Doing Cooking (1980)Luce Giard

Everyday Life Reader, Ben Highmore

ID 501 – Kıvılcım Çınar

Keywords

Memorizing gestures, cooking, repetitive, monotonous,

programming mind, women’s work.

Memorizing certain gestures and tastes,

Women’s place in terms of cooking

French cuisine

Culinary production

Cooking as women’s work

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce

(http://www.videosurf.com/video/jeanne-dielman-23-quai-du-commerce-1080-

bruxelles-1976-8867026?t=12)

She emphasises « the art of cooking »

She considers that domestic routines are evidence of gender

inequalities.

Memorizing certain gestures,

Keeping track of certain tastes, smells, colors and sounds.

A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange

anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive

experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was

heiress and guardian without wanting to be.

Provided with a woman’s knowledge and invested with the

secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.

Women

doomed to both housework and the creation of life.

excluded from public life and the communication of

knowledge, (to be trapped)

educated at the time of grandmother’s generation.

Women

doomed to both housework and the creation of life.

excluded from public life and the communication of

knowledge, (to be trapped)

educated at the time of grandmother’s generation.

Reconstruction of culinary( gestures, tastes and combinations)

Culinary practices situate themselves at the most rudimentary level, at the most necessary and the most unrespected level.

French cuisine is enhanced... The importance of diet in raising children

The care for the family is emphasized in the media

The housewife as primary buyer and supplier for the household

Cooking is judged

to be repetitive and monotonous

To be devoid of intelligence and imagination

However, culinary production

Requires a multiple memory

a memory of apprenticeship, of witnessed gestures and of consistencies

Calls for a programming mind

Calculate both preparation and cooking time

Sensory perception intervenes

Making new dish from leftovers

.

To sum, cooking as a women’s work is described; a work without schedule or salary

a work loops in dreary reality

a work without added value or productivity

a work whose success is always experienced for a limited

duration.

Women’s work is slow and interminable.