An Ostentatious Feast: Performing Gender at the Late Soviet Table

An Ostentatious Feast: Performing Gender at the Late Soviet Table
 
Maria Pirogovskaiia will speak about the Soviet cuisine, ideas of abundance, and gender performance.
 
The festive table of the post-war and late Soviet period had to be ostentatious and visually impressive. The idea of abundance, married with the demand of collectivity and disseminated through official visual media, such as state-issued cookbooks, women’s magazines, and cinema (e. g. late Soviet screwball comedies), took hold despite the shortages and constraints of time budgets. At the level of practice such abundance used to be constructed with a specific type of table setting and food design. The spatial, visual, and gustatory organisation of the table helped to structure the feast in contrast to routine meals. Particular recipes, tastes and settings were received as appropriate or inappropriate for holiday dining and marked the boundaries between special occasions and everyday life.
While marking strategies and methods of making a rich table for friends and family are more or less described by sociologists and historians, the social meaning of the Soviet phenomenon in question still needs to be clarified. The talk seeks to investigate both the structural and genealogical dimensions of the table setting and the social meanings such a table conveyed about the cook and her guests, being in itself an element of gender performance of a ‘genuine woman and good mistress of the house’.
 
Food will be served.