to cook To further tease out the distinction between learning the techniques of cooking and learning the value of cooking, the participants considered how and from whom they had learned to cook. While the mother figured predominantly in teaching cooking values, most of the women stated that they did not explicitly learn technical skills from their mothers. Instead, they learned through trial-and-error after moving away from home, through other female friendships, or 43 through pop culture and food media such as magazines, cookbooks, and television, and websites such as Pinterest. Time spent with their mother in the kitchen was often passive, serving to form memories while sitting at the counter, rather than actually helping out or being explicitly taught (Oleschuk, 2019). The learning that happens in this context was often not considered real learning by the participants, and there was a tendency for the participants to attribute not having learned to cook from their mothers to their mothers’ lack of cooking skills. However, it may have more to do with the time and energy required for daily cooking that is unconducive to simultaneously teaching someone what to do, or having the capacity to allow for the expected fumbles of a learner (Beagan, et al., 2008; Oleschuk, 2019). Lily: When I went to university, I had zero cooking skills because there wasn’t really a lot to learn from my mom. It was just the basic meat & potatoes. Kolby: I didn’t really have any cooking skills either. My mom really didn’t have to cook too fancy through the week, cause it as just for us four kids. So when I moved out of the house, I barely could boil water. Some of the participants recall being inspired to learn to cook by other women, including home economics teachers, friends and relatives. Confidence in the kitchen is indicated as a main factor in recognizing another woman as influential in the development of a positive relationship to cooking. For these participants, learning cooking skills was facilitated through relationships with women who were more experienced and confident in the kitchen. Lisa remembered going for dinner at a female friend’s house and being struck by the ease with which the friend whipped up a simple, fresh, homemade pasta dish. The act of witnessing another woman execute that in the kitchen motivated and emboldened Lisa to believe that “cooking doesn’t have to be hard.” 44 Rebecca: I think of my friend, M. When I lived with her, we would always make lunch together. Her mom is a chef, so she grew up always around food, always feeling really creative and confident in the kitchen and cooking with her gave me that excitement about it. Another significant way that women deepened their connection with domesticity and desire to learn new cooking skills was through pop culture, particularly cookbooks and cooking shows. The world of cooking and food has become increasingly accessible with the rising popularity of celebrity chefs, designer cookbooks and the ideology of the domestic goddess. Wanting to emulate and recreate what is now available in books and on television propelled many of the participants to try new things and be more creative in the kitchen. Popular cookbooks offer a tangible means to access and share food knowledge that also brings with it an entry point to current conversations about what we value about food (M.G. Smith, 2016). A librarian in the group describes the immense popularity of cookbooks as a community resource: Rebecca: Well, as a librarian, some of the most checked out books in the entire library are cookbooks, which I think is such a cool thing as a shared resource. There’s food knowledge in there…I worked at the library for two years and in those two years I replaced the Moosewood cookbook twice, because it was checked out so many times, and used so much. The emergence of foodie culture, an interest in food coupled with specialized knowledge about cooking and cuisines, brings with it a cultural cachet previously inaccessible to the humble home cook (Cairns, et al., 2010). Celebrity chefs and TV cooking shows have made food cool, and their influence is reflected in my participants’ statements about their engagement with cooking, some even referring to themselves as a ‘domestic goddess.’ The evolution of foodie 45 culture has also encouraged different conversations about food, and new ways for women to connect with food, as well as bringing with it an interest in foods and food practices previously thought uncool. Rebecca: I think that people my age are so into food because it’s trendy to be into food. Well even Anthony Bourdain, travelling the world and eating food and then it becomes not just something you eat, the whole world of food became something that was accessible for people to understand a little bit more. Not even just the cooking, but the eating of it and the culture. Ani: Sauerkraut was kind of always a fussy old man food when I was growing up, but like I’m loving fermented foods right now and I really love the idea of it, so I’m interested in what we’re up to here. Learning to cook is not a one-time event, as learning continues throughout adulthood and has varied sources of inspiration. While women remain the “primary transmitters of cooking knowledge” (Oleschuk, 2019, p 607), the whole burden does not necessarily fall on mothers’ shoulders. When passive learning in the kitchen with mother was largely taken for granted as a legitimate method of learning to cook, the power of making cooking look easy surfaced as a notable factor in women learning to cook through other female relationships. Although it would be worth exploring whether the mothers did not want to teach, or the children did not want to learn. Social trends play a significant role in influencing food and cooking choices, and foodie culture as its own phenomenon has greatly influenced women’s cooking habits. 4.1.3 Cooking as chore vs. leisure While participants varied in their reflections on domesticity, they all articulated a distinction between the daily chore of cooking and the potential pleasure derived from cooking 46 for special occasions. The responsibility of cooking every day for a family was described as being ‘mechanical’ and ‘thankless,’ and the participants expressed often running out of energy to continually tackle the task adequately. Boredom with the planning, tiredness after a full day of work, and the difficulty of juggling diverse family palates were offered as deterrents to finding the joy in everyday cooking. For some of the participants, the feeling that cooking becomes grunt work, a duty that others in the family are relying on women for, significantly impacts their ability to find meaning and stimulation in the project of meal cooking. Mary: That’s when I think you lose some of that joy of cooking, is when it’s just a chore, it’s your duty, your obligation, as opposed to the art and the relationship, cooking out of love. It just becomes what you do all day. Lisa: The everyday meals can get tiring and boring especially when you throw kids into the mix and all they want are cut veggies and grilled cheese sandwiches. In contrast, the leisure of special occasion cooking derives from two areas: the celebratory nature of cooking for and eating with other people that extend beyond the immediate family, and the stimulation that comes from menu planning and organizing for a big food event. Celebratory cooking was often discussed in terms of large family gatherings that facilitate cooking with others (most often other female family members), and potlucks, which are described as ‘taking the pressure off’ the host. In both cases, more hands on-deck alleviate the overwhelming workload for women to plan, prepare and clean up an entire meal for a large group. Louise: I think when I’m cooking stuff like that, I love having someone else. And then it’s fun and you get lots more done. 47 Velma: Or potlucks, where everybody brings something. It takes the pressure off. There’s that many more hands cleaning up as well, often you have to clean as you go. The ability to plan ahead can also impact the amount of pleasure and leisure available in cooking. Having the time to get organized, to menu plan, and to prep both lessens the amount of stress associated with preparing meals and increases the possibility of finding joy in the task. There can also be an emotional pay-off to hosting such events that stems from the nurturing aspect of feeding people you love, and an opportunity to showcase cooking and hosting skills as the ultimate example of femininity (Cairns, et al., 2010; Grace & Gandolfo, 2014; Hollows, 2005). Consuela: I definitely get a sense of accomplishment getting our recipe, and going to the store and knowing what I’m getting and then making it, it’s pretty nice. Lisa: Oh, it’s just you for Christmas? The more the merrier. I love cooking for that many people. I find it, I don’t know, almost invigorating. I don’t want to cook every day meals for my family, but planning, deciding what I’m going to make, choosing what goes with what. Inherent within the gendered division of labour is the narrative that a woman must ‘do it all’ – be an excellent housekeeper, cook, wife, mother, and maybe also work outside of the home – and do a good job of it. A woman’s ability to successfully juggle all of these tasks can be used as a measuring stick for how well she is performing femininity, and within this framework is an element of comparison, and monitoring, both of the self and of others (Rezeanu, 2015; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Mary reflects on her housekeeping compared to her friends: 48 Mary: Talk about being a good housekeeper, Reenie. Louise too, I go to Louise’s and I look in her drawers and I think these are amazing, I hope she doesn’t look in my drawers. The connotation from Mary is that the perceived inferior cleanliness of her drawers is an observable marker of her (in)ability to ‘do it all,’ and thus a comment on her value as a woman. In another conversation, in which we were discussing the roles and responsibilities of hosting, the example came up of a woman who was hosting guests for the weekend and did not to wash any dishes after meals. This generated a lengthy discussion, the subtext of which was that the failure to fulfill unspoken rules about women’s obligations in the home was worthy of unpacking. The monitoring and the subsequent conversations about what women are doing in their own homes can be seen as an example of gender policing as it relates to enacting femininity through domesticity (DeVault, 1991; West & Zimmerman, 1987; Williams, 2016). Rebecca: It’s this tricky thing because everybody grows up and is taught a different thing about what it means to host. Consuela: I always like to contribute, as a guest, as a courtesy. Indigo: I was taught to host, and my expectation is that if I have people over then I should do all of the cleaning, and if I’m a guest, I should also clean. While Rebecca mentions that differences in how one is raised will influence personal values about hosting, other women offered the feminized quality of politeness as a reason to justify the obligation to clean up when one is both the host and the guest. The expectation to be a perfect host and a perfect guest may put undue pressure on women to be constantly self-monitoring whether they are doing everything they can to be good at domesticity. 49 Whether domestic foodwork was classified as a chore or as leisure affected the participants’ capacity to connect positively with cooking. Because women’s domestic labour is undervalued, the effort and work that women put into providing food for their families on a daily basis can be taken for granted, leaving women feeling unappreciated, tired, and bored. However, when the participants had the opportunity to cook for, or with, others outside of their immediate families, the level of joy in the task increased. There are also other benefits to the relationship-building that happens within communal cooking contexts, which will be discussed in Section 4 – Domesticity and Women’s Knowledge. The pressure to fulfill domestic obligations is inherently gendered, and a woman’s capacity to successfully fulfill those implicit rules about gender and domesticity inevitably has an impact on how women are perceived and how they perceive themselves. 4.1.4 Domestic identities as fluid As discussed amongst my participants, the identities that align with domesticity fluctuate over time and are dependent on changing life circumstances. Fluidity of domestic identities was primarily associated with the time in one’s life, where major differences were noted between being single, being newly married, raising a family and being retired, as well as the space for new identities that surfaced as social and cultural expectations shifted around who women were both expected and allowed to be. One participant talked about her relationship to domesticity as an evolution that expanded and unfolded along with her life, fluctuating naturally through her life’s stages. Velma: I think it’s an evolution. Not a lot of us could cook well when we first left home. I know I didn’t. But as I got older, and after I got married, I wanted to. I like food, and I like to cook, I don’t like cleaning up the messes. But I found that 50 after I quit working, I had more time to learn new things. After I retired, I’m a domestic goddess now. As one moves through the stages in life, priorities and duties change, and the experience of domesticity through cooking also changes. The participants belonging to the baby boomer generation were able to offer a retrospective look at how their relationship to cooking has changed over time, while the younger participants primarily reiterated that they had engaged more fully in cooking once they left their childhood homes. Dee reflects on how her cooking habits were shaped by raising children, and then later, by the freedom afforded by more time and money. Dee: Because I’m older, things will have changed over time. When I had my babies, we were on a budget because we were poor, and my whole thing was trying to get great nutrition. It was all about budget and nutrition and making sure they were eating balanced. And now food for me is more fun. It’s like, you know what, I don’t even have to eat, or I could eat just one thing or I could eat breakfast for dinner – which I do a lot. Or really nice, high quality stuff. The older participants expressed a deepened engagement with cooking after retirement, as they have more time to access the leisure and pleasure that is possible in the kitchen. Following the responsibilities of raising a family, which includes a myriad of time intensive tasks that inevitably take away from carefree time spent in the kitchen, several women talked about their retirement as a phase in life that brings with it a sense of listlessness that can be mitigated through cooking, as well as providing the extra time required to make more complicated recipes. 51 Velma: When you’re working you don’t have time to set things up or stir it or turn it over at a certain point or whatever, so it’s always the quick and dirty. I’ve always preferred homemade food, but I didn’t always have time to make it. Reenie: At this time, I feel like I don’t have much going on in my life so I plan cooking to try to fill my day and give me some sense of achievement and satisfaction and then when it doesn’t turn out perfectly, I am very disappointed. If it’s mindful cooking and everything is going well it’s a great experience. Generational changes that shifted expectations for women have also had an impact on how women see their connection to and responsibility for domestic duties. The women I interviewed offered concrete examples of younger generations being increasingly more critical of the expectations on women to always be responsible for cooking, and to accept those responsibilities without incident. One participant makes reference to the negative reaction faced by an acquaintance who chose to simply not participate in societal expectations around the responsibility women had in the 1970s to cook for others. Reenie: You fed your people. I remember another woman in the community, she was the next generation after my mom and she wouldn’t feed the hired men, they all had to bring their own lunch and they all had to go home for supper. I remember people wondering how she got away with it. While many of the women I spoke to expressed a strong connection to cooking, including positive and empowering feelings associated with cooking for other people, as noted in the above statement, the judgement that she ‘got away with’ something by not engaging in cooking for hired help has implications on the depth and pervasiveness of the role women are counted on to fulfill in terms of taking care of and feeding others. Younger generations are seeing a slight 52 change in those responsibilities, especially as men take on some of the cooking duties (see Section 4.2 – Emotional Labour and Men). Bonita: Our younger daughter, her husband does most of the cooking. She cooks, she loves it and she’s a great cook, and she does baking, but her husband loves to cook and she’ll wash dishes and he cooks. However, despite marginal changes in younger generations, most of the participants in are the ones responsible for domestic foodwork. As such, the associated tasks are found to provide a structure and value in retirement. When one is no longer participating in out-of-the-home work, and the children have likely moved out, cooking can offer a sense of accomplishment that comes with the kitchen projects and tasks that help fill the day. Contrary to the narrative that women feel tethered to the kitchen, the sentiment expressed by some of the participants is that engaging more deeply with cooking is one way women may find purpose and connection. To only consider women’s identities around domesticity within the narrow confines of a simple binary – either women are yoked by their domestic duties or they are empowered in the rejection of those ‘duties’ – significantly limits the possibilities for nuance in the conversation. 