Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess

Abstract

This article examines the significance of cookery writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in relation to debates about postfeminism, arguing that her work negotiates a form of feminine identity between the frequently polarized figures of `the feminist' and `the housewife'. It locates Nigella's work within feminist research into the meanings that women bring to their cooking practices within the sexual division of labour, arguing that her work offers an alternative way of imaging women's relationship to food based on the pleasures of cooking and eating rather than pleasing others. The article draws on Ang to explore how the figure of the domestic goddess constructed by Nigella offers a means of negotiating temporal constraints at the level of fantasy.