Literalizing the Private: Indian-American Women Food Bloggers, Knowledges of "Home”, Domestic Labor and Culinary Creativity

• In Event: Transnational Public Pedagogies of Immigration: Race, Gender, Coloniality, and Media

Abstract

In her book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, journalist Emily Matcher brings an interesting phenomenon to public view. Based on her close-readings of many lifestyle blogs, interviews with women (and men), and observations of D-I-Y subcultures, Matcher identifies the cult of “New Domesticity” as a “new social movement” which thrives upon a renewed emphasis on one's home. The New Domesticity movement embraces a lifestyle that attempts to celebrate the domestic through a renewed interest and involvement in the domestic crafts, home-cooked meals, organic food and gardening. Observing that at the heart of this emphasis on domesticity is discontent with the ever-expanding working day of the corporate America, Mahter identifies within New Domesticity a strain of anti-capitalist critique, which nonetheless thrives upon the celebration of the private, the domestic, and ultimately, the individual, rather than the systemic and class politics-based critiques of the socialist thoughts of an earlier era.

My paper examines this renewed emphasis on the “home” and the “domestic” in the contemporary Indian-American culinary blogosphere, especially those targeted towards and produced by professional first generation immigrant women. Reading such food-oriented cultural productions as sites where ideologies of New Domesticity are performed, often through a deliberate aestheticization of “home-cooked food” and the “kitchen”, I argue that such texts do the work of what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker term as “gendering” of the recession, by providing contradictory representations of both the domestic space and the gendered labor that occurs within such spaces.

On one hand, the repeated documentation of meals cooked in the home-kitchens invoke for the women involved a sense of refuge from both the threatening racializations of the “outside” and a hostile workplace. A lush home-cooked meal, often based on “traditional” recipes handed down by older women in the family, becomes the site through which the Indian-American protagonist performs the mythic work-life balance, often succeeding to find creativity and identity in cooking that is not afforded to her at the workplace. In an offhanded kind of a way, then, this insistent representation of the regenerative and sustaining power of the “creative” labor that happens inside the home also becomes a commentary on the anxieties of home-ownership during a time of foreclosures. On the other hand, the emphasis on the lushness of the Indian food enables the performance of a post-feminist racialized culinary spectacle that enables the containment of social discontent through the socially and culturally acceptable figurations of cooking women, India and food itself.

My paper argues that such emphasis on the domestic, while allowing for a rhetorical space to articulate anti-neoliberal critique, sits comfortably with neoliberal thought. Born out interactions with an emerging transnational culinary public sphere which often fetishizes idea of “ethnic” and “home-cooked” food practices, these blogs often construct a deradicalized notion of a feminist identity, thus neutralizing the word itself. Such representations, through literalization of the concept of “private,” enable us to think of a more complicated relationship between a neoliberal economy and the cultural productions it endangers.

Author

• Nandini Dhar, O.P. Jindal Global University, India