4.1.5 Summary How women experience and define their domestic identity fluctuates and can be challenged and re/created by diverse social and personal factors. As bearers of domestic knowledge and responsibility, mothers are the most formative female character in the development of domestic identities, imparting lessons on expectations, values and skills. These lessons however, were latent until after leaving the family home, when the participants had had time and distance to reflect on their mother’s influence. When not given space at home to cook, a 53 secondary domestic orientation can be found in a home economics teacher and classroom (Weaver-Hightower, 2011), highlighting relationships as formative to experiences of domesticity. When perceived as an obligation to family, it becomes more difficult to find stimulation and joy in daily foodwork. Women are tasked with having to think of ways to stay connected and be creative in the kitchen to special occasion, or celebratory, cooking often involves help from other people, mitigating the boredom and stress of daily foodwork. The pressure to fulfill domestic obligations is inherently gendered, and a woman’s capacity to successfully adhere to domesticity’s implicit rules can have an impact on both a woman’s identity, and how others perceive her, contributing to and recreating performative femininities (Budgeon, 2015; Cairns, et al., 2010; Grace & Gandolfo, 2014; Hollows, 2005; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Changing life circumstances affects one’s experience of and connection to domesticity, and so one’s domestic identity can be expected to be continually negotiated. The feminist/housewife discourse risks essentializing the ‘female experience,’ (Hollows, 2003) rather than understanding identity and domesticity through a holistic, interpretivist lens, especially when the nature of women’s labour in the home encompasses work that is both laborious and draining, as well as relational and satisfying (DeVault, 1991). 4.2 Emotional Labour and Men The burden of food procurement and feeding the family falls disproportionately to women, and while this includes the technical execution of daily meals, it also encompasses intangible and unseen emotional labour (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cooke, 2005; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Marsh, 2013). Emotional labour can be described as the managing of one’s own and others’ feelings to sustain relationships. In the context of foodwork, 54 this includes invisible tasks related to foodwork, but also references discourses on what it means to be a woman and the ways in which femininity and domesticity intersect (DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). Included in women’s role as primary food providers are gendered notions about caring through food, which teaches women that in addition to being nutritious and delicious, family meals must also be laden with love and meaning (Beagan, et al., 2008; Beagan, et al., 2014; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). One’s ability to fulfill this expectation can be an area of satisfaction or disappointment for women. Further, women are usually the advocates of nutrition in family foodwork, and are established as more capable than men to do so (Beagan, et al., 2014; DeVault, 1991; Fielding-Singh, 2017). The cult of domesticity considers women more naturally equipped to care for the family, however the ways in which women excel at family foodwork are likely facilitated by the background knowledge about the nuances of the emotional labour that is required for food provision. Ideologies about food and gender serve to justify and perpetuate the division of labour in the kitchen, and for many of the participants, the idea that ‘cooking is a woman’s job’ was good enough to explain the division of tasks undertaken in their homes. However, the organizational structure of the kitchen favours women, and therefore offers women an area in which to exercise agency and dominance (hooks, 2014; Scicluna, 2017; Stovall, et al., 2015; Williams, 2016). While women would welcome a reduced load of domestic tasks, they still value and feel protective of their position in the kitchen. Within the home a kitchen hierarchy establishes men as subordinate, and in need of significant praise when they do help out (Klasson & Ulver, 2015). When men help with foodwork, it is appreciated by their female partners, if also poked fun at, as men are perceived as 55 inept in the kitchen and not capable of sufficiently completing all of the hidden tasks that women do (Fielding-Singh, 2017; Szabo, 2013). While men are increasingly skilled in meal preparation, they often do not want the responsibility of foodwork, recognizing they are ill-equipped to take on everything that would entail – primarily the underlying emotional labour. This unwillingness to help out can frustrate and aggravate women. 4.2.1 Women’s emotional labour Emotional labour was identified as the most stressful element of foodwork for the participants. The emotional labour inherent to foodwork includes tasks such as menu planning, accommodating family palates, considering nutrition, keeping inventory of what is in the house, grocery purchasing, and time management. Reenie articulates the sentiment shared by many of the participants, that valuable help with foodwork comes in the form of thinking of ideas about what to make for dinner, always having to think of creative recipes and meals that the whole family would eat, and the pressure of making everyone happy with your choice. Reenie: I like to cook and look after the meals and do the shopping and stuff, but sometimes you just wake up in the morning and think, what are we going to have tonight? If [my husband] comes up with something, well let’s have this or that, it just takes the load off. Mary: By 10 o’clock in the morning, I’m always thinking you know. For the last 29 years, that has been my chore. I’m at work and by 10 o’clock I’m already planning and I’ve got to get groceries on my lunch hour and it’s just hard. These tasks require thought and consideration that often goes unnoticed by other family members and are often taken for granted (DeVault, 1991). This hidden skillset is a source of anxiety for many women, as it brings with it the pressure to live up to both social and personal 56 ideals about how foodwork should be done (Beagan, et al., 2014; Castellano, 2016; Meah & Jackson, 2013). Further, the emotional labour associated with foodwork takes up significantly more time than the actual cooking, a never-ending assignment over the course of a lifetime that cannot be eschewed without risking letting down either the family or oneself. 4.2.2 We love through food Included in deeply ingrained ideals about enacting femininity is that women care for their loved ones through food (Beagan, et al., 2014; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). Several of the participants substantiated this idea, articulating that they felt cared for by their mothers through special meals and family food traditions, as well as demonstrating their own love and care through food and cooking. While caring through food was mostly discussed as positive and special, there was also the subtext of feeling pressure to effectively perform love through food, as well as latent feelings of disappointment when it was perceived that their mothers did not live up to this expectation. Mary: We love through food. Velma: I wonder how many mothers, when their kids are coming home for Christmas, make all their favourite dishes. The kitchen is understood as a feminized space, and therefore the activities undertaken therein are correspondingly gendered (C.J. Smith, 2019). As women are perceived as more nurturing and more caring than men, the activities found within feminized spaces – such as the kitchen – become coded as nurturing and caring as well. Many people perceive the degree to which a woman successfully feeds her family as corresponding to how ‘good’ a mother she is (Beagan, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991; Meah & Jackson, 2013). 57 Maria: The memory I have is coming home from school for lunch and it would be snowing and there would always be homemade soup on the first snowfall, and just that feeling of being cared for. Indigo: I feel like cooking for other people is how I communicate love for them, it’s my way of doing it. It’s a way I can show people I care, and keep them nourished. Dee: When I was growing up in my mother’s house, meals weren’t joyful, my mom wasn’t in a happy place in her marriage, and I think that translated into the meals that we had. For some women the narrative of caring through food is welcome and easy, as they are confident in their ability to achieve the expectations. However, others – the mother not happy in her marriage, and unable to provide ‘joyful’ meals for her family, for example – are framed as failing to fulfill that implicit requirement of motherhood and womanhood. The sentiment that there is a difference between a mechanical meal and one made with love is an example of the emotional labour expected of women that goes beyond simply putting a meal on the table, and compounds the pressure for women to show up emotionally on top of physically. Mary: There’s a difference between mechanical cooking though, and a love of cooking. I think if you don’t honestly like cooking, it changes the dynamic of it. You can do a mechanical meal, but it’s not the same as someone who finds a way to love food. Another facet of women’s emotional labour within domesticity connects women with the idea of creating specialness through food and cooking. As a manifestation of the ‘love and joy’ that women are expected to put into cooking for their families, several participants stated that on 58 the occasions when meals really matter, the ‘fancy meals’ that happen on holidays, family gatherings, and dinner parties, it is assumed and unquestioned that women will put the meal together. Some participants conveyed this idea in reflecting on the role that their mothers had in executing special occasion dinners. Lisa: My dad did most of the everyday cooking when I was growing up and my mom did all the fancy cooking, the Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, holiday dinners. Reenie: It was Christmas Day, 1964 and my mother was so sick she was bedridden. She always worked so hard to ensure our family had a wonderful Christmas and that year my father had to pull the day and dinner together. I was devastated and unbelievably sad. After we had finished the meal, I was taking the freshly baked, hot pie out of the oven to serve for dessert and dropped it on the floor. That was the final straw to a very sad and lonely day. For Reenie, the idea that her holiday would be ruined without her mother’s presence became a self-fulfilling prophecy, culminating with the pie dropped out of the oven. In this case, the result of mom being sick was not only that she would not be able to cook Christmas dinner, but also a much more stirring effect on the family’s emotional state. The clear association between a mother’s involvement and the success of the holiday illustrates how cooking is not just cooking for women, but also encompasses a wider scope of emotional responsibility and care-taking for her loved ones. 4.2.3 Caring through nutrition An added layer of emotional responsibility for women is that of nutrition and both the desire and the pressure to feed their families healthy meals. Included in the task of meal-planning 59 is the expectation to not only provide meals, but also to ensure that they are nutritious (Beagan, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991; Fielding-Singh, 2017). Making decisions and worrying about whether their family is getting nutritionally balanced meals is another area that exhausts women and leaves them feeling like they are the only one that can do it. Louise: [My husband] used to think baked potato was a vegetable. For some participants, there was an element of control associated with meal-planning related to the idea that other members of the family (in particular, their husbands) could not make appropriate nutritional choices in regards to meals. This idea was explained as men lacking the background knowledge to make the same type of informed nutritional decisions for their families that women make. The sense of ownership inspired in women over nutritional decisions was one that they did not necessarily want to relinquish, despite also wishing that their partners or children could adequately plan nutritiously well-rounded meals. Dee: I wanted my babies to have the most nutrition as possible. I would grate carrots and spinach and beans into everything so they couldn’t recognize it and so they’d get some fiber and stuff. But then it was all about budget and nutrition and making sure they were eating balanced. Velma: Usually I plan because if I let [my husband] plan – this is that control thing, again – his idea of a vegetable is lettuce with 1000 Island dressing. I like the whole package, not just the meat. Lisa: I used to resent that role but now I have embraced it, I try to make sure we have healthy meals but sometimes we have whatever is easiest and try to strike a balance through the week. 60 The result of women being so intrinsically connected to feeding the family is that food becomes a marker by which to measure women’s quality and success as a woman, a wife, a mother. The pressure to love and care for people through food is undertaken by women, and manifests as the emotional labour that women do behind the scenes every day (DeVault, 1991). When women are appreciated as uniquely capable of fulfilling the underlying emotional expectations around family foodwork, it keeps intact the gendered division of labour that both places the burden of emotional labour on women, and fails to encourage men to adapt to that role (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cook, 2005; Szabo, 2013). 4.2.4 “Cooking is a woman’s job!” Despite continually naming the emotional labour of cooking for their families as taxing, the participants did not correspondingly engage in conversations about the disparity of workload or expectations between them and their male partners. Rationalizing the gendered division of labour was easily done by characterizing men as mostly incompetent in the kitchen (Fielding-Singh, 2017). Through this narrative, women could retain agency and control over the kitchen space and cooking decisions, while also dismissing men’s contributions as more of a nuisance than a help (Meah, 2014). While one participant spoke directly to the deeply rooted concept of domesticity as women’s domain, others accepted it as a given that as women, they would take care of the home. The belief that women are bound to the kitchen was established in childhood, when expectations about who would do what were taught. Reenie: I started cooking quite young. I think it was a given that I would work and help in the kitchen with meals, cleaning up, gardening, housecleaning, etc. Louise: It’s a woman’s job! I mean all of us grew up in houses where the mother did it all, and the dad worked or whatever. 