Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In the storytelling during collaborative workshops about the social life of kitchens, “Nature” provides just a background. Other main characters lead the plot: disputed gender roles, strong emotions, senses of belonging, the dutie to feed, and the moral economies and poetics of modern home.

Paper long abstract

I focus on stories shared by participants during collaborative workshops and personal interviews within the project In Kitchens: Relationships, Moral Economies, Materiality, and Poetics of Intimacy in the Domestic Kitchen (UNED, 2023-26). The project entailed fieldwork in Madrid, Marseille, Halifax, Montevideo, and Mexico City. The participants, mostly women, exchanged lively on their experiences regarding the practice of everyday cooking, the meals, the sharing of housekeeping, and related topics like food shopping, appliances, refurbishing, children grooming, and family celebrations.

The stories presented here include (a) the Canadian traveler who -after years of wandering away- felt the urge to write down the recipes of her old mother, anticipating she could die soon; (b) the newmarried Montevidean woman who felt trapped by the cooking complicities that gradually emerged between her husband and the grandma that had raised her; (c) the savvy tricks of an Andalusian housewife, struggling to reeducate her husband and daughters in the kitchen chores; (d) the Canadian man who found ways for self-learning in the responsibilities of the family kitchen, becoming a foody; (e) a very “old and ugly green cooking glove” that everyone used -and loved- in a roomies’ apartment at Montevideo -and why.

I will question in what ways “Nature” appears in these kitchen plots. Not visible at its center, it does nevertheless provides a background for the agency of other protagonist actants: disputed gender roles, strong emotions, senses of belonging, the duties to feed and to be fed, and the moral economies and poetics of modern home.