“A woman’s place is in the kitchen.”
Most of us born in female-designated bodies, in a country like India, have grown up hearing this dictum. When did a basic life skill like cooking your own food become a gendered role? Any discussion on this subject will boil down to this one thing among others – space is both gendered and political.
As long as we are talking about unpaid domestic labour, we expect a woman to be toiling day and night in the kitchen, preparing food for the other members in the family, and, more often than not, eating after everyone else is done. When we move into the broader horizon of the production of food in professional (paid) settings, the dominant image is that of male chefs, being praised for their skills and talents at conjuring culinary magic out of raw materials in the kitchen.
Among such binary images that dictate the workings of society, the presence of a queer AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) person in the kitchen – especially, in a professional one – of their own volition, marks a shift in the dominant narrative of gender roles and causes a rupture in the polarised, gendered fabric of labour.
In a professional space like the kitchen area at Porshi, a training centre with canteen facilities which is an initiative by Sappho for Equality, the presence of AFAB individuals, preparing food amidst joy and laughter, and earning their livelihood through this act of production that has always been considered a domain of unpaid labour for them, changes the heteronormative narrative around food. They are not only reclaiming their space in the kitchen by translating the patriarchal norms into a means of livelihood for themselves while simultaneously asserting their queer identities, but are also helping to foster a safe space for all individuals, queer and straight alike, who can go there and have food according to their liking, at affordable prices and beyond the gaze of the heteropatriarchal society that dictates who should eat what and how much. Food then becomes not only a way to vocationalise their skills and interests, but also to create a sense of kinship and community among people, especially those belonging to marginalised sections of society.
The sight of gender non-conforming or masculine-presenting AFAB individuals in a kitchen, like that in Porshi, itself causes a jarring effect to the heteropatriarchal gaze. What shifts the narrative towards fluidity and equity even more is the absence of the politics of care that society normalises and perpetrates in heteronormative spaces. In a heteropatriarchal set-up, a woman is often expected to neglect her own dietary requirements. “Men need more protein”, which basically is a euphemism for the patriarchal dictum of men needing to increase their sexual potency, is an oft-repeated excuse to prevent women from having their fair share of meat or any other kind of protein that, in any case, she has been the one who has cooked. While this is a way to link her value in society to the amount of food that she can consume without incurring a ‘loss’ for the family, it is also a way to regulate her libido. Her sexual desires need to be controlled because the only role assigned to her in the arena of sexuality is that of passivity, while her active participation is essentialised in her role as the caregiver of others, predominantly, men and children, and, sometimes older people. In this way, the politics of care is naturalised and perpetuated. This politics of care is subverted in a space like Porshi where queer AFAB individuals, besides earning their livelihood through cooking, also have the right to survey their own consumption of food without adhering to the preconceived notions of society dictating their appetites. Each person is viewed as an adult having the right to consume food as their body desires. Food, thus, becomes a form of community care in this scenario. Regardless of one’s class, caste, gender, sexuality, or any other label of classification, one is treated with equality when they are served the food they desire. At Porshi, people put away their used utensils themselves after eating and this adds to the decentralisation of the politics of care.
In a similar fashion, the presence of AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth) individuals in a domestic kitchen area also subverts prescribed gender roles. A friend of mine, who is a gender non-conforming AMAB person, loves to cook food for themselves and their loved ones. Nourishing the body is an act of love and resistance for them. Such an act of production of food based purely on the philosophy of service and love, without any financial gain, by queer (and/or straight) AMAB individuals topples the normative expectancy regarding production and consumption of food and generates a narrative of resistance. Such AMAB individuals are often made fun of because the feminine essentialist idea around food is ingrained in the minds of people. This is also the reason why even in queer relationships, such as one between two AFAB individuals, a masculine-presenting person cooking for their feminine-presenting partner is still looked at with raised eyebrows because it topples the narrative of the politics of care that stems from heterosexual relationships but is also prevalent in several queer spaces.
Queer people are frequently discriminated against in matters of food even in their own family spaces. Not giving access to food is one of the several ways of punishment by family members who try to ‘bring back’ such individuals on the path of heteronormativity. Amidst such prevalent discriminatory practices that aim at stripping an individual of their basic rights, the agency of a queer person to prepare food for oneself and for others in the community is an act of reclamation and resistance in itself.
Kitchen areas also hold the potential for the transgression of the codes of conduct imposed on AFAB individuals. In Fire (1996), directed by Deepa Mehta, the kitchen becomes the space where Radha and Sita can be together, away from the gaze of others. As they enact their ‘duties’ in the kitchen by preparing food for the other members of the family, a kind of homosocial space is created that simultaneously holds the potential for subversion by the two women whose conduct is otherwise under supervision and probable inspection in other parts of the house. Hence, a space of repression like the kitchen becomes the space that holds the liberating potential for creating a way for them to navigate their sexual desires that are otherwise suppressed by the family and society to maintain the image of women as submissive and compliant beings in matters of their own compulsory heterosexuality.
Thus, the presence of queer bodies in the kitchen in such scenarios disrupts what we expect to see in a domestic or a professional kitchen area. Prosumption (as in production and consumption) of food becomes a political act, and the nourishment of the body becomes an act of self-love as well as community love, both of which are resistances in their own might. By shattering heteronormative ideals, queer bodies cook up various other alternative ways of resisting through food.
Cover Image: Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