61 Mary: I think you’re hard pressed to find a woman over the age of 50 though, who doesn’t cook because that’s her job. I really think that’s been the gender role that you just do it. Some of the participants expressed difficulty in letting go of the responsibility for domestic duties. While one aspect of this was related to retaining agency within the domestic sphere, another aspect considers how easily justified the gendered division of labour is, even when circumstances allow male partners to contribute equally. For the participants, the reasons for this are two-fold: first, they may feel guilty when their partners (or others) take on tasks that the women themselves are usually in charge of. Second, couples simply fall into mutual habits that correspond to traditional gender roles learned through family and socialization (Fielding-Singh, 2017). While the obligation of household duties felt like a burden to some participants, it was also not a burden they felt comfortable foisting on others. Reenie: [My husband] decides when he’s doing housework and I always feel guilty, like I should help him, so I say let’s do it the next day. But why do I do that? It isn’t that I want control or anything, cause he’s excellent at it, but I would feel bad not helping. Lisa: My dad was the daily cook and the grocery shopper while I was growing up. I think I expected a little more help in the kitchen based on how my dad was but my husband came from a much more traditional home where his mom did all of the cooking. Women from younger generations may have more progressive ideas about how the work tasks should be divided in a marriage, however, as Lisa mentions, having a husband that is on board may be difficult. What incentive is there for men to take on a bigger workload, one 62 historically managed by women and so easily upheld by social norms? When life circumstances, such as retirement, could facilitate a more equitable division of labour by freeing up time and energy for both partners, it often remains the case that each party simply continues doing their respective and long-established jobs. The gendered division of labour can transcend an individual’s ability to take on more responsibilities in the home. In the examples below, both husbands relied on the safety net of their wives to get the job done so that they could avoid helping out, even when they were better equipped through time and convenience to complete the job. Lily: Back when he went to work Monday-Friday at an office, and I drove around picking work up at a doctor’s office, it was easy for me just to stop in and pick up groceries so that’s the way it’s always been. He’s been retired for 5 years, but still, that’s just the way. Bonita: [My husband] worked in a grocery store, he managed a store for 40 years, and he would never really come home with groceries until the end. It was too much work before. Mary: But [my husband] doesn’t want the responsibility of planning or being responsible. And I just think we’re both so conditioned that way now. The burden of navigating a task outside of one’s usual field can require significant energy and effort that is often easier left to someone else, and in the case of family foodwork, even when a male partner is capable of completing the task, there is still a sense of ownership for the task felt by women. As it is taken for granted that women will do these tasks, there is little incentive for men to master all the mental and intuitive jobs associated with foodwork. The gendered division of labour is justified and driven by discourses about gender in the kitchen that offer 63 women some sense of agency and control, firming their position at the top of the kitchen hierarchy, while failing to motivate men to take up a larger part of the role. 4.2.5 Men in the kitchen While I did not interview men for this study, twelve of the 14 participants are married to male partners, and offered insights from their perspective on men and domesticity, further informing the dialogue. Most frequently, the anecdotes that arose in the discussions about men and domesticity tended to marginalize men’s contributions and capacity in the kitchen, and a language of kitchen hierarchy was frequently employed in which men were referred to in subordinate roles (Fielding-Singh, 2017; Meah, 2014). Men were also perceived as unwilling to help women fulfill the obligations of domesticity or to alleviate the emotional burden of daily cooking. Because men’s participation in the kitchen is secondary to women’s, it was understood that they needed significant praise for their efforts when they did help out (Klasson & Ulver, 2015). As ideas about masculinity and domesticity inevitably shift, men are perhaps granted a wider margin within which to involve themselves. Men were primarily referred to as having entry-level jobs in the kitchen, as noted by the language used to describe their roles, such as sous-chef, cleaner, and prep cook. The inference with this language is that men do not have a well-developed enough skill set in the kitchen to either take on the primary cooking role, or even to be taken seriously when they are in the kitchen. When men enter the kitchen, they are thought to be ‘playing’ rather than doing any serious work. While this narrative was usually presented with an element of comedy, a gentle poking fun at men in the kitchen, there was also an underlying theme of demeaning men’s role in the kitchen, like in this exchange between two participants, in which the other interviewees were laughing in amusement: 64 Lily: [My husband] is a good sous chef, and he’s a good cleaner. Louise: Mostly I like cooking with someone, even…[my husband]. *everyone laughs* Lily: He’s a really good helper. Louise: Yeah, he follows instructions well. There are several ways in which the gendered division of labour manifests in the kitchen aside from women taking on the majority of the foodwork. These are primarily related to emotional labour tasks, and include the burden of training someone to take on tasks, the pressure of maintaining the kitchen hierarchy, instilling the importance of nutrition in a meal, and the persistent belief that men only need to function as substitutes in the kitchen. Louise succinctly articulates all of these elements in the following comment: Louise: [My husband] has become a very good sous chef and when I’m really stressed or working late or exhausted, I’ll just text him and ask him to figure out something for supper, he’ll do it and he’ll actually make a vegetable, but I had to train him. Louise’s husband is capable of pulling together a dinner when she is otherwise stressed or exhausted, but for him to do it properly – by including a vegetable – she had to train him. Louise clearly establishes that she is the superior, and that to achieve an equal position in the kitchen, her husband would have to cook more frequently than just the occasions in which she is emotionally and energetically maxed out. Men are often given simple tasks in the kitchen, much like those that would be assigned to a child learning to cook, because of their marginalized status in domestic spaces (Scicluna, 2017). Many participants hinted at the imperfect results of their 65 husband’s efforts, the tendency for them to make a mess, and the failure to properly clean up afterwards. Bonita: When it comes to [my husband], I don’t mind him in the kitchen. The other day we made gnocchi together and he was my gnocchi roller, so he was quite excited about that. Velma: There’s lots of times when I’m cooking in my own kitchen and my husband comes in and he wants to help, and he’s just in the way. Sometimes I just can’t even look, I can’t even watch. I just clean up later. When women are established as uniquely prepared to take care of the home, if and when a man decides to jump in, it is perceived that he is doing something extra, something above and beyond his usual obligations, and he will be praised for minor contributions. Even in cases where women do the majority of the prep work, the man may be acknowledged and complimented for having cooked dinner. This is especially true in if the meal involves meat or BBQ, as in the following examples: Mary: Did they marinate the meat? Didn’t think so. But if they’ve BBQ’d it, it’s their meal. Velma: He was in charge of the meal, but his wife was in the kitchen chopping everything up, delivering it to him to BBQ and he just threw the meat on the grill. Louise: Oh yeah, if a guy cooks you gotta praise them up and down for an hour or two, right? Some of the women have husbands at least moderately interested in and able to help out with the cooking, even if they get in the way, or make a mess. However, other participants spoke 66 of men’s inability or unwillingness to help out around the home, expressing resistance on men’s behalf to getting their hands dirty with domestic chores, which applied equally to the daily task of food provision as it does to the special occasion cooking of family gatherings and events. While women tended to complain in a joking way about their husband’s efforts in the kitchen, the complaints made about men’s unwillingness to participate in foodwork were charged with frustration and irritation. When men are willing to help out, their efforts are appreciated, if also made fun of, but no attempts at all to help out were less favourably received. Mary: I said to [my husband] recently I would really like you to start taking on doing some meals and not asking me what to make because I’m working, right? He would actually call me at work at three to say what are we having for dinner, do you want me to pick something up? Which is lovely, but he’s had the day off, and went down for his nap after lunch, so I was like so could you just start running with this? Make a decision, get the groceries and he was like, no. No, I’m not doing that. Louise: We had tons of memories around food and family, but they were always such big gatherings, because just my siblings and their partners and kids alone, we were always 25 people. For the women, it’s a real lot of cooking and clean up. Dee: And on family dinners, [men] don’t help. They sit around, you serve them, they talk together. While the data presented here on men and domesticity is very limited, it does illustrate a narrative about men’s relationship to domesticity, both in how they are perceived and in how they engage in domestic tasks. Ultimately the responsibility of foodwork lies with women, which 67 includes mentoring their husbands, a task of emotional labour in and of itself. In contrast, men have the luxury of choosing to participate in foodwork, or of only participating when women are otherwise indisposed. Men also do not have to live up to the same standards as women do in relation to domesticity (Szabo, 2013). 4.2.6 Food and masculinity One area of foodwork in which men typically excel is in meat cookery, as food is gendered with meat being coded as masculine (Beagan, et al., 2014; McPhail et al., 2012; Sobal, 2005). Foodwork and masculinity thus intersect and through engagement with ‘masculine foods,’ men can affirm their masculine gendered identity in a correlative way to women affirming feminine identities through caring foodwork. When men express interest in foods not coded as masculine, they may risk compromising their masculinity (Beagan, et al, 2014; McPhail et al., 2012), and because meat is accepted as masculine, it remains a safe access point for men to engage in cooking. Mary: That’s really part of our culture though. The BBQing for the men. Rebecca: Yeah, food traditions with my dad, I do have a lot of food traditions with my dad, like I help him butcher the elk, or I help him pluck the turkey, that kind of thing. Bonita: He doesn’t necessarily execute unless it’s the barbecue or the smoker, but he’s becoming more intuitive. Lily: He’s got chicken dishes, he’s got beef…and the smoker. When men can affirm their masculinity through other avenues, such as high socio-economic status, they are granted more space in which to be playful with food (Beagan, et al., 2014; Sobal, 2005), therefore domestic masculinities may be experienced differently across 68 socio-economic lines. One participant attributed working-class men’s disengagement with food to a lack of time rather than the gatekeeping of their masculinity. Depending on the context, men can alternately reinforce or disrupt traditional masculinities through foodwork (Szabo, 2012, 2013). For example, traditional masculinities may be reinforced when cooking is used as a tool to impress women, while they may be disrupted as men compromise their own needs when cooking for their families (Szabo, 2012). For many men, being interested in cooking requires a delicate balance of and confidence in their masculinity, and the associated gender policing reinforces idealized notions of race, class and gender that privileges middle-class white men (Klasson & Ulver, 2015). 4.2.7 Summary Women’s gendered identities and concepts of self are linked to notions of caring work, manifesting in the emotional labour associated with foodwork that women are expected to do (Erickson, 2005). That expectation, and the continued execution of emotional labour by women reinforces the gendered division of labour that burdens women and leaves men out of the equation. When men do take up feminized family foodwork, they may be viewed as progressive and modern, however it is with an understanding that the ultimate responsibility for that work falls to women (Fielding-Singh, 2017; Szabo, 2012). While both women and men negotiate gendered identities around food, and those identities are affected by the intersections of race and class as much as by gender, the emotional labour uniquely expected of women becomes integral to how women understand their feminine domestic identities, and men’s performance of emotional labour is not similarly understood to be representative of the self (Erickson, 2005; Sobal, 2005; Szabo, 2012). Men must also navigate 69 ideologies of gender in relation to food, which manifests in the close connection between men and meat as an affirmation of masculinity (McPhail et al., 2012; Sobal, 2005). Many women do not recognize their emotional labour as unpaid work, as discourses of love and caring through food are so deeply internalized (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). The failure to acknowledge women’s emotional labour as real work enforces the idea “that being an emotional caretaker is something women are rather than something women do” (Erickson, 2005, p. 349), and a closer look at women’s emotional labour as an essential component of the gendered division of labour is critical to shifting the inequities experienced doing family foodwork. 4.3 Domesticity and Feminism Despite women’s close ties to domesticity and gendered identities around domestic and care work, feminism has seemingly had trouble imagining a feminist identity compatible with traditional domestic femininity (Budgeon, 2015; Hollows, 2007). As the feminist agenda evolved, feminism’s second-wave focused on women’s paid and unpaid labour, and feminists like Betty Friedan promoted the idea that housework was work, but not real work, and being relegated to the home was keeping women from self-actualization (1963). The legacy of second-wave feminism and the ongoing quest for women’s access to paid work outside the home posits that women can ‘have it all’ – both a rich family life and a rewarding career (Hochschild, 2012; Krolokke & Sorensen, 2006; C.J. Smith, 2019). However, the majority of household work falls on women’s shoulders, resulting in the ‘second shift’ that includes both paid labour outside the home as well as unpaid labour in the home that continues to be unrecognized and undervalued (Hochschild, 2012; Marsh, 2013). Participants accordingly felt 70 empowered by and entitled to working outside of the home, while still conceiving of domestic housework as their responsibility because they were women. Despite engaging in conversations about domestic work, gender, and women cooking together, the participants did not recognize a clear connection between feminism and domesticity, and most felt reluctant to identify as feminist. In feminist discourse, feminine domestic identities are presented as an either/or construct, with the housewife Othered in favour of the self-actualized, and preferred, feminist (Friedan, 1963; Genz, 2009; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Hollows, 2003, 2007; Johnson, 2000; C.J. Smith, 2019). However, conversations with the participants revealed the feminist identity to be less favourable, as most of the women related more to their domestic roles, despite also working (or having worked) outside of the home. 4.3.1 Having it all and the second shift The participants have benefitted from the second-wave feminist movement in ways related to reproductive rights, maternity leave, greater access to work and education, and protections against domestic abuse. While the participants expressed chagrin at their predecessors having been shut out of the working world in various ways on account of being women, most failed to connect with feminism. The complicated relationship between feminism and the lasting pressure for women to perform femininity through modes of domesticity converge around conversations like this, reinforcing the structure of women’s identities in an either/or dichotomy. Velma: My mother-in-law was a teacher and when she first started teaching, they were expected as soon as they got married to not teach anymore. She got over that because it happened around the Second World War, and then babies 71 came and they were again expected not to work, she hung in there. A lot of women didn’t. Mary: And in a lot of places, you couldn’t. Once you got married, you had to forfeit the job. The school board wouldn’t allow you. Despite women increasingly joining the public sphere and paid work-force, and more families becoming dual income, men did not correspondingly take up housework (Breen & Cook, 2005; DeVault, 1991; Hochschild, 2012; Meah, 2014), and the second shift has privileged men while burdening women as those primarily responsible for household labour. While Louise suggests that feminism has allowed women to ‘have it all,’ Mary counters that what is promoted in popular discourse as women ‘having it all’ obscures the added workload of the second shift that can be difficult for women to juggle. While women may have experienced a revolutionary change through their access to paid labour, neither conventional workplaces nor traditional husbands have similarly adapted to this new way of life (Hochschild, 2012). In the “speed-up of work and family life, working mothers are its primary victims” (p. 10), with tensions in homes and marriages resulting from “the stall in this social revolution” (p. 13) in which men have not taken up an equal share of the second shift. How profoundly the inequitable division of the second shift affects couples depends on how ‘traditional,’ or ‘egalitarian’ their respective and underlying gender ideologies are (Hochschild, 2012). Louise: Feminism seems like it’s embracing all of life. Whereas before women were over here and you could only have part of it and now, we can have it all. Mary: Women I think just work so hard, because I think some of the battle with domestic duties and chores is that it’s just been so hard for women to stay on top of all of it, stay on top of working and raising kids, cleaning. 