Engendering Transnational Foodways: A Case Study of Southern Sudanese Women in Brooks, Alberta

For countless women across time and space, the kitchen and the food work conducted within it have represented sites of simultaneous repression and celebration. Women's work in the kitchen. becomes undervalued in societies that place greater value on the financial responsibilities of a household than the nurturing (Engels 1972). In these contexts the kitchen becomes a space that limits women's social, economic and personal mobility (Devault 1991; Mclntosh and Zey 1998). However, scholars have also illuminated how a significant number of women understand the kitchen as a space for the creation of identity, love and creative expression (Abarca 2006; Adapon 2008; Avakian 1997, 2005; Counihan 2005, 2008). Due to the diverse meanings contained in the kitchen, women may utilize it in ways that represent multiple changing levels and degrees of freedom, self-awareness, subjectivity, and (Abarca 2006:19). It is therefore important to acknowledge the diversity of significances women encounter when working within this space. As such, this article contributes to feminist anthropological work analyzing the ways in which women use the kitchen, specifically foodways,1 as dynamic spaces for social, economic and personal mobility (Abarca 2006; Avakian 1997, 2005; Counihan 2005, 2008). Because of the ideological baggage that very often accompanies foodways, women who define foodways beyond their oppressive associations are embarking on acts of agency (Abarca 2006).In this article, I investigate the specific relationship between Southern Sudanese women and food. In particular, I use a case study of refugees in Brooks, Alberta, to explore how power relations are enacted within the global movement of people, products and ideas. As globalization facilitates the reconceptualization of boundaries, identities and existences, people often renegotiate their understandings of culture and tradition (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996). Global consumer society creates new markets, demands and meanings for culture (in this case, food in particular), as local practices become embedded within global structures (Ferrero 2002; Long 2004; WiIk 2006). When people negotiate new modes of existence, categories of power blur and create new spaces of action where the relations between the dominant and the subordinated, the self and the other, must be reconfigured (Ferrero 2002:195). Southern Sudanese women in Brooks provide an example of these global processes as they take place within the daily foodways of women in rural Alberta.In relation to food practices, patriarchal ideologies simultaneously define and devalue the identities of Southern Sudanese women; yet, the women assert agency by manoeuvring within these ideologies and defining themselves outside them. Their movements are facilitated by the global interaction of people, food and meaning which encompass the experiences of Southern Sudanese women in Brooks. Specifically, in this article, I will investigate how women's openness to foreign food practices and their simultaneous development of cosmopolitan consciousness demonstrates acts of agency. For these women, cosmopolitanism is an orientation; it is a readiness and competence to engage in the unfamiliar undertaken within the realm of everyday embodied experience (Cheah and Robbins 1998). By engaging in this orientation, women make the foreign familiar and create belonging within diverse fields of cultural meaning. Southern Sudanese women's cosmopolitan foodways are a means of empowerment because first, they represent women's challenge to the liminality of their existence and, second, they facilitate a global awareness of culture that allows women to utilize their cultural capital to gain prestige among their peers as well as new resources to manage their daily lives. In creating belonging within the diversity that defines their experiences, Southern Sudanese women in Brooks show how daily food practices are used to navigate experiences of gender, ethnicity and power. …

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