In the reading "Doing Cooking" I found a lot of interesting points. First off, it highlights the fact that cooking has been made to be a women's job in today's society. It is described as work with schedule, a work loops in dreary reality, a work without added value and productivity, and a work with a limited duration of satisfaction. I found these critiques pretty harsh. I do believe there is all of these qualities to be found in cooking. Or at least, you could find this harsh reality it any bodies duties; even mens.
   This reading talks about all of the creative qualities it takes to cook. Creativity comes from preparing food from leftovers and calculating cook and preparation time. It is almost as if this reading was giving women credit for being creative and being good problem solvers, but was then shooting them down by saying it is just cooking. It is also interesting how cooking is all of the better of the women's family or anyone eating her food for that matter. It is to maintain a child's good diet and too maintain a good household. The importance of such a role often goes unlooked.

Giard and Friedan

After reading "Doing Cooking" I immediately thought about all the times my mom has said "Let's go out to eat tonight, I don't want to cook". Cooking is made out to be more of a woman's job than a leisure activity. But what I thought was interesting was the whole chef concept. Chef are usually thought of as men, not women, even though cooking is looked at as a woman's role. It supports the stereotypes that women can't be as good in the professional or business world as men. It makes the statement that women should stick to household activities, like taking care of the children or cooking her family dinner. As for Friedan's article, it has the theme that women do things to please men, especially in relationships. The women are the submissive figures and the men are the dominant figures. Women are looked at as not being able to do things for themselves or on their own because they're too incapable.

Giard and Friedan

I found both of these articles to be rather fascinating as I am a women and do not feel that these stereotypes should even be relevant in todays world. However, if I were to take a step back and look at it from another perspective I can definitely see how these article could apply to a women’s everyday life. But in contrast I do not think that anybody’s identity should define them or what their life is like. For example, just because someone is a certain race, religion, or gender they should not be expected to live a different life.  

                  I like how Giard’s article “Doing Cooking” points out how many people view the act of cooking to be mundane yet it is just expected of women. Something that I found very fascinating however, is how Chef’s are typically identified as men. To me this emphasizes the gender inequality as if women can not be good enough cooks to be chefs, but a man who enjoys cooking is much superior to a women cook making him a chef.

                  I found Friedan’s article “The Problem that has No Name” to have an interesting taste. Reading through this article it was clear that this article was written in the 1960’s. My main reaction after reading this article was that women during this time seemed to live just to please men. This makes since with the stereotypes of this time period, however this article almost makes it seem that the women enjoyed living to please men, meanwhile forgetting about themselves.

Betty Friedan's Passage is Kind of Depressing

I'm going to analyze "Doing Cooking" because the other one made me sad. So, I noticed that the writer talks about cooking the way we as a class talk about the everyday. She talks about "nuances" and how it's really the culmination of all these little things that make cooking so special. Also she brings up that "the sophisticated ritualization of basic gestures has thus become more dear to me than the persistence of words and texts". I think she's saying that words aren't enough; they don't do the concept of cooking justice. On the first day of class we tried to describe "the everyday" and failed. There just isn't a combination of words that adequately describes it. Also, we decided it was the little things that made everyday life so special. The message of this passage is clearly that life is nothing without cooking. I fully support this idea.  

Friedan and Giard

Both of these readings entail the same idea: women work hard, and for who? Definitely not themselves.

In Giard's essay, she mentions how when you have friends over, you need to quickly prepare something for your guests. It's all an important matter of memory. When the husband describes his wife's process of making soup which seems like what would be a minute task turned into a two day process, we see the severity of how much a woman actually does. Although Giard is in love with cooking, she describes it almost as an act that women repeat every day. Is Giard making it seem as though these social expectations for women are engrained in us?

As for Friedan's essay, it is much more blatant than Giard's. Women are constantly seeking femininity, only because society puts it on women. And for what? They're making other people happy again. If there is something wrong in the marriage, they blame themselves. If there is something wrong with how they are feeling, they blame themselves. Women are oftentimes put on a pedestal by men as fragile, insignificant begins that cannot fend for themselves because they are delicate and inferior. I think the saddest quote of this essay was "Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn't laugh because she doesn't hear it."