72 One participant shared that she hired a housekeeper to help maintain the house while working full-time, highlighting the necessity of an intersectional analysis of domestic work to uncover the ways in which idealized, white, middle-class femininity is not attainable or desirable for everyone (Budgeon, 2015; Bowen, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991; Oleschuk, 2019, 2020). In her case, achieving an idealized domestic femininity was facilitated by social class, which allowed the participant to outsource domestic work. However, without access to such resources, and with additional social barriers, successfully living up to these standards can be unattainable (Brenton, 2017). Many women do not recognize their unpaid labour as inequitable, as domestic work is so entwined with women’s identities (Erickson, 2005; DeVault, 1991; Marsh, 2013). Second-wave feminists, who in part did not recognize women’s domestic work as real work because it focused on caring for others rather than the self, pushed for women’s full participation in the public sphere to mitigate the fear of losing oneself in care work (Erickson, 2005; C.J. Smith, 2019; Thompson, 1986). Part of the problem that feminism has in understanding women’s identities in relation to domesticity is the continued marginalization of women’s domestic work. 4.3.2 The trouble with feminism Keenan: Do you identify as a feminist? Velma: That’s a switch up! Lily: From the domestic goddess to a feminist! Mary: But a domestic goddess can be a feminist. Louise: I don’t know about the label feminist. I’ve never felt, oddly enough, comfortable with that label, but I don’t. I should stand up for myself, if you call that a feminist. 73 As the conversation shifted to feminism, many of the participants felt ambivalent about or averse to the concept, and struggled to agree on how to define feminism. That conversations about the gendered division of labour, women’s responsibilities for the home and feeding the family, and the connections women make in the kitchen were not explicitly recognized by the participants as conversations about feminist issues was surprising. When asked if they identified as feminist, the general response from my participants was “no,” and while there were a few outliers, the majority of the women even bristled at the idea. What followed was a back-and-forth, in which some participants were on edge and defensive: Velma: [reading from the dictionary] Feminism: The advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. That’s the definition. Mary: Well, that’s one definition. There’s many, many. Velma: Well, I’m just saying that’s what it says. What it is about the concept of feminism that caused these women to disengage, especially if they have directly benefitted from feminist movements that opened the door to women’s access to paid employment, higher education, and reproductive rights? Faludi (1991) writes of a backlash against feminism perpetrated by the media and social institutions that fail to recognize women’s continued inequality as the real problem. However, the tension felt by feminists about how to make sense of women’s domestic work directly contributed to the idea of the feminist and the housewife as two separate and fixed identities (Johnson, 2000; C.J. Smith, 2019). By reducing the choice to just two in an opposing binary, women are offered little room to imagine alternate subjectivities, and for these participants, the feminist emerged as the less suitable option. 74 4.3.3 Summary Problematic to normalizing the feminist identity is that women are actually invested in their domestic identity, and derive self-worth and relational meaning through that role (Beagan, et al., 2008; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Thompson, 1986). This manifests as an attachment to the traditional domestic role, as indicated by the participants resisting the feminist label in order to preserve their connection to the home. However, as long as women’s labour continues to be marginalized and undervalued, feminist theorizing will continue to have problems assimilating othered domestic femininities with idealized feminist identities, and it becomes critical to examine the relationship between the two (Hollows, 2006). 4.4 Domesticity and women’s knowledge Feminist research has not always recognized the kitchen as a legitimate space of inquiry, preferring to focus instead on the ways in which women are participating in the public realm (Meah, 2014). However, what emerged from conversations with participants was a dialogue on the kitchen as a site of empowerment and connection for women (Scicluna, 2017; Stovall, et al., 2015; Williams, 2016). Through a feminist lens, the kitchen is often viewed as a place of women’s hidden and unpaid labour, neglecting the ways in which the kitchen can facilitate power and agency. As a feminized domain, the kitchen may be marginalized and taken for granted, viewed predominantly through a lens of the gendered division of labour. I would like to present the kitchen as a place of agency, where knowledge is shared, identities are navigated, and community-building takes place. As the heart of the home, the kitchen is often a place where families gather, to nourish and be nourished, and participants reflected on the kitchen as an important relational space. Meaningful connections that happen between women in the kitchen were noted as especially 75 significant. As women’s domain, the kitchen offers the potential for women to feel safe and valuable, to talk intimately and openly, and to experience creativity, freedom and healing, yet kitchen discourses may remain peripheral to those of more public/masculine spaces (hooks, 2014; Scicluna, 2017). Participants spoke of the collaborative and cooperative nature of working in the kitchen with others, benefitting the collective through food sharing and relationship-building. The narrative that women need to escape the kitchen was missing from the conversations I had with participants, and instead, the kitchen was recognized as a space that offered both quiet and satisfaction. Cooking together in community offers the opportunity for women to engage in women’s talk, an important process for negotiating gendered identities (Green, 1998; McKeown, 2015; Meah & Jackson, 2013). The kitchen is not only a site of connection and empowerment, but also a place where healing can happen, where women can their negotiate domestic feminine identities, and knowledge-sharing occurs. If the ‘wholeness’ of everyday life develops through the recognition of different ways of learning and knowing (Vaines, 2004), then the kitchen, as “a place where the power of the ordinary and the imponderabilia of everyday life unfold[s]” (Scicluna, 2017b, p. 251), offers just the locale to explore women’s ways of relating and knowing. 4.4.1 The kitchen as women’s domain Through my interviews, the kitchen is observed as a site of empowerment and connection for the women, a place where cooking skills are developed, where women have the opportunity to build relationships, and where they can exert power and control. For the most part, the kitchen was not perceived as a place women sought refuge from, but rather where they found joy. Intersectional research highlights the inequities apparent in contemporary discourses on cooking 76 and kitchens, where the ideology of home-cooked family meals is not realistic for many women and families, like those juggling job schedules and budget constraints, or in precarious living situations (Bowen, et al., 2014; Oleschuk, 2020). Although the participants in this study are primarily white, middle-class women, and do not face many of the associated barriers to achieving cooking ideologies that women of colour and working-class women do, it is worth exploring the ways in which cooking and the kitchen can remain both connected to the feminine and inform women’s identities and communities in positive ways. Dee: Food for us is connection, there’s always someone cooking, and the rest of us are sitting around enjoying and talking. Mary: All the best stuff happens in the kitchen. Louise: It does, and that’s why people have [island bars] now, so people can sit around. Mary: The living room is no longer sectioned off. Bonita: That’s my space, my zen place I guess you could say. Spatially central in many modern family homes, the kitchen is often a room around which family life revolves, where families like to socialize around the action: someone cooking, food being plated, wine being poured, and to nourish and be nourished, both figuratively and literally (Meah, 2014; Supski, 2017). What immediately surfaces from these conversations is the important role the kitchen has in relationship-building. When thinking about ‘the kitchen’ as a place, several participants reflected on the formative experiences they had with other women, while others reiterated the importance of learning to feel comfortable in the kitchen and that usually being facilitated through a female relationship. 77 Rebecca: That feeling of I know what you need, you know what I need, we’re just kind of a team. The dance. Bonita: I have two people I cook well with, my two sisters-in-law. One is here, and she and I can almost dance around the kitchen and know what we want of each other. As a woman’s space, the kitchen, and thus cooking, may be coded as safe for women to both explore and process experiences in ways not possible within mixed gender spaces (Green, 1998; Scicluna, 2017). Time spent in the kitchen together provides an important occasion to talk about life, bond and support each other, to be silly, and to laugh. Maria speaks to the freedom available when cooking for girlfriends, articulating the inherent security of the relationship even if the meal goes sideways, contrasting, perhaps with the higher pressure of cooking for family members or partners. While not explicitly about the kitchen, Mary reveals how valuable a woman’s only environment was for her finding herself and a new community following a divorce. The absence of men in this cooking context allowed Mary the time and energy to heal through her relationships with other women. Maria: To be in the kitchen together [with girlfriends], you’d maybe take a risk cause your girlfriends are going to love you even if it sucks. Mary: When I was in my very early 30s when I was a single mother of two very young boys, it was a very isolating time in my life. I thought, I’d better bring the people to me, so I learned how to make pizza dough, and Friday nights became pizza night at my house. It was very fun, there was music, there was a table full of food, there was no men allowed. It was really special. It was safety a little bit because it was such a difficult time. 78 As an integral part of how women do friendships, “talk with other women… is one of the most [common] leisure activities across differences of age, social class and ethnicity” (Green, 1998, p. 183). Women’s talk, usually taken place in the private (and often domestic) sphere, is often understood in opposition to men’s talk, which happens in public and is perceived as more ‘real’ (McKeown, 2015). Feminist analyses of talk between women note its importance to female friendships and as a tool to negotiate identities and explore ideas of femininity outside of societal expectations (Green, 1998; McKeown, 2015; Meah & Jackson, 2013; C.J. Smith, 2019). Reenie remembers listening to her mother and aunts engaging in such talk, where within the confines of a women’s only space, the conversation could veer towards more private topics, those not always considered appropriate for women (Green, 1998). Reenie: I loved it when Mom and her sisters would get together to cook. They had so much fun together, talking, reminiscing, and sharing. They were so silly and they’d laugh. They also talked a lot about sex – so that was interesting! While the kitchen may afford women power, influence and control – typically masculine objectives – the less overtly valued effortless female intimacy and ease of connection is what surfaces through these conversations as more significant. In contrast to the view of the kitchen as oppressive to women, an opposing perspective comes up that allows for recharging, empowerment and connection through domestic spaces like the kitchen. As a frequent locale of women’s talk, the kitchen can be described as a space in which friendships are established through storytelling, sharing experiences and information, and discussing problems (McKeown, 2015). However, the marginalization of women’s voices and experiences often construes women’s talk as idle gossip, denying its importance in contributing to and building women’s relationships and identities. 79 4.4.2 Cooking in community Women’s leisure activities are often linked to women’s labour (DeVault, 1991; McKeown, 2015). It is compelling to analyze the kitchen as a site of both leisure and labour, and collaborative kitchen activities as a critical avenue to understanding the connection between domesticity and women’s empowerment. Several of the participants reflected on the collaborative and cooperative nature of working in the kitchen with others, which facilitated building relationships and community. Many of the participants had experience cooking in community when it involved making labour-intensive dishes that were more easily tackled with a larger group of women. Ani: When I was growing up, we had a big apple tree in our yard and my mom and her girlfriends would get together and they would harvest all the apples. One person would be in charge of peeling and cutting, one person was in charge of pastry and one person was in charge of assembling it all. They all had their roles, and everyone ended up with thirty pies. While not a community kitchen in the traditional sense of the concept, this type of communal cooking benefits the collective in multiple ways, allowing women to engage in leisure, and bonding talk while at the same time accomplishing domestic tasks, minimizing the individual labour required in favour of collaborative work. Further, the intersection of women’s labour and leisure found within domestic cooking spaces may offer a starting point for locating gendered identities outside of the feminist/housewife binary. Another beneficial aspect of connection through domesticity is the knowledge sharing that happens between women about of food, which extends beyond the technical to also include more intangible aspects such as finding community and making friends. 80 Reenie: Louise & I share all the time. Right now we’re canning, so we share produce, whoever finds those sealer lids buys them, we share those, we share recipes all the time, we share how everything’s done. I was at her house last night, she was over here this morning. Rebecca: I love when you meet another sourdough baker, it’s actually part of the deal of making bread is the connection that I have with other people over the process and troubleshooting. Engaging in responsive and intimate conversation is integral to the process of women doing friendships, and as a feminized space, the kitchen can offer a place for women to develop emotional intelligence and relational skills that allow women to sustain important social connections for themselves and their families. Collaborative foodwork undertaken in such spaces may encourage women to participate in domestic femininities while simultaneously negotiating and establishing identities. At the junction of women’s labour and leisure, cooking (and by association, the kitchen), should be investigated for ways in which women construct identities outside of the feminist or the housewife. 