Feminism, Domesticity, and Self-Reliance

My computer has decided to be nice today. I hope this lasts.

This train of thought began, strangely enough, in a linguistics blog. Language Log featured a brief entry about the word "femivore" as one of the extensions of the suffix "-vore" as created in a New York Times article. A good portion of the comments are devoted to discussion of the prefix "femi-" and the suffix "-vore", but a few strayed into the political implications of this small but noticeable movement in food politics.

This is something I've been considering for a long time. Starting a garden, keeping chickens, and generally being fairly self-sufficient with what I consume is incredibly appealing. The feminist implications are still a little iffy for me, as a woman still coming to terms with the possibility of domesticity as a form of feminism. I've been told both that I am "the most domestic of [a friend's] friends but the least likely to be a domestic" and that "whether [I] marry a man or a woman [I'll] be the one in the apron." Coming to terms with being a feminist domestic scares me.

This is because "difference feminism" (as I've heard it called) has often sounded like keeping the traditional place of women in the private sphere and men in the public sphere, with too little emphasis on the work that goes into maintaining a domestic space and almost no discussion about the possibility of a "house-husband" or "male domestic"*. I've seen a number of my moderate-to-radical friends in relationships act out the "men make houses, women make homes" (or even traditional gender roles being assigned to partners in same-sex relationships) model way too often for my taste.

Is "femivore" more related to the prefix "femi-" or the suffix "-vore"? Is this movement focused more on gender or food politics? I see it as a wonderful food politics movement with strong influence on gender politics, but the article is more focused on the feminist aspect of this movement in an almost condescending manner. The last paragraph seems like the author is trying to justify how negatively she views this aberrant lifestyle, but instead of encouraging men to participate more in domestic matters, ends up sounding dismissive of the whole thing. I would love to have garden and own chickens in a sustainable, eco-friendly way, but whoever I was living with (roommate, partner, whatever) would have to give equal effort to domestic affairs. Instead of talking about the negatives, about how this movement can be interpreted as both feminist and anti-feminist, we should talk about how to make them equal. More direct symbiosis, less parasitism.**


On a considerably less academic note, the word "femivorism" is one of the ugliest I've encountered in a good while. I hope it doesn't catch on.

The Femivore's Dilemma (via New York Times)
Vaguely related, Why Making Healthful Foods Cheaper Isn't Enough (via NPR)

*note the marked gender of these phrases
**related to The Vegetarian Myth, which will probably be the focus of my next entry, provided my computer stays on long enough for me to compose a coherent entry