The Kitchen as a Place of, and for, Memory and Narration

Abstract

The kitchen stories told by older lesbians evoked poignant aspects of their lives that cut across various social spheres. Perhaps it is because the kitchen holds a specific role, one which, as Dubisch (1986) states, says something about society in general. As I discussed in Chap. 5, the role of the kitchen is different and distinct from that of the bedroom, the bathroom and the living room. It is that place which is closest to the body in terms of nurturance, social relations, pedagogy, care and processes of feeding which occur across the life course. Such processes are often associated with the mother, and her image of the archetypal feeder. However, this was not always the case for some key participants. The mother—as present or absent—did emerge as a prominent theme within these kitchen stories. Hence, these associations and representations triggered various earlier memories from childhood, and especially mother-centred kitchen stories. The theme of the ‘mother-daughter relationship’ emerged as another common denominator in the stories told by these older lesbians and was also perceived as sensitive to the extent that some key participants kept their ambivalent mother–daughter relationship hidden, until I visited again in a more informal manner. Attached to the mother-memory-storytelling, there were also official discourses of gender, motherhood, religion, class and androcentrism. This chapter will focus on the kitchen as a place of, and for, memory and narration. In this chapter, there is further ground for enhancing my argument of the kitchen as a tool for analysis of self and culture (Chap. 5). I seek to do so by looking at the stories narrated by older lesbians and how aspects of self, gender, politics, history, class, kin relations, hegemonic institutions and ethnicity were entangled within the storyline.