What Measure is a Non-Woman?

Both of the readings deal with the specific problem of a woman's everyday life, something which can generally be accepted as different from a man's but doesn't seem to have been specifically addressed in our earlier readings.

Much of how Giard describes cooking makes it seem like one of de Certeau's tactics; she would come up with her own unique individual methods of meal preparation within the strategic framework of tradition, of the media and of inherited memories and sensory pleasures. I found her use of the phrase "a very ordinary intelligence" particularly compelling, because it evokes the idea of the common and everyday as well as the special talents, memories and actions of the individual, syncretizing both without ignoring either. She then brings up the point of the self-immersion that comes with cooking, in contrast to the alienation of everyday work (which, in this case, does not seem to mean housewifely duties).

The fact that Giard appears to relish in the idea of cooking stands, to me, in stark contrast to Friedan's nameless problem of femininity. Where Giard takes pleasure in the act, Friedan describes it as one of many actions which women were finding themselves distanced from; they did not object to the act of cooking itself, but the apparently unquestioned performing of it made them feel unfulfilled.

I noticed the use of the phrase "female anomie" in the introduction to Friedan's text - anomie referring to a lack of ethical or social standards. This seems to imply that in the mere reproduction of expectations of femininity, women of the '50s and '60s had turned those expectations into an unspoken code of ethics. Women who felt dissatisfaction with those standards would thus perceive themselves as being dissatisfied with the ethical framework of society, leading to cognitive dissonance and desperation, then a search for some kind of resolution. But there could be no resolution, because to do so would be to accept an alternative code of ethics at odds with the standards of the time. I don't know much about the history of the feminist movement, but I feel like we haven't completely developed past those standards of femininity, only added some alternative archetypes like the successful businesswoman and female scholar.

essays on doing cooking and feminity

The essays, "doing cooking" and "problem has no name" both talked about women's role in society, but in quite different ways.

For "doing cooking", author talked about specifically how women are excluded from society by describing one of their everyday task:cooking. At the time of writing, most women were"excluded from public life and the communication of knowledge"(321), they are separated from outside society and these women's work are totally within their houses. As a result, women's focuses and what they concern are really narrow and trivial, such as "will the cake be moist enough?" or "add some water while cooking tomatoes" or "add a drop of vinegar to grilled pork ribs"(322), that's all their worries, knowledge and views. For them cooking is the medium of everyday practice "that is repeated in time and space". Giard herself loves cooking but that's only she has extra time and really enjoys cooking food, meanwhile most of the women are cooking only because it's their jobs, and always has a "limited duration of success"(323)

For "problem that has no name", Friedan talked about how women are excluded and discriminated from social works. At the beginning of the essay, there are a lot of statistics showing how women's marry age became younger and how the rate of entering college is decreased year by year. Moreover, in a way that numbers and statistics cannot tell, trend of women's dream had become a housewife, and they are satisfied given only a nice house in the suburb, get married and have children. Gladly, women are becoming aware of the problem of themselves, they realized they can do something else besides their husbands and kids though they cannot tell what exactly the problem is.

"Mad Men" vs. Angry Women

When I began reading Friedan's "The Problem That Has No Name," I immediately thought of the TV show, Mad Men. The show depicts a suburban New York housewife who, throughout the episodes, begins to question her life, her happiness, as well as her relationship with her husband, Don Draper. "She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: 'Is this all?'" (Friedan 59). For Friedan, the everydayness of women's lives evidences an emptiness of value. In the show, every woman is literally trapped at her own house, cleaning, cooking, self-pampering, and more or less "taking care of" her children. However, even once among friends, the women would put on an act as if everything was fine, especially reiterating that her and her husband's relationship was perfectly alright. I wonder how many women felt a tremendous relief and self-understanding after reading Betty Friedan's book. That would have been pretty cool.