4.4.3 Women’s knowledge If working collaboratively in feminized spaces like the kitchen offer an ideal medium through which women both connect with each other and explore their domestic identities, to what extent does women’s knowledge of domesticity exist? Domesticity, as a phenomenon of the everyday, did not read as specialized or likely to generate its own unique knowledge to the participants, although almost all of them referred immediately to the gendered division of labour that sees cooking as a ‘woman’s job.’ Mary, the only participant that identifies as feminist, 81 considers the traditionally feminine as cause for celebration, and sees sustaining families through domestic work as central to women’s lived experience. Mary: And the celebration of women. My power, my force, I think it’s great to celebrate. We have done this role for so long. Generations and generations of women did the housekeeping and were the primary care providers and primary cooks and I think that’s an amazing celebration because that’s what holds families together, the sustenance and the tradition and the soul of everything. For me in my life, I do feel that that is true and I think that it’s something that makes me very special and unique. It’s part of your identity. I love being female and I love lots of things that are historically considered feminine. I celebrate that. The other participants did not express a conflicting opinion, but again, the everyday nature of cooking and domesticity is so taken for granted that perhaps they saw no cause to identify it as part of a unique worldview. Velma refers to the public/private dichotomy as it exists between professional chefs (mostly men) and home cooks (mostly women) as a way to explain that cooking knowledge is not just for women. This assessment, however, does not account for the ways in which male/public forms of knowledge are granted legitimacy over female/private forms of knowledge. The discourse that women’s work is less meaningful and less valuable than men’s work subjugates the female experience, conforming to a “pattern of exclusion or silencing” that traditional theories of knowledge favour in search of universal truths (Code, 2007, p. 215). 82 Velma: Generationally, what has been passed on through women, I don’t think it needs to be exclusively women. In world cooking, there’s a lot of male chefs that are there. Domestic knowledge is not inherently gendered in and of itself – although often passed down primarily from woman to woman. This being said, women’s everyday lived experiences should be accepted as valid forms of knowledge that contribute to understandings of the diverse subjective realities of women’s lives (Meah & Jackson, 2013; Williams, 2016). Rebecca shared the idea of women as culture keepers, presenting a fascinating correlation to the ways in which women practice emotional labour, shape social relationships, and potentially subvert gendered notions of identity while also validating women’s epistemologies (Green, 1998). Rebecca: I took a doula course this summer, and a doula is a role that can be anybody but historically it means a woman supporting another woman. I attended a talk about doulas by a person who was researching specifically why most doulas are women and it’s because women are the culture-keepers in many cultures, the vast majority of cultures. That includes holding space, like the kitchen space, where a lot of connections and conversation and storytelling and crafts happened. This is not an attempt to distill women’s experiences to a one-size-fits-all, essentialist woman’s knowledge, but rather to legitimize women’s everyday lived experiences as a valid construct of knowledge. Women’s talk represents a women’s way of knowing, where narrative and intimate conversation can reveal ‘small truths’ (Adkins, 2002). Recognizing that there are varied and multiple ways of knowing, and that knowledges normalized and centred usually 83 reflect social power dynamics (Code, 2007), centering a marginalized (both as feminine and as everyday) perspective can advance feminist discourse on identity and domestic femininities. 4.4.4 Summary Examining how we can understand the kitchen space and women’s domestic work through a private/feminized lens can validate and legitimize women’s experiences around domestic labour. Theorizing women’s lives and epistemologies through a masculine lens risks obscuring the full range of possibilities available to women in embodying a connection to domesticity. When appreciated as a woman’s only space, the kitchen becomes a safe space for women to be and interact outside the purview of patriarchal and societal expectations about how and who women should be. Communication skills, emotional intelligence and social relationships are practiced through the talk that takes place amongst women in feminized spaces like the kitchen, and it is through these very skills that women cultivate their capacity for the emotional labour that is required to fulfill their role in the family (McKeown, 2015). Often labelled as gossip, women’s talk can actually be undertaken in ways that subvert gendered expectations and understandings of women’s identities and realities, and should be understood as a legitimate way of constructing knowledge (Adkins, 2002; Harding, 2004; McKeown, 2015). Women cooking in community exists at the nexus of women’s leisure and labour, and may present an area to explore for locating identities along the feminist/housewife continuum rather than only at its poles. Mary offers an interesting example of subverting the feminist/housewife binary, in that she is the only participant to both identify as a feminist and to fully embrace the power she finds in her domestic femininity. As part of the everyday, domestic work can be both subversive and full of meaning (hooks, 2014; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; Vaines, 84 2004). The activities and conversations that happen within domestic spaces may experience an erasure in feminist theorizing about women’s lives, as feminist objectives are often inconsistent with feminine identities (Budgeon, 2015; Hollows, 2007). 4.5 Summary A feminist, interpretive analysis of the data highlighted several findings, that both support and add to existing research on women and domesticity. Women’s experiences of domesticity were found to be varied and dependent on changing life factors. Construed as both stimulating and exhausting, women’s domestic work and their associated domestic identities should not be reduced to one or the other, and need to be examined as holistic (DeVault, 1991). Women’s identities are influenced by dominant gender ideologies that associate domestic femininity with nurturing and caring through foodwork (Beagan, et al., 2008; Beagan, et al., 2014; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). While women shoulder an unequal distribution of domestic work, the associated emotional labour also encompasses the task of maintaining family and social relationships that are highly valuable. Because of this relational work, the participants expressed an attachment to their domestic identities. Through this research, the everyday emerges as full of meaning, and should be understood as a source of women’s knowledge and epistemic value (Adkins, 2002; Harding, 2004; hooks, 2014; Gillis & Hollows, 2009; McKeown, 2015; Vaines, 2004). 85 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion In this chapter I present a summary of the key findings from this study, a response to the research questions, and a discussion of the data. In the discussion, I consider what the data means and why it matters to both feminist scholarship and home economics pedagogy. I connect the data to existing literature, and highlight areas where the two overlap as well as where my data contributes to the discourse on women, gender, feminism, and domesticity. In the concluding section, I acknowledge the limitations and address the implications of this study, both for the field of home economics and for women generally. Finally, I offer recommendations for future research for me personally, and for the profession of home economics. 5.1 Summary of key findings Through this research, I have been exploring the presence of ‘women’s knowledge’ around cooking and domesticity, while also examining the relationship between sharing domestic knowledge in a cooking context and the potential for increased sense of empowerment, connectedness and identity. I have summarized the key findings from the data in response to the three central research questions of this study, regarding women’s knowledge, women’s identities and women’s communities and relationships. The findings of this research indicate that women’s relationship to domesticity is complex and that women experience domesticity in conflicting ways, sometimes joyful and satisfying, while at other times frustrating and tiring. The connective, emotional labour that is a necessity of domestic foodwork is critical to how women maintain and nurture relationships, which the participants found value in, while also acknowledging that unequal gendered expectations result in a greater burden for women than for 86 men. To distill the complex relationship women have with their domestic responsibilities and identities to one or the other obscures the full meaning of both (DeVault, 1991). 5.2 Response to research questions This study posed three central research questions pertaining to women’s identities, communities, and knowledge. The following section responds to those research question, connecting data gathered from my research to relevant literature. These responses suggest that the domestic work undertaken by women is both valuable, and undervalued in relation to discourses of work, gender, families, and communities. 5.2.1 Research question: Does a women’s knowledge of domesticity exist? Do women have a sense of their knowledge in the kitchen as specialized? This study did not generate conclusive data to suggest that the participants conceive of their knowledge around everyday domestic foodwork as specialized or unique to women. The participants conflated the idea of ‘women’s knowledge’ with women’s work, indicating a strong connection between women and domestic foodwork, while not observing that as specialized. The participants equated foodwork with love and nurturing (“we love through food”), with their mothers (“I liked working with my mom and helping her”), with women’s work (“that’s been the gender role that you just do it”), and women working together (“it’s fun and you get lots more done”), responses that can be characterized as privileging women’s experiences of domesticity. The elements of foodwork established as the most stressful and the most difficult to expect another family member to do were the hidden tasks of emotional labour. Women were recognized as uniquely equipped to take on the emotional labour aspect of foodwork, as the underlying competencies required to do family foodwork are most often and most successfully undertaken by women. This was addressed by participants in conversation about the difficulty in 87 getting their husbands to take up domestic foodwork, notably when Mary said, “my husband doesn’t want the responsibility of planning.” These findings are consistent with other research on the emotional labour of domestic tasks as primarily executed by women, and as integral to fulfilling the duties of domestic femininity (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cooke, 2005; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Marsh, 2013). While a specialized knowledge of foodwork may not be evident to the participants in this study, I argue that domestic emotional labour does represent women’s specialized knowledge. Both the participants, and relevant literature in the field support the idea that the majority of the invisible tasks of domestic foodwork are undertaken by women, and are passed on from woman-to-woman through traditionally female means in spaces coded as feminine (Oleschuk, 2019; Scicluna, 2017; C.J. Smith, 2019; Stovall, et al., 2015; Williams, 2016). 5.2.2 Research question: How do women conceive of and negotiate their domestic identities? Women’s domestic identities were expressed as both fluid and relational, influenced by location and life circumstance, as well as by important relationships. Velma articulated this fluidity by referring to her relationship to cooking as “an evolution,” changing alongside her marital status and her work. As simultaneously rewarding and exhausting, domestic foodwork invokes both positive and negative identity structures (DeVault, 1991). Further, how women perceive the quality of their domestic skills has an influence on their sense of self, and can be a marker by which women measure their worth as women, partners and mothers (Bowen, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; Budgeon, 2015; Cairns, et al., 2010; Grace & Gandolfo, 2014; Hollows, 2005; West & Zimmerman, 1987). The participants did not make sense of their domestic identities in relation to any feminist discourse, and in fact mostly felt uncertain about the conceptual link between domesticity and feminism, as voiced by Lily: “from the domestic 88 goddess to a feminist!” Rather than conceptualizing their domestic identities on either end of the feminist/housewife trope, the participants understood their interactions with domesticity to be located along a continuum. Reenie expressed the variability of her domestic identity in the following statements: “I plan cooking to try to fill my day and give me some sense of achievement,” “I like being a domestic,” “I feel guilty, like I should help him,” and “sometimes you just wake up…and think, what are we going to have?” DeVault (1991) describes this as “the contradictory insights about family work…burdensome and oppressive, but also meaningful because it serves as a means for connecting with others” (p. 232). The women in this study did indicate a personal investment in their domestic identities, those which are critical in supporting their most valuable relationships. Dee reflects on the nature of connection through food, “there’s always someone cooking, and the rest of us are sitting around enjoying and talking.” While feminist theorizing may critique domesticity for its inherent focus on others rather than the self, it is reductive to dismiss the importance of relationships and the ways women nurture and sustain the relationships in their lives. 5.2.3 Research question: Do women experience a sense of community through domestic kitchen work? What are women’s experiences of cooking in community? Domestic cooking was described as relational, and the knowledge sharing and collaboration around foodwork that happens between women helps sustain and nurture social connections. This research affirms the kitchen as a valuable location for facilitating women’s modes of friendship and connecting through women’s talk, as the kitchen allows women to negotiate their gendered identities away from hegemonic masculinity (Green, 1998; McKeown, 2015; Meah & Jackson, 2013; Scicluna, 2017; Stovall, et al., 2015; Williams, 2016). Several participants shared anecdotes of the meaningful interactions they had had through domestic 89 foodwork: “they had so much fun together, talking, reminiscing and sharing;” “it was very fun, there was music, there was a table full of food;” and “in the kitchen together with girlfriends, you’d maybe take a risk.” Collaborative work undertaken in the kitchen encourages intimacy and connection between women, and the talk that happens in the kitchen space presents a valid way of constructing knowledge (Adkins, 2002; Harding, 2004; McKeown, 2015). In the participant interviews, traditionally feminine traits were established as equally valuable as the masculine traits of power and control that women can exert in domestic spaces, as noted by Mary, “that’s what holds families together, the sustenance and the tradition and the soul of everything.” Cultivating these traditionally feminine skills offers women the capacity for emotional labour required in many areas of their lives (McKeown, 2015). At the intersection of women’s leisure and labour, women engage in communal domestic cooking that facilitates knowledge sharing, communication, and emotional intelligence while affirming and reproducing women’s specialized ways of interacting and knowing. 5.3 Discussion of findings Following my initial inspiration, reading extensive literature, coming up with the idea for research, running the cooking sessions, interviewing participants, and interpreting data, what follows is a synthesis of my understandings of women’s domestic work and how it relates to both my lived experience as a woman, and theories of gender, knowledge, identity, community, and transformation. 