Tomato Sauce Splattered Selves: Subjectivity in Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires with Elisabeth Lechner (University of Vienna, Austria)
A BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Event
6 March 2025 (1700-1800 GMT)
Online
About the Event
Tomato Sauce Splattered Selves: Subjectivity in Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires with Elisabeth Lechner, University of Vienna, Austria
Abstract
While feminist critics like Sidonie Smith challenged “the universalist premise of a unique selfhood” (Dibattista and Wittman 2014: 4) assumed in classical autobiographies, which they criticized for “reinforcing prevailing cultural modes of Western male identity” (Haffen 2021: 13), the “unruly genre” (Dibattista and Wittman 2014: 2) of life writing is also known for its subversive potential. I use Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires (2022) to explore how cooking is used to transgress the boundaries of labour/pleasure, fictional/non-fictional, body/mind, feeling/thinking in contemporary life writing. More than a feminist autobiography, Small Fires is a formally inventive “hot red epic” (11), brimming with recipes, poetic passages, diary entries, sketches, listicles and intertextual references, delimiting cooking between un(der)paid reproductive labour and pleasurable acts of (self-)care. Small Fires produces new – culinary – forms of (literary) subjectivity and self-formation: The self is brought into being by a narrator, who cooks tomato sauce; a seemingly simple act repeatedly performed/told throughout the text. Both the embodied experience of cooking, “almost nothing” (11), as well as critically reflecting its position in one’s own life and the larger sociocultural context causes the narrator to form a feminist subjectivity, in which cooking, “the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed” (11), has been reclaimed not just as an act of care, but also of resistant knowledge-production: “Slowly I realize that when I cook, I am also researching the relationship between the body and language, between self and other; I am learning how to think against a rationalist and patriarchal history of knowledge” (12).
References:
Dibattista, Maria, and Emily O. Wittman. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Cambridge UP, 2014.
Haffen, Aude. “Introduction: Dissident Lives, Queer Texts, Political Is.“ Synthesis, vol. 14, 2021, pp. 1-18.
Johnson, Rebecca May. Small Fires. An Epic in the Kitchen. One, 2022.
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