| Cooking Up Trouble engages in a reconsideration of practices historically contested within feminist scholarship, namely an assessment of the possibilities for women's agency in relation to kitchen production. Using a feminist, cultural studies approach, influenced by the theoretical and conceptual frame of kitsch, I consider how the contents of the popularly represented kitchen are appropriated by dominant culture to reify normative codes of belonging. I argue that the kitchen is a space that consistently produces kitsch, a brand of material production and behavioral expectation that functions through repetition and circulation and fosters sentiment, nostalgia, and the promise of cultural comfort. The dominant narrative that takes shape in this kitsch---the foods, objects, texts, and behaviors of kitchen spaces cultivated during the mid-19th-century, idealized in the 1950s, and revisited in the present---is largely a national narrative of white womanhood predicated on exclusion and maintained through consistent material reproduction of a white middle-class value system.;The crux of my work is situated in my reading of how kitschified narratives of white womanhood are contested in counter-narratives produced by marginalized writers who subvert kitsch production, cooking up trouble in order to call into question the domestic power structures that maintain white cultural supremacy. I investigate ornery Frado's repudiation of the domestic manual tradition in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Onoto Watanna's invocation of chop suey in her Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914). I read Alice B. Toklas's conversations about food and/as art in her 1954 Cook Book as a response to the divergent attitudes of French-U.S. domestic and gender politics, attitudes which condition the appearance of narratives of domestic discontent found in the work of Shirley Jackson. Lastly, I examine how Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2004) offer an exploration of contemporary concerns over consumption in relation to whole foods movements that take shape in the mid-1970s. These writers' responses to popular kitchen representations illustrate the reclamation of kitchen kitsch---in object, action, and writing---as a means to critique dominant conceptions of race, gender, and difference. |
