It’s no accident that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt issued the Republican Party’s response to the State of the Union address from her kitchen table, since the kitchen is precisely where the GOP would prefer we women spend most of our lives. Ideally, Britt would have been canning beans or kneading bread with a baby on her hip at the same time, but the related racket would likely have made her strained stage-whispers about murderous immigrants difficult to hear.
This remarkable tableau was punctuated by the family portrait Britt shared on social media afterwards, captioned: “To the American people: Our future starts around kitchen tables just like this. With moms and dads just like you.”
Everything about Britt’s performance was a choice — a carefully crafted domestic diorama.
“Just like this” is a curious way to describe Britt’s kitchen, which is unlike any I’ve ever cooked in. No fridge plastered with kids’ drawings or chore charts. No counters strewn with mail and sunglasses and mugs. No crumb-filled toaster or gunky microwave. Nary a ceramic rooster or a cow-shaped cookie jar in sight. Not even a chalkboard with “live, laugh, love” painted in crisp white script. Just a pristine, greige showroom for conservative conformity.
Perhaps it is unkind to critique a woman’s kitchen — we get enough guff from all sides for anything and everything, from the way we look to the way we live. But the setting of Britt’s speech was as important as its substance. And as long as Britt is presenting herself as the pained face of a GOP committed to ensuring that no woman steps beyond the threshold of her own home, except to carry water for the party’s power-hungry patriarchs, her kitchen is worth talking about.
In a lot of ways, Britt’s kitchen is a trap for anyone who thinks too hard about it. We’re meant to understand the symbolism of speaking from that space, to receive an unsubtle message about a woman’s obligation to perform femininity even as she…
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