Gender is a form of classification. It is etymologically rooted in the Latin genus: meaning ‘birth, race, or stock;’ a term which also denotes taxonomic genera. As its etymology suggests, gender is a human construct used to delineate between beings by their biological anatomy. ‘Gender’ and ‘sex’ are often used interchangeably, though the latter more often refers to biological differences; whereas the former covers social and cultural differences, encompassing more than the binaries of ‘male,’ and ‘female.’

Contemporary notions of gender find their genesis in 1945, when psychologist Madison Bentley defined the term as “socialised obverse of sex,” but its wider acknowledgement as a social distinction is attributed to feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and her 1949 book The Second Sex. In 1955, sexologist John Money coined the term ‘gender role,’ which he defined as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.” Since Money first coined the term, its definition has evolved to be “the behaviour learned by a person as appropriate to their gender, determined by the prevailing cultural norms.”

Gender, and gender roles, have traditionally been a way to demarcate what a person can, or cannot, do. Historically, this has often engendered segregation by barring one gender from partaking in the assigned roles of another. In Western society, these genders have been firmly categorised into ‘male’ and ‘female.’ Those who sit outside of this binary, or do not conform with its biases, have found themselves ostracised.

Our contemporary notion of gender as male or female comes from early feminist theory, which sought to differentiate between a person’s biological sex, and the roles society believed they should play; two factors which had previously been assumed to be the same. By delineating between the two, feminism could separate the role from the person. This line of feminism ultimately tried to define human nature as essentially epicene: as lacking in gender distinction. Unfortunately, a wider societal failure to grasp the notions behind these feminist theories caused gender to be synonymised with sex; the context in which it is widely used today.

As a human construct, gender draws its mutable definitions from our cultural and societal perceptions, and is influenced by myriad factors. Here, gender, as a social notion, ties in with the sociological term ‘foodways,’ which are the social, cultural, and economic practices that surround the preparation and consumption of food. Foodways often sit at the intersection of culture, traditions, and history, and are indicative of the people that practise them.

Both gender and foodways are socially prescribed, and the foodways of a particular culture are often inextricably tied to the enactment of that same culture’s gender roles. The complexity of these connections are such that, for the purposes of this essay, I will be focussing solely on one spectrum. If gender is a role to be played, then we must look whence this role was scripted. It is thus only fitting to examine the stage on which this script has predominantly been acted out: the domestic realm.

Let us start with defining domesticity. In The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (2021), queer theorist Stephen Vider defines domesticity as “the multiple ways people make home and, in turn, make themselves” (ibid: 7). This is through a space’s creation—its building, decorating, etc.; and that space’s use—cooking, eating, resting, etc.

In making his definitions, Vider also cites anthropologist Mary Douglas, who writes that “The home is the realisation of ideas.” If those ideas propound societally prescribed gender roles, they thus compound domestic foodways. Perhaps the most prevalent example of normative domesticity is the nuclear family, a format that is rooted in capitalist notions of social reproduction, typified by mid-century American suburbia.

This format is the legacy of industrialisation and capitalism, for it relies on a wage-labouring male; and a domestic, child-rearing female. Within this equation, reproductive politics is paramount, and the woman’s efforts are designated to fostering a new generation of wage labouring, or reproductive social units.

The nuclear family is a concept with which we are all notionally, if not intimately, familiar. It is regarded as a basic social unit, from which many of us propagate, and into which many of us will one day be subsumed. Separate from community, the nuclear family is its own entity; a private division from broader society. In her role of carer, the woman in this dynamic is also tied to preparing and governing the family’s food intake. Food preparation, on a domestic level, has thus been prescribed as a feminine role.

One example from the late 1970s evidences how the gendering of domestic food preparation remained concurrent well after the 1950s. When Delia Smith published her Cookery Course Parts One, Two, and Three in 1978, she prefaced the series by setting out its intended audience: men and women. To this, she added the caveat: “I say men, as well as women, because I know from previous television series and books that there are many men with a great interest in cooking.” Though perhaps a benign comment, her mention of ‘previous television series and books’ exemplifies contemporary cultural notions, and that she has to clarify that cooking can be both a female and a male pastime is indicative of concurrent presumptions about gendered domestic food preparation.