At first, Giard kind of bothered me for some reason because she was encouraging the stereotype that "kitchens were once again the centre of women's lives," as Betty Friedan would say (60). Consequently, she shattered the idea that women's work, even something considered as basic as cooking, was meaningless.

Giard's reading also highlights some relevant points from previous readings we have done, including the concept of an inescapable everyday dullness. "When the job one has or seeks in vain is often no longer what provides social identity, when for so many people nothing remains at the end of the day except for the bitter wear and tear of so many dull hours, the preparation of a meal furnishes that rare joy...of fashioning a fragment of reality" (Giard 323). Everyone has their vices...Making a soufflé is more productive than most.

"Doing Cooking" and "The Problem That Has No Name"

In the Giard reading "Doing Cooking," I found it interesting how the act of cooking becomes personified and embodied by the kitchen itself, as if the literal act of doing cooking had done something wrong or wronged Giard on a personal level, even though she herself was the one performing the act?  She goes so far as to refer to cooking as her "enemy" even though it is essentially just an extension of the self, a way she can come to express her ideas and thoughts.
I also found interesting her use of this phrase silent legend, as I feel it quite accurately describes many tasks women are expected to do.  They are expected to perform these tasks - cooking, cleaning, laundry, caretaking, etc. - and are not acknowledge or praised for them, because they have the connotation of being every day, ordinary tasks.  Almost as if the men were to say "we could do them, we just don't want to" or "we just don't have the time."  Unless, of course, these tasks are "carried out with a certain degree of excellence" she says, which ultimately would make them male business anyway.
We see this idea in the Friedan article as well right in the beginning, when the "suburban wife" is unsatisfied in her womanly duties.  She lists all that she had done that day, and still feels wholly unaccomplished, because her work goes unnoticed and unacknowledged by others, making herself feel as though she then doesn't deserve recognition and isn't worth anything either, since these tasks are all she does all day long.
Also in the Friedan article I found interesting the statement about the girl who refused a science fellowship at John Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office.  She does this because science was deemed 'unfeminine,' but it's interesting that it's not having a job in general that makes her refuse the proposal, but having this particular job.  So these women aren't even concerned about the fact that they're taking time away from housework, the kids, or taking the 'breadwinner' title away from the man, but rather the idea that certain jobs might label them unfeminine?

Feminine Un/fulfillment

Both the Friedan and Giard readings were kind of shocking to me. Like having heard of but never read The Feminine Mystique, I know that women are and were systemically disadvantaged. But I had no idea how simultaneously obvious and implicit their repression was in the middle of the century. The statistics that Friedan lists were disturbing to me in their extent alone - even to learn that women were less apparently repressed (in some ways) before WW2. I think Friedan's work is moreover an extremely clear example of the fact that our perception of the opportunities available to us and those which we should pursue - for whatever reason, be it personal happiness, social conformity, or that the two are equal - is very deeply ("implicitly") constructed by our culture.  So much so that when these perceptions are fundamentally problematic (i.e. when social conformity is not what is best suited to our personal happiness), deep psychological dysphoria develops without any diagnostic, let alone curative, recourse (because none exists in the culture). Even if I had always thought that many women in that time period (or any, really) maintained a kind of cognitive dissonance between their repression and its rationale (e.g. "what kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor?" (Friedan 61)), I had never really appreciated the extent to which - due to the pervasion and exclusivity of these rationales - women didn't perceive their own repression as repression in the first place.

I think that Giard was as equally remarkable in writing about cooking because, in the same way, I had never really appreciated it for what it is. When she explains that "entering into the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things make[s] one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived without exhibiting itself, in short, a very ordinary intelligence" (Giard 322), I think she appeals to the idea that every practice involves its own unique kind of intelligence and skill, different from but no less than the intelligence indicative of academia - which tends to be the only kind of intelligence that gets any legitimation. This is something I've learned more and more as I've seen the many kinds of and unique strengths that people have and nonetheless get little credit for. Thus, in a way, Giard can be read as a response to Friedan: femininity is repression, but what constitutes femininity (like the ordinary) is far from worthless or unskilled. 

