Kitchenless

Abstract

There is something provocative and at the same time revealing in the act of eliminating the kitchen from the house. The generalized social refusal that this action often provokes allows us to understand the deep affection and assumptions that this domestic space arouses. Ideologically speaking, the kitchen has had a main role in the historical definition of the idea of home and the family, and subsequently, in the creation of gender biased relationships within the domestic sphere. In that sense, an image has been forged of the kitchen as a space where women could take responsibility for domestic work alone, thanks to factors such as its proper design and adequate arrangement amidst a care-based system of social value, rather than economic gain.
The kitchen is where domestic work has progressively lost its economic value and become instead a labor of love, as Silvia Federici names it. Such transformations not only made an entire sector of society (women) economically dependent on others and particular forms of social relations but also, through progressively isolation, lose political agency. But beyond the idea of the kitchen as an apparatus for the perpetuation of clichés, being aware that this type of domesticity is a construction can allow us to understand its reversibility or ability to change. Home values are always in permanent mutation, and today, those which deal with the kitchen are precisely the most capable of radically changing preset gender roles and domestic labor structures.