5.3.1 Domestic knowledge as subjugated knowledge When I asked the participants if they thought their domestic knowledge was specialized or unique to women, they responded referencing how domestic knowledge is transmitted (through women), who actually does domestic work (women), and even the connection between 90 women caring and food. They did not, however, recognize their domestic knowledge as meaningful or particular. I argue that this is not because it lacks either quality, but because domestic knowledge is subjugated on several levels. To understand how domestic knowledge specifically, and women’s knowledge more generally is subjugated we must examine dominant ideologies of power that marginalize women’s lives and experiences. Feminist theorizing often argues that women have only been allowed esteem in the domestic/private sphere, and that any meaning found in that space can only be understood through the patriarchal paradigms that position women in the subordinate. However, that presents a reductive position on what happens in the home, disregarding the home as a “[touchstone] of our human and material existence” (Thompson, 1986, p. 282). The subjugation of women’s knowledge can be interpreted through Foucault’s theories of knowledge as socially constructed and interactional (1980). In this model, knowledge that is most often reproduced is essentialist, based on positivist ideas of truth, and aligns with hegemonic power structures and ideals of modernity. Knowledge is shaped by an individual’s lived experience and social position in relation to hegemonic power. Positivist notions of objective truths obscure structures of power that favour masculine, industrialist knowledge that reaffirm existing ideologies assigning knowledge as ‘male’ (Code, 2007), where scientific, empirical knowledge is presented as objective and true, and “valued as high-status wisdom” (Pendergast, 1996, p. 15). Structuralism establishes relational binaries that are mutually dependent, and when also filtered through hegemonic truth narratives, one half of the duality is ascribed power, while the other is consequently oppressed. Foucault labels the oppressed knowledge ‘le savoir des gens’ – people’s knowledge – “a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity” 91 (Foucault, 1980, p. 82). Such folk knowledges are subjugated, “disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy” (p. 82). The dualities of scientific/folk, male/female, public/private, and mind/body can thus be understood within a dominance/subjugation duality. Because scientific knowledge is presented as objective, it is associated with the rational, male mind and thus ideological dualism inevitably subjugates women through their association with the body and emotion, rejecting the idea that emotions can inform knowledge (Code, 2007). Coded as female and assigned to women, the private sphere is thus relegated to the side of the oppressed, subjugating the activities that happen therein, and denying the possibility of such spaces as sites of knowledge production (Code, 2007). Situated at the nexus of women’s work and everyday knowledge, domestic knowledge is rendered insignificant compared to knowledge formed in masculine/public spaces. Velma illustrated this dichotomy in her statement about male chefs in world cooking, because even a domestic skill like cooking, when taken to the world stage, is rendered masculine and legitimate. This research highlights two explicit ways that domestic knowledge is subjugated. First, through the dismissal of the everyday tasks of domesticity as mundane and irrelevant (Code, 2007; Hollows, 2003). The value of domestic work within much contemporary discourse is marginalized, and its holistic meaning denied (Code, 2007; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003, 2007; Scicluna, 2017; Vaines, 2004). Second, through the devaluing of both the material tasks of the domestic, and the invisible competencies of emotional labour that accompany such tasks. This denies the significance of emotional labour necessary to family maintenance and as a potential tool in making equitable the gendered division of labour. Because the productive value of emotional labour is difficult to quantify and measure, it is hidden behind more public forms of labour and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). 92 Vaines (1994) argues that what happens in the everyday is sacred because of the interconnections between family as a domestic sphere and others such as the public, power and biospheres. Thus “it is easy to miss the meaning and long-term consequences of everyday routines if these underlying patterns are invisible or taken for granted” (p.59). Dismissing the everyday also ignores emerging cultural patterns, such as the inherent subversiveness of traditional skills that are collaborative, constructivist, and based on knowledge sharing. The women in this study touched on some of these elements in the conversations around cooking in community and the kitchen as both a safe space and a place away from men where women can speak freely. The challenge is that domesticity is grounded in a power structure that sees everyday acts as mundane and incidental to the masculine, productive labour of the public sphere (Vaines, 2004; Thompson, 1989). Analysis of the everyday is often distilled to economic or political discourses, which do not adequately embrace the relationships, connections, and communities that are equally or particularly relevant to everyday life (Vaines, 2004). Economic analyses rely on models of productivity that further discount everyday domestic work as merely reproductive and/or consumptive (Carroll, 2014; Hewitson, 2003; Hollows, 2007; Rezeanu, 2015; Vaines, 2004). Political analyses view the everyday (in particular the gendered division of labour) through power and inequity (Vaines, 2004). Neither addresses the relational aspect of the everyday, that which sustains and connects families and communities. The everyday takes place in the spaces “where all spheres of life interweave in the most taken-for-granted ways and [offer] a cultural context for a deep understanding of society” (Scicluna, 2017, p. 251), and should therefore be closely observed for its epistemic value. Vaines, a home economist, introduces a cooperative model of the home that blends economic, political and moral discourses to honour the “wholeness in everyday life,” (2004, p.135). The 93 cooperative model relies on acknowledging ways of knowing other than through scientific inquiry to “[rediscover] what is now considered ordinary and mundane…as sacred and meaningful” (p. 135). Mary plays to this in saying, “all the best stuff happens in the kitchen,” but the collective sentiment of the participants was that cooking, as perhaps the most essential of the everyday, creates and facilitates deep meaning in their lives. For bell hooks (2014), the ‘homeplace’ is “where all that truly mattered in life took place – the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls” (p. 41). Everyday practices have the potential to be subversive in their capacity to re-imagine and re-shape cultural norms and dynamics (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; hooks, 2014; Meah, 2014; Scicluna, 2017; Williams, 2016). While hooks (2014) writes specifically about Black women, she conceptualizes the home as a site of social and political resistance, a space in which the closeness of its participants cultivates both meaning and action (p. 45). Both daily life and emotional labour can be important sources of woman-generated knowledge (DeVault, 1991; Harding, 2004). Integrating these interpretations of the home and the everyday practices that happen within recognizes the everyday as both socially and politically relevant. 5.3.2 Doing gender and women’s emotional capital Much feminist research has highlighted the ways in which women are socialized to be caring and nurturing, qualities that are intimately connected to how women enact femininity, and are often perceived as essential female traits (West & Zimmerman, 1987). The participants in this study echoed this through conversations about caring through food and feeling cared for through food, perhaps most succinctly when Mary said, “we love through food.” The second-wave narrative articulated a position where women both should and wanted to be liberated from the home and family in order to participate in public domain productive work (Friedan, 1963; 94 Krolokke & Sorensen, 2006). However, the women in this study were strongly connected to their domestic identities because of the role those identities play in maintaining important relationships. To discount the value of the caring work embedded within domestic labour denies the importance of connection and relationships to human life (DeVault, 1991; Thompson, 1986). The analysis presented here of women’s emotional labour in the home through the theoretical frameworks of ‘doing gender’ (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) affirms both the value of women’s domestic work, and its potential for subverting domestic gendered ideologies. While women successfully ‘do’ femininity through the performance of emotional labour, something that they often perceive as a burden on many levels, this results in an unintended benefit where women accrue emotional capital to a much higher degree than men (Reay, 2004). Gender is socially constructed through interpersonal and social interactions, which West & Zimmerman (1987) refer to as ‘doing gender.’ The salience of gendered identities is understood as variable and situational, and the performance of gender encompasses the interactions and processes by which individuals conform to socially established gender norms. The extent to which an individual successfully conforms to ascribed gender ideologies is observed and assessed, both by the self and others. This self-monitoring was observed with the participants in this study when they compared their cleaning skills, and in the subsequent conversations about the expectations of being a good host. Doing gender serves to “sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category” (146). The more a woman adheres to traditional domestic femininities, the more those femininities become essentialized. 95 Within the home and family, femininity is enacted prominently through caring work, or emotional labour (Beagan, et al., 2014; Budgeon, 2015; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Hollows, 2007). This was apparent throughout the interviews I had with the participants, notably in their expressions of exhaustion at having to continually think about what to cook; the pressure felt about food and cooking being reflective of how well they were caring for loved ones; managing the family’s nutrition; and the responsibility of cooking large dinners with little help from men. Because many women have an investment in adhering to social expectations about being feminine, they are both expected to and choose to take on the emotional labour and material tasks of domestic work. Emotional labour may be indistinguishable from the associated domestic tasks, and to try to extract one from the other diminishes the full meaning of either, as DeVault (1991) highlights: If the activity is thought of only in terms of relationships and emotions, the necessary and arduous work of physical maintenance disappears. If it is thought of only in terms of the tasks like those of wage-workers – as discrete ‘products’ or ‘services’ – the most significant interpersonal parts of the work disappear (p. 10). An example of how doing gender essentializes women’s domestic femininities is evident when caring is conflated with ‘that’s just how women are.’ Caring is perceived as essentially feminine, rather than as a learned skill (DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hollows, 2007; Huppatz, 2009). Because of this conflation, both the emotional labour and material tasks that women perform to a greater degree than men are seen as expressions of care rather than extra work, and many women do not recognize their emotional labour or an unequal distribution of household work as inequitable (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Marsh, 2013). This is 96 partially attributable to doing femininity appropriately by avoiding conflict and investing in interpersonal relationships (Beagan, et al., 2008; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005). Statements such as, “it’s just what women do,” “it’s a woman’s job,” and “that’s how it’s always been” reflect how internalized the ideology of caring through food was for the participants. Despite this, women find meaning and value in care work and continue to establish a sense of self in relation to how they care for others through domestic foodwork (Budgeon, 2015; DeVault, 1991; Thompson, 1986). Another way that gendered identities are enacted in the domestic sphere is through feminine connectedness in contrast to masculine separateness (Hewitson, 2003; Peterat, 1989; Reay, 2004; Szabo, 2012). Caring is not coded as masculine, therefore men have more latitude when it comes to domestic work, as doing masculinity is self-focused rather than other-focused (Erickson, 2005; Szabo, 2012). The male distance from the obligations of domestic foodwork was prominent when the participants were talking about their husbands simply refusing to help out with food-related chores. These refusals came even though the men had more time, and completion of the task would have benefitted the whole family. Despite the masculine distance from caring work, men are capable of doing emotional labour, and do at times perform it when they undertake domestic tasks (Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Szabo, 2012). The inequitable division of household labour is an enduring problem that may partially be addressed through more equitable balancing of the emotional labour of domestic work. It will be useful here to refer to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital – essentially the cultural knowledge an individual has (1986). Cultural capital can be acquired in its embodied state through socialization or investment in the self or the individual, often by the family. Reay (2004) applies this concept to emotional labour, acknowledging that because women do more emotion work 97 than men, they have more emotional capital than men. Part of the process of socialization experienced by women includes building increased capacity for caring for others and maintaining relationships (Huppatz, 2009; Fielding-Singh, 2017; West & Zimmerman, 1987). The embodied state of cultural capital takes time and labour to attain and assimilate, therefore both women’s socialization for and long-term participation in caring and relational work can be understood as accruing women greater emotional capital. However, emotional capital is “generally confined within the bounds of affective relationships of family and friends and encompasses the emotional resources you hand onto those you care about” (Reay, 2004, p. 60). As such, it is not readily convertible to other forms of capital because of its focus on others and “lack of value in the public sector” (p. 60). However, “the processes through which emotional capital is generated highlights the costs for mothers of always being ‘close-up,’ while men maintain their prerogative to remain ‘at a distance’” (p. 71). This distance was addressed when Dee said, “and on family dinners, [men] don’t help. They sit around, you serve them, they talk together.” Emotional capital, as an extension of emotional labour, is an other-focused endeavour, where the investment is not in the self, but in loved ones (Huppatz, 2009). While the focus on others may be perceived as a detriment to self-development in feminist theorizing (Friedan, 1963), my position is articulated by Thompson (1986) that the work women do in the home and in their relationships is critical to humanity: Male-led society may also have simultaneously, and unwittingly, delegated to women not humanity’s “lowest needs” but its “highest necessities” – that is, the intense emotionally connected cooperation and creativity necessary for human life and growth (quoting Miller, 1975) (p. 277). 98 Limited research has examined how gendered domestic identities (both feminine and masculine) are being challenged and negotiated in the kitchen, some suggesting that men may adopt more feminine ways of doing domesticity (Szabo, 2012), while others claiming that men continue to access feminized spaces, such as the kitchen, on their own terms, retaining a strong element of leisure (Meah, 2014; Meah & Jackson, 2013; Rezeanu, 2015). As long as feminine skills are understood as inherent traits rather than acquired competencies, they will continue to be undervalued and assigned almost exclusively to women (Huppatz, 2009). This both sustains the gendered division of labour, and limits the expectation that men participate in domestic work to an equal degree (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cook, 2005; Szabo, 2013). 