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

Abstract

This paper considers the kitchen and the phenomenological values that emerge from it. In this text the kitchen is seen as a space of possibility within the context of the Capitalocene, from which new values and imaginations for a more sustainable future may emerge. Drawing upon ecofeminist critiques and feminist food studies, and building upon the phenomenologies of space of Gaston Bachelard and Yi-Fu Tuan, this exploration surveys how intimacy, memory, care, and relation emerge from kitchen endeavours and what these notions mean for a Capitalocenic world. These theoretics are intertwined with ethnographic materials on foodscapes and foodways gathered in Xochimilco, Mexico City. From this, radical conceptualisations of the kitchen emerge and everyday phenomenologies spread into new spaces, while bringing together these subjects with environmental issues. I propose the notion of the antiromantic as an approach emerging from the kitchen's history as a gendered and contested space, and as a way to approach the kitchen and its labours in the midst of our current ecological crises; in this way the kitchen can be understood and inhabited as a political space of possibility for sustainable transformations.