The art of cooking

The thing that I most took away from the piece that Giard wrote was the way that she described the act of cooking. She took an activity that many see as mundane and just another every day ritual, and used elegant phrases to describe it as the skillful act that it can be. Phrases like "...the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things make one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and and stokes of genius..."(322) and "These are multifaceted activities that people consider very simple or even a little stupid, except in the rare cases where they are carried out with a certain degree of excellence, with extreme refinement."(322).

She sets up the act of cooking to be a simple activity that is expected of women, and can be relatively simple to complete. Then she shows the other side of cooking as this wonderful art and creative act where people are creating wonderful things from ordinary objects, showing that the perception of every day activities is not always true. 

Cooking and femininity readings

Both of these readings really focused on gender roles for women in an interesting way. The fact that the author of the first essay felt ass though she was playing into gender stereotypes because she liked to cook was fascinating. It seemed as though she was allowing societal norms to beat out her individuality if she admitted to herself that she liked to cook. It seemed crazy that she was so concerning about not fitting this gender role while reinforcing that it exists. In my opinion, if she does not want to conform gender roles, she should just not acknowledge them.

The second essay was more of a historical look back than an ideological critique, but no less interesting. This generation of women who didn't want to defy stereotypes but give their entire mind and body to play into them. It is a interesting case study into a group of people that care so much about trying to fit into society that they lose themselves and their individuality in the process. Even though I feel that this probably wasn't the case for all women or housewives in the 1960s, it is still interesting to see.

The Devalue of Cooking

Luce Giard’s “Doing Cooking” [1980]

I like Giard’s sarcastic and overt approach used to be critical of society in terms of gender inequalities, especially when she describes the “paperback cookbook devoid of both illustrations and ‘feminine’ flourishes” that in her mind “endowed the book with eminent practical value and sure efficiency” (320).  As if there is NO WAY that anything associated with femininity could ever be considered practical or efficient; the two just don’t mix.

I also thought it was interesting how much stress she placed on memory in the cooking environment. From the time we are children, we involuntarily inherit learned skills and tactics from watching and listening to our mothers cook that are rooted in our memory until there comes a time when we need to recall that information in order to fend for ourselves. This skill is something that used to hold great societal appreciation and family value, although today it is considered nothing more than women’s “work without added value” (Giard 323).

Tuesday's Class: Taking a Walk

I really enjoyed the class activity where we got to orient ourselves with parts of the campus that we would not generally think of as a "space" that serves as different purposes for different people. For example, there are about 100,000 people that travel through campus every day - each and every single one of those people are going from point A to point B, in a way that they are used to, in a new way; or maybe they have never even been on the campus before.

To me, observing how people interacted with their spaces was very interesting. We are all dependent on each other with the way that we walk on campus: the slower somebody is, the slower we are. There are designated spaces that each person is permitted to be allotted to, such as walking on the sidewalk and biking on the street. If we were to impede on the allowances, we might be reprimanded or in trouble.

Space is ultimately how we interact with our surrounding environment, and how it interacts with us.

Adorno: Culture Industry Reconsidered

With a thing, comes its sides. Unless  it's a circle, but for the sake of imagination pretend the thing is not a circle. Obviously there is not enough room around a thing for everyone in the entire world to look at one part of it. They surround it and perceive it from all angles and imaginable perspectives. Each and every person is sharing ideas and perceptions of the thing: writing it down, talking about it, and decided all that there is to decide about it. People do this for all things and all things are this way. By this rule it means that looking into something for the first time provides all of those ideas together.

We learn to take perspective on things, and we learn to feel the way we do, partially because of media and the culture industry. The culture industry tells us what to like. The culture industry "misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality..." (99). Also, "each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement" (100). Pop culture loves to do one thing, and that is to sell to the mass. 

What would life be like if we did not have to accommodate to mass culture?

New essay idea...

Just kidding about that last essay idea post...

I have decided to talk about the cycle of representation within the culture industry and how so long as it remains unquestioned by the masses it can never be broken or changed.

