Intersectional Food Spaces: Policing Women’s Participation in Public and Domestic Food Spaces in Malayalam Films

Abstract

Emerging in the early twentieth century, tea shops and toddy shops functioned as democratic spaces in Kerala, signifying a break from caste-based proscriptions surrounding interdining. However, these spaces remained largely male-dominated, and their meagre female presence was limited to lower caste female workers, as public, caste-inclusive environments were deemed inappropriate for upper caste women. Moving further from rendering these spaces as gender exclusive, Malayalam films had also resorted to the sexualization of the lower caste female bodies engaging in these spaces, a motif more evident in films from the 1980s. Drawing on the binary of kulasthree-chanthappennu, as theorised by J. Devika, and the notion of caste gaze, this article analyses the depiction of women engaging in private–public food spaces in Malayalam films, focusing on the sexualization of subaltern women in tea shops and toddy shops, and the burlesque of upper caste women withdrawing from the domestic kitchens, while simultaneously moving to public spaces. This article attempts to explore caste nostalgia in the selective sexualization of gendered caste subalterns. Tropes of the provocative women from tea and toddy shops as well as the rather desexualized kochamma (a female honorific title, typically used to address wives of employed men, or feudal landlords) and ‘society lady’ are explored, tracing them to the feudal, patriarchal intolerance towards women’s violation of gendered allocation of spaces, further delving into the popular discourses surrounding female homosocial spaces.