Reflections

Abstract

This book clearly demonstrates the extent to which everyday food-ways are infused with the intersectionalities of gender and class. The focus has been on the intimacies and intricacies of relations within the domestic sphere. Respondent narratives highlight the intercon-nectedness of the self with ‘other’ as well as with wider socio-cultural and structural norms and values. When articulating one’s identity it is difficult to avoid ‘common vocabularies’ (Mills 1959). In the telling of the self it is necessary to connect with recognisable cultural scripts. What it means to be a middle class woman or man in twenty-first century neo-liberal consumer capitalist societies is embedded in discourses of responsible individualism. However, despite a commitment to this ideology, identities are difficult to define beyond the meta-narratives of modernity and without recourse to dichotomous thinking (Oakley 1992) or the binary oppositions that help create/re-create gender and class. These Cartesian dualisms continue to draw and re-draw the boundaries between/within social groups, not least on the basis of gender and class. In contemporary neo-liberal westernised societies the atomised individual free from social obligations is coded male (Lewis 2007), as women continue to be judged in terms of a selfless, seemingly ‘natural’ feminine disposition.