Despite its familial connotations the nuclear family format is, in essence, representative of a larger societal system in which most are, to some extent, entangled. This contemporary—if now somewhat archaic—social model upholds traditional heterosexual monogamy. In so doing, the nuclear family eschews numerous forms of non-normative bodies, and thus maintains its normativity through exclusion. Depictions of this normative idyll will be familiar to us all in various formats, yet perhaps none more so than that of mid-century American suburbia.

America was among the first nations to start building suburbs in the late 19th century due to a growing middle-class population, and improvements in infrastructure and transport. Suburbs were kept cost efficient through their standardisation: houses were built the same as one another, their fittings identical. The homogenisation of these living spaces is indicative of the types of lives they were designed to house, and thus of those they excluded.

In these spaces, housewives were expected to lead domestic lives, catering for their family’s needs. Each day, mealtimes brought together the family at a table of home-prepared food, around which members were hierarchically arranged. This model helped establish and maintain normative notions of family life in its regularity. As Vider writes in The Queerness of Home: “gender gains its reality through its repetition.” These mealtimes were the foodways of mid-century American domestic life. By being so integral to the reenactment of traditional everyday gender roles, food thus served to compound normative notions.

In the 1960s, the strict social governance of nuclear family life found itself under attack from the sexual revolution. Under the revolution's auspices, extra-marital sex; queer sex; contraception; and abortion all found themselves partially freed from the shackles of convention. At the same time, women could more easily escape the confines of housewifery. Concurrently, and perhaps somewhat unexpectedly considering the sexual revolution’s feminist backing, some also began reframing the domestic as a masculine space.

This is explored by philosopher Paul Preciado in his Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics (2019), which examines the male-centric culture surrounding Playboy magazine, and the wider social impacts this had. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Playboy sought to redefine masculinity as inherently domestic, by recreating the notion of domesticity, in what they termed a ‘masculinist’ revolution. As Preciado writes: “faced with the “empire of the heterosexual family home” of the 1950s—the generative topos of the American dream—Playboy fought to construct a parallel utopia: “the empire of the urban bachelor.””

In a chapter aptly titled The Kitchenless Kitchen: Defeminizing the Domestic, Dedomesticating the Feminine, Preciado examines how Playboy redesigned the notion of home for the bachelor. “Playboy interpreted the process of transforming the private domestic space of the kitchen into a showroom [...]. The woman had lost her leading role on the kitchen stage and become a spectator in a theater of masculinity.”

In challenging the domestic tropes outlined by traditional heterosexual marriage, and rewriting masculinity: from the outdoor man, to the indoor bachelor; Playboy revolutionised convention, while simultaneously compounding it. Women became guests in the bachelor’s pad, invited in only for sex. The kitchen, previously a feminine retreat, was redefined as the ‘kitchenless kitchen:’ an archetypally masculine space. Kitted out with the latest electronic equipment, it was no place for a woman and her analogue ways. As Preciado writes: “the redefinition of kitchen activities in terms of technical efficiency and male skill safely eliminate any risk of feminizing or emasculating the bachelor.”

Playboy’s ‘masculinist’ revolution continued its conquest of the domestic kitchen with the publication of its 1961 The Playboy Gourmet, a cookbook written by, and intended for, Playboy’s urban bachelor. In a 2013 review of the book, curator Polly Russel writes: “Unlike the suburban housewife, the playboy cook is not troubled with the relentless drudgery of domestic life. His bachelor-pad kitchen is designed to minimise labour. Tedious food preparation and clearing up are carried out by the “occasional maid”.” In spite of reclaiming the domestic as a masculine space, Playboy still expects its maintenance to be outsourced to women.

So far, we have discussed the normative connotations that the genders of ‘male’ and ‘female’ have within the preparation of food, and the domestic realm at large. However, this negates all non-normative bodies who do not adhere to this heteronormative binary. The people that sit outside of this have long been ostracised for their nonconformity, and those who wish to escape gender’s rigmarole must unlearn its societal teachings.

For many queer people, the family dinner typical of domestic environments is a hostile space, where one must perform an identity that is not one’s own. Here, we return to the writings of Stephen Vider. In The Queerness of Home, Vider shifts what has been a prevailing narrative of queer and trans bodies in activism inwards, to the domestic. The association of queerness with domesticity has often been a controversial one. For heteronormative society, the home is a paragon of normativity, so its depiction as queer can be contentious. Inversely, for queer people, the homes they make themselves have been a refuge from society’s gaze.