5.3.3 Undoing gendered domestic identities In response to West & Zimmerman (1987), Deutsch (2007) posits that if gender is created through interactional processes, it can also be deconstructed through those same processes. Deutsch further provides a framework for research on undoing gender, to “examine resistance to gendered social interactions as a source of change” (p. 120). Several studies have explored the ways in which both women and men negotiate their gendered identities through domestic foodwork (Meah, 2014; Meah & Jackson, 2013; Rezeanu, 2015; Szabo, 2012, 2013). One study in particular noted that men who are responsible for primary foodwork in their homes were also more likely to cite feminine benefits (such as showing love and creating intimacy with children through foodwork) to doing that work (Szabo, 2012). A truly equitable division of household labour will require such a shift towards other relationship and community-focused attitudes and goals. The problem is not with women’s participation in domestic work per se, but with a structural value system that is skewed towards individualism and self rather than towards others 99 and community. The second-wave feminist notion that women should move from the home into the workplace runs parallel to modernist ideas of progress in which the male/public domain exists in a linear trajectory ahead of the female/private domain (Hollows, 2007; Johnson, 2000). Johnson (2000) writes that the “concept of the autonomous, self-defining individual is implicitly gendered” (p. 244), where a focus on independence and the self are characteristically masculine. In contrast, feminist epistemologies position women’s ways of knowing and being in the world as central, and identify “collectively-oriented projects” (Budgeon, 2015, p. 307) as a way forward, recognizing that women “juggle loyalties to other people’s needs and demands as well as their own” (Johnson, 2000, p. 245). As a gendered space and a site of gendered interactions, the domestic sphere certainly has the potential to deconstruct gendered ideologies that continue to affect both women and men. Women, for their disproportionate burden of household labour, and men for their focus on the self and lack of emotional literacy (Hewitson, 2003). If gendered spaces, such as the kitchen, “can be conceptualized as places of resistance where one could undo gender, and deconstruct masculine hegemony” (Rezeanu, 2015, p. 25), as a home economics educator, I am curious about how gender can be undone within the home economics classroom? Exploring this potential further relates to the concept of emotional/cultural capital, as institutional education is another avenue through which capital can accrue (Bourdieu, 1986). As a field that concerns itself with the everyday, home economics educates for real-world realities and challenges, and should be explored as an area of potential resistance (East, 1980; Smith & deZwart, 2011; Thompson, 1989). Home economics intersects in an interesting way with feminist theory, where speaking from the margins has the potential to disrupt the status quo by privileging women’s ways of 100 knowing (Harding, 2004; Hewitson, 2003; Lather, 1989; Pendergast, 1996). As an elective course that is marginal to core subjects, home economics may be uniquely situated “to challenge orthodox theoretical and methodological practices” (Lather, 1989, p. 251). Home economics’ learning objectives embody collaboration, critical thinking, relationship literacy, and addressing the “fundamental needs and practical concerns of individuals, families, communities, and society” (BC Ministry of Education, 2019). Addressing those practical concerns should include thinking critically about the ways in which women’s experiences have been marginalized while men’s have been privileged. A feminist pedagogy in the classroom seeks to uncover and challenge regimes of power that maintain gendered ideologies, and teaches for empowerment, community, and leadership (Shrewsbury, 1997). This includes honouring personal experience as a legitimate way of learning and knowing, teaching for “a community of mutuality rather than a community of isolated individuals” (p. 170), and for transformation in the way students think about and interact with how gender is ‘done.’ This type of transformative, feminist pedagogy seeks to “make the classroom a place that is life-sustaining and mind-expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership” (hooks, 2003, p. xv), goals that also line-up with Thomas & Smith’s ideal of a person educated in home economics (1994). How can enacting a feminist pedagogy in home economics undo gender (or at least ameliorate aspects) and lead to more equitable understandings of gender roles in domestic spaces? When home economics is understood as “a knowledge system, not a gender system” (Thompson, 1986, p. 279), we can start the work of deconstructing the dominant male/female binary associated with domestic spaces. This parallels the recognition of women’s emotional labour as a learned skill and not an inherent characteristic. Deutsch (2007) locates structure and 101 interaction as key areas in which gender can be undone. The structural form of home economics education allows for gender similarity, at least in terms of participation and responsibility. When structure supports gender parity, at the interactional level “individuals [can] challenge boundaries by resisting conventional gendered behaviour” (p. 121). With a feminist pedagogy that embraces the concept of undoing gender, the home economics classroom can transcend re/creating gender hierarchies to become a site of gender disruption. 5.3.4 Summary Women’s epistemologies and knowledge of the everyday have been marginalized in ways that privilege male/public forms of knowledge. However, when everyday practices are recognized for their potential to be subversive, there is the possibility of re-creating and blurring gendered domestic identities. The feminization of domestic skills is not reflective of women’s innate abilities in the domestic realm, but should be understood as learned competencies. This includes the women’s emotional labour, the very skills that can bring us to a more whole-hearted, collaborative future. This connective work continues to be foundational to how women identify and find meaning in their life, and rather than continuing to subjugate the desire for connectivity, I believe there is transformational power in the greater valuation of such skills. Home economics exists in these same margins, where there is opportunity within to undo domestic gendered identities. A feminist pedagogy is inherently focused on community and social justice, collaboration, and a holistic systems approach. Enacted in the home economics classroom, such a pedagogy can support educators in teaching home economics not only as a practical skillset, but as a knowledge and value system, where the work of undoing domestic gendered identities can start. 102 5.4 Conclusion After an inquiry about how feminism and home economics intersect, I am now at the conclusion of this project, and find myself still making sense of it all, reflecting on where this project has brought me, and where it still has the potential to go. While the connection between women’s domestic work and the associated emotional labour had already been made clear (Beagan, et al., 2008; Breen & Cooke, 2005; Castellano, 2016; DeVault, 1991; Erickson, 2005; Hewitson, 2003; Hollows, 2007), what I found to be the most significant piece of this project was highlighting caring and relational work as learned competencies that everyone can, and deserves to, participate in. As a home economics teacher, I also find meaning in this work as it relates to my daily profession of educating students in the field. This project has brought up questions about how I can do that work more equitably and more whole-heartedly. At the beginning of the 21st century, there is so much newfound space to be proactive and hopeful about transformation and disruption, whether through relationships, education, or communities. As I worked my way through the research and data, some limitations and areas that deserved more attention revealed themselves, and those are presented below. I also offer three key areas for future research that I was not able to do justice in this study. 5.4.1 Limitations of the study A limitation of qualitative research is that it is not easily generalized cross-contextually, and often requires significant time to collect data (Creswell, 2015; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Ryan, et al., 2007). Because of the time and energy commitment of conducting qualitative, interview-based research, the sample size in this study is relatively small and thus the results remain relevant to this participant group, and not necessarily applicable to a larger sample. To recruit participants, I primarily used word-of-mouth and social media, which resulted in the 103 participant group being made up of women I was acquainted with, and many of whom were also acquainted with each other. This meant that the participants were all from the same demographic background as me, and as each other: (mostly) white, middle-class women. This is a limitation for two reasons: first, speaking to a homogenous participant group likely resulted in similar stories, experiences and personal histories being shared. A more diverse group, both ethnically and socio-economically, would likely have produced a broader range of narratives to include in the data. Second, one of the primary critiques of second-wave feminism, and an impetus for the evolution of feminism’s third-wave, is that the women in question were most often privileged, middle- and upper-class white women (Folbre, 1991; Hollows, 2003; Krolokke & Sorensen, 2006; Matchar, 2013). Third-wave feminist research attempts to centre the voices and experiences of women on the margins of the feminist movement, namely women of colour, and working-class women. While my intention had been to honour the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in my research, the resources I had in connecting with potential participants did not facilitate doing so. 5.4.2 Implications for practice and pedagogy The devaluation of traditionally feminized skills is a detriment to women, who have learned that their unique, creative and valuable skillset is not specialized or relevant in a masculine economy. What is perhaps less obvious is that it is also a detriment to men, who have been left out of the lineage of caring, from which the most essential and connective of human experiences are borne. This is important and critical work to which men have not been permitted, resulting in the over-feminization of caring and a masculinity in which men need to affirm their manliness by repressing their emotive selves (Harrington, 2021). 104 Any gender essentialism dismisses the opportunity and possibility for everyone to learn a breadth of skills that will serve them in creating an equitable future for themselves and their communities. When caring and connecting are construed as ‘essentially feminine’ traits, it denies the opportunity for boys and men to learn those skills, and limits the expectation that they do so. Understanding these ‘soft skills’ as learned competencies has implications for home economics education. Citing a study from 1983, Thompson (1986) reports that “both male and female home economics students are perceived as more expressive…more helpful, kind, aware of others’ feelings, understanding, and warm in their relationship to others” than students not taking home economics (p. 281). All of the qualities mentioned by Thompson are usually perceived as feminine, however in the context of home economics education, in which both male and female students participate, the masculinity of the males in this study was not compromised by their adoption of and fluency in such skills. How do we start the work of doing this in our classrooms? Writing about transformative, social justice movements, brown (2017) states that “critical connections are more important in a long-term transformation process than critical mass” (p. 28). This echoes M.G. Smith’s (2019) work on decolonizing home economics, in which the framework given for starting that process acknowledges and honours the primacy of holistic pedagogies that teach for interdependence. With a framework of connection and empathy in mind, educators (both in home economics and other subject areas) much begin first with reflexive practice, in which personal biases are challenged and unpacked, followed by shifting curriculum and pedagogy, and finally, addressing the issue in research (M.G. Smith, 2019). As an interdisciplinary field, home economics seeks to address life’s complexities, and empower the individual to make critical decisions about their everyday lives. Transformative pedagogies highlight the importance of relationships and caring, 105 and of inclusive and conscious classroom environments (hooks, 2003; M.G. Smith, 2017). Establishing critical thinking, collaboration and caring alongside skill-development as integral to home economics, the transformative classroom can be a space in which an ethos of social justice takes root. Conscious teaching “evokes and invites community” (hooks, 2003, p. xvi) through interpersonal connections and caring. Enacting a caring and conscious pedagogy in the classroom model the skills and interactions that are necessary for shifting the ways we do and disrupt gender. 5.4.3 Recommendations for future research Throughout this project, three areas for future and continued research emerged as integral to a deeper understanding of domestic foodwork. First, the necessity of an intersectional analysis of domesticity (Budgeon, 2015; Bowen, et al., 2014; Brenton, 2017; Cairns, et al., 2010; DeVault, 1991; Genz, 2009; Groeneveld, 2010; Hollows, 2003, 2006; Meah, 2014; Williams-Forson, 2011). The research presented here conforms to historical biases towards a dominant group – white, middle-class women. Historically, both the feminist movement and the profession of home economics have been complicit in advocating largely for and about the rights and needs of white, middle-class women, obscuring the lived realities and experiences of women on the margins. Williams-Forson (2011) writes that “there is a need to place the methodologies and theories of gender, race and intersectionality at the center of food studies research” (p. 15). A broader scope of research should be undertaken that includes deeper conversations about how the intersections of domesticity, gender, race, class, and sexuality are experienced by women. That normative femininity itself is misrepresented as white and middle-class further obscures these intersections (Budgeon, 2015, p. 309). When only the stories of the most privileged are heard, it diminishes the opportunities for responding to the needs of all women (Kendall, 2020). 106 Second, future studies should take into account the kitchen as a valuable area for feminist research. The data from this study that surprised and interested me the most was related to the kitchen as a place and space in which women felt empowered, safe, and connected. Because of the tension between feminism and women’s domestic identities, “feminist theory lacks discourse on the kitchen that supports cooking as empowering, socially valuable, or political influential” (Stovall, et al., 2015, p. 113). An over-focus on how women are excelling in (or excluded from) the public realm runs parallel to feminism’s historical focus on the dominant demographic of white, middle-class women, at the exclusion of narratives from the margins. When discourse ignores the kitchen as a critical site of identity formation and community-building, it ignores the ways in which women garner power within the home in ways they cannot outside of the home (Gillis & Hollows, 2009; hooks, 2014; Sukovic, et al., 2011). Further research should focus on the kitchen as a subversive and political space where women engage in connecting and transformative everyday action (Scicluna, 2017; C.J. Smith, 2019; Stovall, et al., 2015; Vachhani & Pullen, 2011). Finally, future research should aim for a deeper understanding of men’s experiences of domestic foodwork, and how participation in domestic tasks can disrupt dominant gendered ideologies. My research excluded first-hand accounts of men’s experiences of domesticity, and literature in the field focusing on men and domesticity is limited. Men’s domestic identities intersect with gender in different ways than women’s do, their sense of identity not as wrapped up in domestic work (Erickson, 2005; Sobal, 2005; Szabo, 2013). However, men may be shut out of domestic endeavours in ways that are currently unacknowledged or marginal to women’s experiences (Beagan, et al., 2014; McPhail et al., 2012). While there are a few studies that examine how men negotiate their identities through foodwork (Meah, 2014; Meah & Jackson, 107 2013; Rezeanu, 2015; Szabo, 2012), it would be valuable to explore what factors inspire and motivate men to exhibit caring traits in the home. 5.4.4 Final words When I started this project, I wanted to find out the deeper reason why I, and so many women I know, feel empowered by their domestic skills and connection to the home. Surely this was not unique to just the women I know. I was conscious throughout the project about leaning too far into honouring the feminine without critically analyzing how and why women’s work matters. There is a tension in feminism between celebrating women and women’s work, which risks essentializing ‘a female experience,’ and striving for meaning and value in domains that have been historically exclusionary to women. Situating my inquiry in the larger context of feminism, theories of knowledge, and ideologies of gender, revealed to me that women have been tasked with the important, critical and relevant work of holding things together. Structures of power favour profit economies, taking for granted women’s everyday work in homes, families, and communities. I believe this research is extremely timely. We are dealing with climate change, social justice movements, and the struggle to find community and meaning in a global system that values expansion and extraction. Addressing these issues will require a shift in critical consciousness, in our values, how we think about and interact with the world and how we engage with each other. Independence and the “autonomous, self-determining individual” (Johnson, 2000, p. 245) is no longer a viable collective goal. We are at a time when we need to find inspiration from holistic and collaborative systems, where “the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships, which could only be measured by their depth, [where] scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic” (brown, 2017, p. 10). 