Kitchen Drama: Performances, patriarchy and power dynamics in a Dorset farmhouse kitchen

The paper explores the power relations that identified a farming family through a particular farmhouse kitchen in Dorset, England. Studying this kitchen space was important, because on one hand it embodied a systemic sense of power, symbolising patrilineal inheritance with its ownership passed through male hands. Memories and voices haunted its space and pieces of inherited family furniture dominated its configuration, resisted change and defined performances. On the other hand, kitchen space exposed the complexity of power relations as household members Were simultaneously disciplined by it and affected its substance. An episode of kitchen life illustrates this paper based on participant observation of a farming family in Dorset.