Materializing Memory, Mood, and Agency: The Emotional Geographies of the Modern Kitchen

Abstract

Drawing upon narrative and visual ethnographic data collected from households in the UK, this article explores the material and emotional geographies of the domestic kitchen. Acknowledging that emotions are dynamically related and co-constitutive of place, rather than presenting the kitchen as a simple backdrop against which domestic life is played out, the article illustrates how decisions regarding the design and layout of the kitchen and the consumption of material artefacts are central to the negotiation and doing of relationships and accomplishment of domestic life. Based on fieldwork in northern England, the article examines the affective potential of domestic space and its material culture, exploring how individuals are embodied in the fabric and layout of domestic space, and how memories may be materialized in their absence.

Kitchen phenomenologies: Antiromantic poetics of space and food in the Anthropocene

“…Because it links with ecofeminist critiques that see in women's ignored labours of care knowledges and perspectives that can be useful in our context of crisis (Barca, 2020;Salleh, 1995). Because it is a room somewhat ignored by phenomenologists, although feminist scholars have started to pursue this avenue (Duruz, 2004;Meah, 2016b). And because the Capitalocene is intimately related to food, both in that current crises bring forth questions regarding the sustainability and resilience of food systems (Garnett, 2016), and in that the history of this epoch is closely related to the history of industrial agriculture and the making of the modern diet where food becomes a commodity (Moore, 2015;Shiva, 2009).…”

“…He speaks of houses and wardrobes, but intimacy is also found in the kitchen, partly because of its place inside the house. The kitchen is one of the most intimate places there are; a place of fire for warmth and food at the centre of home; as Meah points out, ‘kitchens have symbolic significance as the heart of the home’ (Meah, 2016b). This speaks of the values of intimacy held by kitchens, fire, and food.…”

“…In this way there is a ‘polytemporality…on the tongue of the eater’ (Ibid., p. 473). In this polytemporality ‘past(s) and present…converge in the form of absent presences’ (Meah, 2016b, p. 58); Xochimilca kitchens show this includes not only human presences, but also nonhumans who inhabited the kitchen and its landscapes, be they bodies of water or of watery creatures from which we once fed. These mnemonic values make of the kitchen a space of possibility where alternatives to the Capitalocene can be imagined and cultivated.…”

Fathers, food practices and the circuits of intimacy in families in Northern England

“…Rather I offer an extended understanding of how men's involvement in foodwork can be mapped onto and has meaning within the circuits of intimacy around which contemporary family life is organised, and which are specifically constitutive of contemporary fathering. Previously I have focused on the situatedness of the kitchen in the emotional topography of home (Meah 2016); here, I explore the contribution of practices, specifically food practices, in facilitating intimate family relationships, indeed in bringing men into relation with their children. While the spatial and temporal dimensions of men's caring through food is foregrounded primarily through the experiences of non-resident fathers, that fathers' foodwork can have ongoing resonance within these circuits of intimacy is illustrated via the accounts of bereaved adult offspring reflecting on their fathers' contributions to feeding the family.…”

Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen

“…While some items might, for example, enable their users to achieve ‘better’ or faster results in terms of cooking and cleaning ( cf . Meah and Jackson ; Meah under review), evidence from Hand and colleagues' () study of kitchens (and bathrooms) indicates that material items are also implicated in the performance – or doing – of ‘family’, which is particularly significant within the current conceptualisation of kitchen as a space for living, an idea embraced in a kitchen manufacturer's advertisement published in Good Housekeeping in 2002, where the kitchen is described as ‘ somewhere you want to spend time, where you feel comfortable, where you can simply live your life ’ (Hand et al . , 675).…”