108 Through individual and collective research and practice, in relationships, classrooms, homes and communities, we can start shifting how and where we find value and meaning. 109 Bibliography Adams, M. L. (1989). There's no place like home: On the place of identity in feminist politics. Feminist Review, 31(1), 22-33. Adkins, K. C. (2002). 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Telephone: 604-822-2867, e-mail: kerry.renwick@ubc.ca Co-Investigators: Keenan Way, Graduate Student, Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, University of British Columbia. Telephone: 604-837-9782, e-mail: keenan.way@alumni.ubc.ca II. Purpose: Why are we conducting this study? Our research seeks to explore the presence of a ‘women’s knowledge’ around cooking & domesticity, while also examining the relationship between the sharing of women’s domestic knowledge in a kitchen and cooking context and the potential for increased sense of empowerment, connectedness and identity. III. Project Procedures: What happens if you give consent to participate in the study? If you agree to participate in this research study, you will participate in six weekly community kitchen cooking sessions that will be approximately three hours each, for a total of 18 hours. The kitchen sessions will be audio-visual recorded only for dialogue transcription by researchers. No video of any participant will be shared or viewed outside of the research team. You will also take part in a one-on-one audio-recorded interview that will allow a more in depth insight into women’s experiences of domesticity, and will take no more than 2 hours of your time. The interview data will then be transcribed verbatim and direct quotes will be used to support the research findings in the written report. You will also be asked to keep a weekly reflexive journal of the cooking sessions. This will assist the researchers to further understand how you have made meaning of the experience. Due to the current suspension of in-person research, both the community kitchen sessions and the one-on-one interviews may take place using Zoom, a video conferencing platform. By consenting to this study, you agree to both video and audio recording through Zoom, as the participant dialogue and connection is relevant data for the study. You may sign in with 122 H18-01271 Version 1 June 15, 2020 Page 2 of 3 a pseudonym to maintain anonymity, and can turn off your camera or mute your microphone at any time for privacy. Efforts will be made to ensure that no identifying features will be included in any photographs taken or used, however if any identifying features are present in photos, they will be blurred for anonymity. Please note that Zoom servers are located outside of Canada, and Zoom stores your name and information regarding your use of the site outside of Canada. IV. Study Results: The resultant data will be analyzed using the issues and themes generated from the kitchen sessions, the interviews and the reflexive journal. You will have the opportunity to proofread and approve the use of your contribution before it is used. The results from this study will be written up and submitted as graduate studies research. It will also be available for you to read upon request. V. Potential Risks of the Study: Is there any way participating in this study could harm you? There are minimal risks associated with participating in this study. The questions and ideas being explored in the study are not outside the normal realm of everyday conversations with family and friends. We encourage all participants to refrain from disclosing the contents of the discussion outside of the group; however, as this is a group study, we cannot control what other participants do with the information discussed. You will have an option to not to respond to a question within an interview; and you can engage in private communications with the primary investigator and/or co-investigator outside interview on your own reconnaissance. You are free to opt out of the study at any time. In this circumstance, the data you provide will not be included in the study results. VI. Potential Benefits of the Study: What are the benefits of participating in this study? By participating in this study, you will have the opportunity to make and share food with others while engaging in conversations about your experiences of domesticity, ways in which you are empowered through cooking and knowledge sharing, as well as a greater connection to and sense of community, increased social network, new friendships, and self-confidence. VII. Confidentiality: How will your identity be protected? Your confidentiality is of utmost importance during this study. Any data resulting from this study will be kept strictly confidential. All paper-based documents will be kept in a locked cabinet in the co-investigator's office. Any digital recording information will be kept in secure electronic files, and be both password protected and encrypted. Any report that is written about this study will, by making use of pseudonyms, preserve your anonymity. As a participant you can request a summary of the results of the study. If you want to receive a summary of the research please complete the attached form with your contact details. VIII. Contact: If you have any questions or want further information about this study, you may contact Keenan Way by phone at 604-837-9782 or by email at keenan.way@alumni.ubc.ca. 123 H18-01271 Version 1 June 15, 2020 Page 3 of 3 If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the Research Participant Complaint Line in the UBC Office of Research Ethics at 604-822-8598 or if long distance e-mail RSIL@ors.ubc.ca or call toll free 1-877-822-8598. IX. Consent: Please understand that your participation in this research study is entirely voluntary. You have the right to refuse to participate in the study. You may further withdraw from the study at any time without providing a reason and with no consequence. In this circumstance, the data you provide will not be included in the study results. If you wish to participate in this study, please complete and detach the consent slip on the next page. Thank you, Keenan Way Dr. Kerry Renwick DETACH CONSENT SLIP AND RETURN Please check the box indicating your decision: I CONSENT to participate in the above described study on women’s experiences of connecting through communal cooking. I acknowledge that I have received a copy of this consent form. Please keep a signed copy for your records, and email a signed copy to Keenan Way. By checking this box and typing my name below, I am electronically signing this consent form. Name (please print) Date: Address Signature Request to receive a summary of the results of the study Contact Name: Email Address: 124 Appendix B - Conversation prompts H18-01271 Version 1 June 2, 2020 Page 1 of 1 Participant Observation – Conversation Prompts Observation will occur while participants take part in six weekly community kitchen sessions, with researcher acting as participant observer. Relevant information will center on the conversation generated between participants while cooking in the kitchen. Conversation prompts will be utilized to guide conversation during communal cooking sessions, and are as follows: Week 1: Why did you want to participate in this study? What are you hoping to get out of participating in these cooking sessions? Are you interested in learning new cooking skills? Making new friends? Expanding your community? Week 2: Do you have experience cooking communally with other people? Can you tell us about it? How did you find the experience? What are your experiences and thoughts when cooking together in community? Have you experienced knowledge sharing in the kitchen? At what times? Week 3: How/where/from whom did you learn how to cook? How/where/from whom did you get most of your cooking experience? With whom do you share your most potent kitchen and cooking memories? Do you have any food traditions or practices that you maintain? Week 4: What does feeling connected mean to you? Have you experienced a sense of connectedness with food/cooking/the kitchen? Has your sense of connection to cooking or domesticity changed over time? How so? Week 5: Do you feel like cooking is a pleasure or a chore or something other? Does how you feel about cooking change with different circumstances? Can you provide examples? In your home, are there expectations about who will plan meals, buy groceries, and cook meals? What about in your childhood home? Week 6: Did you find participating in this study valuable? What did you enjoy the most? Is there anything you wish we could have done/learned? What was the most meaningful experience you had in this study? Is there anything else you would like to share? 125 Appendix C - Journal prompts H18-01271 Version 1 June 2, 2020 Page 1 of 2 Participant Documentation – Journal Guidelines & Prompts Participants will be asked to keep a journal to document their reflections of the study. Reflective journals can offer an important heuristic perspective, where participants can reflect on and make meaning of their own experiences in the study. Journal guidelines will be given that will include topic and format suggestions, as well as length and number of entries, and can include photos. Following the research study, participant journals will be collected for analysis. Journals & photos will be used with permission; faces will be blurred for anonymity. Journal guidelines are as follows: 1. Please take the time once weekly to write a short journal entry of your reflections and experiences in the community kitchen. 2. You may keep a hand-written, hard copy journal or a digital journal. Either version will be submitted to or shared with the researchers upon completion of the study, and will be returned once the journals have been reviewed for data. 3. Each journal entry should be no more than one page in length. 4. The journal is meant for you to develop a richer understanding of your own relationship to experiences of the kitchen, cooking and domestic knowledge and will be a keepsake of your experience in this study. 5. You are welcome and encouraged to also include photos that inspire you each week, and to be creative in any way that feels appropriate to you. Journal prompts: Week 1: Who taught you how to cook? What was the first dish that you cooked on your own? How was it? If you don’t remember the first dish you cooked, think about an early cooking experience and tell me about it. What is the most important thing you know about cooking? Week 2: Food is an important aspect of tradition and culture, used to celebrate holidays, rituals and family gatherings. What food traditions do you or your family have? Who and where did those traditions come from? Are they linked to your cultural or ethnic heritage? Do those traditions have any stories connected to them? What are those stories? Week 3: Memories of food are both powerful and comforting and can bring people together. Think back to your most memorable meal. Can you describe the setting, the people, the food, the feelings, the smells, etc.? 126 H18-01271 Version 1 June 2, 2020 Page 2 of 2 Week 4: What is your relationship to cooking? What would your ideal relationship look like? Can you think of a time when you felt inspired, excited, proud, engaged in a cooking project? What about a time when you felt disappointed, overwhelmed or bored with cooking? Week 5: In what ways do you share your food and cooking knowledge? Can you give examples? Were you able to share any knowledge with the group during the cooking sessions? If so, what did you share and how did that make you feel? Week 6: The kitchen is often considered women’s domain. How have you experienced that to be true? How have you experienced that to be untrue? Think about your own experiences, or the experiences of other people in your life. 127 Appendix D - Group interview questions H18-01271 Version 1 June 2, 2020 Page 2 of 3 Group Interview – Semi-Structured Interview Questions 1) How would you describe your relationship to cooking? How do you feel about your skills in the kitchen? What factors have influenced how you feel about your domestic skills? 2) Can you think of a time when you felt inspired, excited, proud, engaged in a cooking project? What about a time when you felt disappointed, overwhelmed or bored with cooking? 3) How/where/from whom did you learn how to cook? What is the most important thing you know about cooking? What was the first dish that you cooked on your own? How was it? If you don’t remember the first dish you cooked, think about an early cooking experience and tell me about it. 4) Memories of food are both powerful & comforting and can bring people together. Think back to your most memorable meal. Can you describe the setting, the people, the food, the feelings, the smells, etc.? With whom do you share your most potent kitchen and cooking memories? 5) Do you like cooking with others? If so, who do you most enjoy cooking with? What do you enjoy most about cooking with them? If not, what do you prefer about cooking on your own? In what ways do you share your food and cooking knowledge? Can you give examples? 6) Food is an important aspect of tradition and culture, to celebrate holidays, rituals and family gatherings. What food traditions do you or your family have? Who and where did those traditions come from? Are they linked to your cultural or ethnic heritage? Do those traditions have any stories connected to them? What are those stories? 7) What does feeling connected mean to you? Have you experienced a sense of connectedness with food/cooking/the kitchen? Has your sense of connection to cooking or domesticity changed over time? How so? 8) In your home, are there expectations about who will plan meals, buy groceries, and cook meals? Are you responsible for the majority of cooking in your household? If so, how do you feel about that responsibility? If not, who regularly does the cooking? How did you come to that arrangement? What about in your childhood home? 128 H18-01271 Version 1 June 2, 2020 Page 3 of 3 9) In what ways can it be inspiring to be in the kitchen and/or cooking? In what ways can it feel like a burden to be in the kitchen and/or cooking? Do you feel like cooking is a pleasure or a chore or something other? Does how you feel about cooking change with different circumstances? Can you provide examples? 10) Do you consider your kitchen knowledge as specialized or unique to you, as a woman? Or knowledge that anyone could have? The kitchen is often considered women’s domain. How have you experienced that to be true? How have you experienced that to be untrue? Think about your own experiences, or the experiences of other people in your life. 11) Do you identify as a feminist? If so, what led you to that? If not, what does not feel right about the ‘feminist’ label? 12) Is there anything else you would like to share?
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Home Economics Education
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Renwick, Kerry
Women's experiences of knowledge sharing, empowerment, and connection through domestic cooking
Text