Estrategias de entrenamiento y desarrollo

The women‘s narratives show the complexity of meanings and dynamics around women and food. Many women produced discourses that illustrated how identities around food allow women to perform traditional and contemporary (more egalitarian) gender roles, to be playful with these performances and with their ways of eating, cooking, and preparing foods, and to enjoy self-empowerment through eating, cooking, and doing food chores. Women discussed the ways they experienced, acquired or rejected their power in the kitchen and families, where food glues and strengthens social ties.

Some women resisted traditional gender role expectations, refuting and rejecting food chores for themselves and others. Many felt empowered through this very rejection of this requisite hegemonic domestic femininity. Others embraced domestic femininity, but on their own terms. Making their own rules allowed these women some agency against the otherwise oppressive kinds of obligation embedded in gender tradition.

Globalization influences ideologies and practices. In this way, I attempted to illustrate the intertextuality between technologies of food as encapsulated in the media, local and global geographies of food, food practices, and sense of self. This intertextuality involves imagery of food to circulate and seduce women, perhaps to create a false consciousness (that traditional gender roles do not oppress) but also to inspire, empower, and educate. In my sample, I found evidence that women have an ambivalent relationship with food- as an obligation. This love/hate relationship pertained mostly to the perception of obligation to others. Women reported

reinterpreting or adjusting this obligation to a role that better fit and empowered them and their sense of self.

Equipping themselves with culinary knowledge empowered women, and the foodscapes validated many women‘s love of food and cooking. If only in their imagination, these women implicitly internalized the celebrity chefs they admired on television. While some of them idolized these ―celebrities of domesticity,‖ they found themselves grappling with the reality of the quandary- to be domesticated, contained, or regulated but choosing to do food chores and cook. This matter allows us to see how contemporary feminisms allow women to be empowered by food and food chores in ways that should not necessarily be interpreted as false

consciousness. Instead, the women‘s voices demonstrate a new dynamic in domesticity. The dilemma, however, remains, in that women who enjoy food and food chores may find that, unless they become some exception to the rule, they are un/intentionally complicit in the system that oppresses and colonizes them in the kitchen.

Women can use their culinary knowledge as currency and that currency allows women to gain and regain power but reproduce traditional gender roles, whether they realize it or not. Fortunately, most women have some awareness that their love of food and cooking can do this, but the pleasure of thinking about and shopping for food, cooking, eating, and feeding

themselves and others seems to outweigh the consequences of crystallizing this connection (between women, kitchens and cultures).

Global technologies allow women to contest and reinforce boundaries around culture and families as they cook to follow tradition and at other times to intentionally disrupt or deviate from it. The women‘s narratives gently remind readers of the porosity or permeability of culture. Eating out allows a culinary education and further critique of cultural boundaries. Eating out ―differently‖ demonstrates that cultural food colonialism is not the only interpretation of cultural border crossing where food and women are concerned. That is, I found as much support for

cultural food colonialism as I did for culinary education. I also found a lack of evidence to support a sincere cultural reciprocity or exchange, where perhaps culturally mixed groups cooked or ate at culturally varying establishments. Thus, cultural boundaries were largely reproduced and regulated, with white ethnicity being normalized and largely invisible as the perpetual referent, and ―ethnic‖ foods diversifying and spicing up the ―ordinary‖ (read: normal, American, whiteness).

Evidence of cultural food colonialism was arguably not strong because participants relied on color (culture) blind discourses to talk about ―ethnic‖ foods in ways that reinforced a white cultural centrality and that marginalized the ―ethnic Other.‖ Relying on these discourses does not make the practice of cultural food colonialism any less colonizing, but it does make its detection much more difficult. Pressures to present their socially desirable selves as non- colonizing may have prompted many of the women in the sample to evade questions of cross- cultural food consumption.

Despite their efforts to produce neutral discourses, many of the women incorporated the Other into the places where they shopped for food, and/or dined out, and food that they cooked. They partially fetishized food as ―different‖ within a safe distance of that difference. That is, only a few participants mentioned food consumption of particular groups or regions, i.e. the Caribbean or Africa cultures, or the black diaspora in general. For most of the women, that ―difference‖ became synonymous with Asians, a group that many race scholars consider ―honorary white‖ (Gallagher 2003, Bonilla Silva 2002). Future research should revisit these emergent patterns to see if and how the contemporary racial hierarchy plays out socially and culturally to influence practices and understandings of cultural food colonialism.

Future research should also look more closely at these friendship and family networks, attending to their racial, ethnic, and cultural compositions. Such research might focus on micro- level interactions and discourses produced around food and culture to understand if and how borders are being crossed, in what contexts, and under what conditions by which actors.

Alternatively, future research could also consider the emergent and existing blogs, food markets, fairs, festivals, and various new technologies and geographies of food that affect women and men of various social and cultural backgrounds.