In Cook (Not) Like Your Mother, young women tell their stories and gain insight into becoming a woman nowadays. The interviews are designed in an anthropological/ documentary style.
While cooking a beloved dish from their childhood, participants reflect on their mothers, and themselves, in the domestic context. How they see cooking (and caring) roles reveals the work of constructing their feminine identity in intergenerational relation to their mothers, grandmothers, fathers, gender-roles, as opposed to whom they want to be.
These interviews were analysed, materialised into recipe books, designed to reveal to the readers the true intricacies of mother-daughter relations, assisting their everyday struggle to construct a gender-role that fits.
Interview method
and
experience
In Cook (Not) Like Your Mother, young women tell their stories and gain insight into what it is like to become a woman nowadays.
I chose six women, my contemporaries, and applied the interview method I developed. I curated the women who participated, they all had different stories in one way or another: their relations to cooking were different; in a relationship, others were not; they were of different ages, and they came from different cultural backgrounds.
Method
1. Each participant chose a recipe her mother cooks, some of them asked their siblings what they think, some needed to ask their mothers for the recipe, others knew it, even if it was the first time they made it.
This was the first stage where the participant had to consider and think about her mother. It created an intergenerational reflection, even if only by thinking about how their mothers cook.
2. We cooked that recipe together. As we cooked, they introduced themselves, what they were cooking, and talked about their memories of the dish. I asked about their mothers, and how they cook. This was the second time in the process when they needed to reflect on their mothers. Based on that conversation, we moved on to talk about them, about their roles in their homes, and their idea of themselves as women.
The interviews are designed in an anthropological/documentary style, as I looked into different backgrounds and documented the participants.
How the women who participated see their cooking (and caring) roles reveals the work of constructing their feminine identity in intergenerational relation to their mothers, grandmothers, fathers, gender-roles, as opposed to whom they want to be in a changing world.
