Feeling the kitchen: Exploring the visceral kitchen space through art-based research practice.

• In Event: Gender and Place

Abstract

In this paper I offer a theoretical and methodological discussion of the kitchen as an emergent space. Reviewing works on kitchens or kitchen labor, I show that understandings of the kitchen have moved from the kitchen as a designated place in the home to broader ideas of the kitchen space. Current research sets the scene to understand the kitchen space as emergent rather than given. By exploring unlikely kitchens such as spiritual kitchens, temporary kitchens or outdoor kitchens, scholars have challenged the seemingly static relationships between gender, the kitchen and domesticity. They have demonstrated the kitchen as a changing, porous and embedded space. I argue that this development was fostered by an embrace of feminist methodologies and experimentations. Continuing this feminist exploration of the kitchen, I offer art-based research practice as a way to further our exploration of the kitchen as emergent. This paper is a theoretical and methodological review of literature enriched by consideration of my own art-based research practices conducted during my fieldwork on the food practices of women from francophone West Africa living in New York City.

Author

• Gaëlle Aminata Colin, Stony Brook University