Why don't you cook? If you know how to cook”: A Study on the Narratives that Women Build Around the Experience of Cooking for Others in Santiago del Estero

Abstract

The present study intends to reconstruct the narratives of santiagueñas women in relation to cooking and to identify  implications of sex-gender mandates  present in subjectivity. It is part of the field of women's health and nutritional anthropology from a gender approach. The aim was to recover images constructed around food preparation and rituals, and to identify identity   elements from a perspective that strains  the place assigned to women in a local socio-cultural context. Cooking is   understood as a cultural category where  it is possible to encounter  diversity in the strategies that configure routines and rituals of eating and "doing to eat", bridging tradition and innovation, past and present. As an  anticipation of meaning, we consider that women's femininities today are still  marked by these cultural inheritances proposed as social mandates, and   cooking shows women's capacity to take  care of others, to the disregard of their own. Furthermore, by adopting  narrative as a theoretical and  methodological tool, the intention is to  enrich and transform the experience into  autonomy, constructing new narratives, new versions, new  possibilities, and new stories about cooking.