Round 2 on that Essay Idea

I can't for the life of me find where I read that prompt I wanted to write about. So I'm switching to a thought I had while reading Lefebvre's "Work and Leisure in Everyday Life". He brings up the "vicious circle" of working to earn your leisure, but leisure being nothing but an escape from work. I thought it was odd that there are tons of people that only work to provide others with leisure. That's the entire entertainment industry for one. Read the full essay for more!  

Essay Idea

For our first essay the topic I am going to choose to write on is Althusser's ideas of ISA's and their roles in society a little bit more in depth.  After looking at it with more detail I plan to talk about things like are ISA's NEEDED? Or are there better ways to be evolving and enhancing our current society.  Also are ISA's bad? Good?

The Prompt to End All Prompts

My essay prompt is going to argue that the intent behind an action doesn't really matter, just the end result of that action. It's going to be super persuasive, but I can't find the text in which this question was posed. I'm going to keep looking though.

essay idea

I was intrigued by our in-class activity when we walked around campus and had to define our relationship to the space and certain things that shaped how we moved around our space. I would like to focus on that for my essay, but try to tie in a quote that I've also been intrigued by since one of the first readings. I put this quote in one of my previous blog posts, and it's from German Ideology. It says "life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life", and I'd like to dive deeper into that and look at our everyday actions (walking around campus, the paths we take, moving through our everyday routines) and try to include a conscious vs. unconscious aspect to that.

Another idea is about work and leisure. I think you could explore a lot on this topic and find a lot of things to say about it like what work and leisure is to someone vs. someone else, can work actually be considered leisure based on your lifestyle, etc.

I would like to take a look deeper into work and leisure. I am still deciding on the specifics but I want to take the stance that we never truly stop working and that it is natural human nature to always be working on someway. Also, the differences in what some people consider work and what some people consider leisure. I would like to explore why people hold those differences.

Essay #1

For my essay, I would like to write about Lefebvre's "Work and Leisure in Everyday Life". I find the relationship between family, work, and leisure very interesting, since they really are connected to each other. We could not have leisure without work - however, if we did not exist under a capitalist nation or a society in which work was absolutely necessary to survive, would leisure exist? I would like to also touch base on where family falls in with these two ideas. During the bourgeois, aristocrats never worked, and therefore existed off of leisure. That being said, peasants had very little leisure time, and constantly worked. After the bourgeois society, the separation of family, work, and leisure came into play. We must find a medium between these three ideas in order to happily exist. There is also a separation of oneself that comes into play.

Basically, I will be touching base on all of these concepts and continuing the idea of Lefebvre's argument about work, leisure, and family.

Essay Ideas

In my essay I am thinking of discussing what culture would be like without a profit motive. So basically I will be taking Adorno's article and be extremely critical with his ideas and see how they play a role in the world today. I think that it would be extremely fascinating to interpret what the relationships in the world would be like without any sort of underlying profit motivation.

Thoughts on essay topics

For this essay, I would like to talk about the work-leisure relationship and mass culture's effect on people's leisure time. Another thought is talking about the alienation in Marx's passage and alienation's role in work and leisure.

Essay topic (again)!

I'd like to explore the ideas of history (or its negation) which have been presented on our readings. I feel that everyday life and history are inextricably intertwined, and to understand either of them we must clearly define and analyze the other. Furthermore, I'd also like to analyze the act of walking in this context of history and its creation. Walking seems to be the stereotypical everyday activity, but I find that it also carries a significant amount of weight in creating and recreating everyday life.

Essay #1: The Everyday Escapes

I will focus my Essay on a passage written by Maurice Blanchot and Susan Hanson in “Everyday Speech”, an article published in the Yale French Studies:

“Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification. The everyday escapes.” (14)

I would argue that the everyday (i.e. the passing of time, the times when we are alone, the mundane, the quotidian, how we spend our moments in darkness and in silence, our secrets) is in fact the center of all truth, the most honest reality. It is DEFINITELY the “site of all possible signification”.