Friday, March 14, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
The question of the value of domestic labor has been central to feminist projects since 1844 when Engels wrote Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. It was also a decisive issue in the 1960s when feminists encouraged women to leave the home, consequently conceiving of it as a site of oppression and patriarchal oppression. Yet recent work by third-wave and third-world feminists has started to call into questions some of the basic assumptions about freedom and agency that early feminist approaches adopted from Western social theory that devalued domestic labor. This paper aims to contribute to that body of research by focusing on the social, material, and environmental contexts that surround the production of food in order to understand how a cooked meal can be a mediator of social relations and how the value of domestic labor is recognized under different political economic systems. Based on fieldwork conducted in rural Armenia, I argue that if we adopt a perspective of cooking as a practice that involves technical skills, highly valued within the context in which they are produced, we are able to move past the assumption that the domestic space is a necessarily confining one. Consequently, the domestic realm becomes a space where women are able to define value and exert their own agency through skillful actions, allowing them to find meaningful fulfillment in the work they do for their families and others.
