Initial Thoughts

My kid is finally napping (well, actually, he’s in bed singing the Tigger song to himself ... the nap may or may not “take”) so I have a couple of minutes to write.

I have all kinds of course announcements to make, but I thought I should start with something other than “do your reading, folks!” So, instead ...

Why is this blog called Women’s Studies Test Kitchen? A couple of reasons. First, I wanted something that sounded kinda experimental because this blog is experimental on so many levels:

• it’s my first blog;
• it’s the first time I’m using blogs in my teaching, and I want to emphasize the experimental quality of the whole endeavor (for me and students too);
• though I've taught like 6 different WS classes, this is my first Intro;
• it’s my first foray into teaching after leaving academia for two years, and an experiment in where teaching—and academia more generally—fits into my life.

Second, kitchens have a long history in terms of my relationship to Women's Studies and feminism.

• My mother was a Home Ec major in the Fifties. She is All About The Kitchen. And, just like most folks, I learned a lot about gender from my mother.
  
• There are many things about my mom that I did not inherit; I did, however, inherit her love of cooking. Although the amount of pleasure I take in cooking moves in cycles, there have definitely been times in my life where cooking did all kinds of things for me: relaxed me, fed my intellect, allowed me to give back to my friends ... 
• I have a little kitchen fetish. I love kitchen design. I have randomly drawn kitchen design plans on graph paper since I was about 10 years old. I want to say it's my geekiest habit, but that's just because it's the only one on my mind right now ... there are plenty of others.
  
• I wrote my dissertation on kitchens, or more specifically how images of the kitchen were used in public discourse between WWII and 1992. It was a bit too “cutting edge” as a topic—which means that there wasn't any existing research that was really helpful, so it kicked my a$$—but it did enable me to think and write about most of my academic interests, like gender (of course), race/ethnicity, futurism, popular culture, design, and, of course, food. And I still like kitchens, and I'm still interested in what and how they mean, which is a miracle.
  

So given all of that, test kitchen seemed like a better metaphor than, say, lab.

We’ll see where it goes from here.