Vider seeks to change these stereotypes, and help us understand, as his title states: the queerness of home. To do this, he begins by analysing normative notions of domesticity and gender. In his introduction, Vider cites gender studies philosopher Judith Butler, who believes gender to be “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”

Vider builds on this to suggest domestic norms as a script “socially determined yet individually enacted; predetermined yet open to interpretation, improvisation, revision, and failure. Like gender, the idea of home projects stability yet is constantly made and remade through imperfect, and sometimes subversive repetition.” In this definition of domestic norms, Vider opens the notion of home up to reinterpretation, enabling non-normative bodies to create their own spaces outside of the confines of heteronormativity.

Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964) is also a pertinent way of understanding how queer identities break from normative gender roles. In Notes, she lists numerous definitions of camp, often contradictory; always excessive. She writes “[a]ll Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice.” Camp “is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not,” “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders.”

Sontag’s definitions of camp present them in alterity to the norm. They are aware of normativity, pandering to its hegemonic gender roles, yet they do so as a facade, a mask over their real selves. “Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene.”

Epicene is defined as ‘having characteristics of both sexes; having no characteristics of either sex; or, of indeterminate sex.’ Sontag’s notion of ‘style’ is rooted in the idea that camp is a mode of aestheticism: a way of seeing the world. Style, and artifice, are thus the ways in which camp perceives. As such, this ‘style’ becomes epicene: it is indefinitely mutable and unbound by gender.

When Sontag published Notes, it encouraged a novel widespread interest in queer life. This was capitalised upon by chef Lou Rand Hogan who, in 1965, published The Gay Cookbook: The complete compendium of campy cuisine.

Hogan’s choice of the word cuisine is pertinent. Cuisine is a form of cooking that takes its cues from the French kitchen. These kitchens are modelled on the 19th century chef Georges Escoffier’s brigade de cuisine. Borrowing its structure from the military, under the brigade, kitchens are governed by a chef de cuisine: a ‘kitchen chief.’ Etymologically, their role is to rule; and so they do, in a militant style. This system engenders patriarchy, and eschews non-male, non-normative bodies from its ranks. Escoffier is also responsible for enshrining the 5 mother sauces of French cuisine: a yoke under which cuisine still labours.

In his use of the term cuisine, Hogan elevates his book through the word’s association with this form of quote-on-quote high cooking, while also comically camping a definitely heterosexually male-dominated career. Hogan’s Cookbook thus reclaims this machistic, patriarchal tradition, combines it with the feminine associations of domesticity, and presents the resulting epicene form of campy cuisine.

It is important to note that Hogan’s book is decidedly sectional and solely representative of the gay, middle-class, white CIS man. On top of this, some of his recipes are at times racist, and look no further than his subjects.

Camp is where performativity meets duplicity: part assimilationary self-preservation; part whimsically fluid identity shifting. It is mutable in its inadherence to norms. When combined with the heavily gendered act of domestic cooking—be it a suburban housewife or an urban bachelor—it delightfully subverts the norm, and suggests alternate modes of being.

In a 2018 article for Eater titled Queer Food Is Hiding in Plain Sight, Kyle Fitzpatrick quotes Kevin Kopelson, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, “A basic camp move is transvaluation, to take something that the culture doesn't value and pretend to value it, to see what pleasure comes from that;” camp is, and can be, anything. Fitzpatrick himself writes that “[c]ulinary camp often manifests as the over-the-top embrace, and subversion, of heterosexual domesticity. Poking fun at mainstream culture is a coping mechanism, linking a near-secret language to otherwise accessible cultural creations.”

The play on artifice and duplicity that Sontag propones in campy style remains prevalent today. Thus, instead of gender and food, let us imagine epicene cuisine: of a human nature unbound by socially prescribed roles, and how that might impact the way we prepare and consume food.

Here, I reference my own artistic practice to illustrate the ways in which I personally have been queering the conventions of gender and food. In my work, bread has been my main focus. Bread is integral to normative notions of eating. It is a staple in many of our diets, and has even been enshrined in our culture. By queering its form; bending its tins goes against gendered conventions of domestic cooking.

This analysis of food and gender has been largely based on Eurocentric Western notions of gender, and domestic environments. It is important to note that, though these spaces are inherently intersectional, they do not represent all homes. Within this realm, domesticity upholds prevailing notions of normative gender, and how they pertain to food within dominant narratives. As such, traditional gender roles within this, as well as less normative forms existing in these spaces, might help us reinterpret this essay’s title from ‘Food & Gender’ to ‘Epicene Cuisine.’

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