Two Women and A Kitchen: Power Relations among Women

This article focuses on the power relations among women in their relation to cooking that is identified as the most important task of the housework and kitchen that is mostly identified by women as a place of their own. Feminists have pointed to home and the housework as women's prison and the centre for the oppression that addresses women. However, in recent years there has been discussions about home and the potentials that women discover in it. Giving meaning to kitchen and the activities that are held in it, women describe kitchen as a place of their own and use this place for their resistance and empowerment strategies. Moving from this point, this paper focuses on how women temporarily and permanently living together make meaning of kitchen and the activity of cooking and how they use the place. For this study, I used the in-depth interviews that I conducted with 30 women for my doctoral research I completed in 2014 and did 5 additional in-depth interviews in order to gain a deeper understanding about kitchen and the power relations among women using this place together.