Baked In: Women's Role in Curating and Creating Family Culture Through Culinary Performance

My dissertation, Baked In: Women's Role in Curating and Creating Family Culture Through Culinary Performance, works from the central assumption that a decent part of communal memory includes some aspect of food, and particularly for many families, those memories are tied to the bodies of the women who hold the recipes or knowledge of how to make those dishes. My project engages my own family's food traditions through interviews, participant observation, and personal narrative to explore the ways that families writ large and women in particular work to build a sense of community culture through food and the stories surrounding that food. Whether dealing with memory that lives within the body or within narrative, food is a bold, embodied performance of self and community identity.