A recipe for female identity
Ingredients:
– phallocentric culture
– invisible ancestors
– pre-drawn role models
– mastery
– identification
– fulfilment of a principle
– anxiety
– silence
Preparation:
Shape into an aesthetically pleasing appearance by cutting off the excess. Its shape can be enhanced by tying it with twine or netting. Then cut into pieces of a size that is convenient to handle. If it is stronger, tougher, it is broken with a special patterned hammer. If it is weaker, it is enough to tap it softly with a smooth surface beater to keep it from losing its enjoyment value. Try to avoid over-stressing during the process, as this can make it difficult to eat.
Recipe:
All you need to make the female identity is a large bowl and a man’s worth of time. We start by kneading together the examples we inherited from our mothers and grandmothers, and add to the raw mass we are making impersonal muses from poets, painters and exaggerated archetypes from films and video games. In the process, we realise that we have no exact measurements; we have not prepared the ingredients, we are just trying to choose between them; and we are not even sure what we are cooking. In our growing desperation, we add too many contradictory opinions and expectations to the mass, which then becomes runny, spills out of our hands and sticks to our skin. Home is turned inside out – the soft fabric of our apron turns to chains, and reaching for the prepared kitchen knife, our hands reach for the hilt of a sword.
Achievement unlocked – can we transform the recipe, or do we always just jump back to the beginning?
The text was co-authored by Orsolya Drozdik Walking Brains – Contemporary Feminist Discourse and Gerda Széplaky Animal is Woman? and The Body of Man, and the section on meat preparation in Wikipedia’s Kitchen Operations. The title of the exhibition refers to Carol J. Clover’s Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Films.