‘When We Eat-Out’: Women,Desires and Public Spaces of Food Consumption

Introduction

Avakian and Haber (2005) while commenting on the relation between feminism and food, also cautions about the danger of a Euro-American bias while studying experiences of women from different parts of the world. They argue

In this broader context, as the need arises to challenge the conceptualisation of the ‘homogenous passive female victim’ belonging to the third world and South Asia in particular, this paper attempts to answer the question—What does it mean for women to desire food? In other words, what does it mean for women to have the desire for food besides meeting their nutritional needs at public spaces of food consumption? I argue that within the patriarchal structures that form a dominant characteristic of South Asian societies, there lies plurality of experiences and diversity of desires when it comes to food consumption by women in general and public spaces in particular. The exploration of these desires during their ‘eating-out’ ventures and the constraints women faces there off forms a rather discursive landscape that needs to be unearthed in a much more nuanced feminist analysis.

Now, what do I mean by ‘eating-out’ at public spaces of food consumption in the first place? ‘Eating-out’ here specifically means eating at spaces such as restaurants, cafes, road-side stalls where one can avail food through payment in pure monetary terms rather than eating out at public spaces like in the case of a feast where even if other forms of reciprocation is involved, money transaction is not the means through which it is carried out.

However, food consumption in public spaces by women and the diverse aspects related to it, has hardly gained much intellectual interests within the region of South Asia. Most of the time women desiring food are seen as an aberration. For women to make use of food as a medium for expression of other desires in public spaces such as for having some ‘me’ time for oneself, dating, self-indulgence, self-fulfilment is yet to perceived as ‘normal’ in our societies. Moreover while analysing female desires related to food, can’t we look beyond the bi-polar model of the ‘good’ woman on one hand who cooks and feeds her family and on the other hand, the ‘unruly’ misfit who desires food for food sake or for fulfilling other desires. Can’t we not probe into the ‘in-between’ spaces of this bi-polarity and look into experiences of women as desiring beings, be it food, sex, freedom, power, safety, etc. Perception of women as simply asexual, the sacrificing motherly figure is as much an error as it is to view them to be only sexual lustful creatures. It is the plurality of desires among women that this paper aims to bring to light while focussing exclusively on food consumption at public spaces of eating-out.

Following this, the crucial question that arises is why the city space of Guwahati in Assam is chosen for this study. This needs to be answered in a broader theoretical perspective involving how food consumption is viewed and is understood not just in Guwahati, but more generally in South Asia too. Public food consumption in South Asia has hardly been given much academic interest. Liechty (2005) writes, ‘compared to recent historical studies of prostitution, research into the history of public eating remains limited and is almost entirely focused on Europe’ (Liechty 2005: 17). Moreover, relatively smaller India cities such as Guwahati are hardly considered when discussing ‘eating-out’ experiences of women. It is always the ‘bigger’ metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore that are typically chosen mostly for such studies. But what we may term as ‘local’ experiences in a city like Guwahati are also not isolated from influences beyond the local; be it in terms of materiality of food, space or other aspects related to public food consumption.

Cities are spaces of constant flux, and myriad negotiations between processes and people take place. As such, various kinds of influences in the form of colonialism, migration, urbanisation have influenced the city space of Guwahati and its people—politically, economically, socially and culturally. Exposure to food practices from other regions of India and beyond have made inroads into the city through various forms of media, such as television, newspapers, internet and the opening up of various eating out spaces. Further, post-1991 wave of globalisation and neo-liberalisation have had a major influence in the way ideas regarding food practices, access to public eating spaces, exploration of desires and gender norms have been modified and perpetuated. The market today is playing a crucial role in shaping desires including female desires related to food and public spaces of food consumption.

This paper is based on ethnographic data. The time period of my fieldwork stretches roughly from June 2016 to February 2017. Qualitative methods were employed for the study. Within qualitative methods, I chose in-depth interviews and participant observation and visual methods (analysis of photographs and videos). My sample consisted of both women and men within the age-group of 18–80 years residing in Guwahati city through purposeful and snow-ball sampling. The research participants that were included were owners, workers and consumers as well as non-consumers of these ‘eating-out’ places. Although public eating spaces were my primary sites, I nonetheless also visited some of my participants, especially female participants in their homes or any other spaces that they wanted me to visit.

Women’s Desires and Food

We know that people desire various things in their lives and that, desire means much more than just liking. A desire is a longing, craving and aspiration. Similarly, in terms of food it is not just eating what one likes but also what one craves for; what one yearns for. However, desire, most of the times carry the baggage of a negative sexual connotation to it, especially when female desires are spoken about. A woman who has desires, sexually or non-sexually has always been equated to the ‘unruly’ women, a misfit for the proper functioning of the society. This unruly women is described as the one who has ‘excessive appetites for food, power, sex, or anything else’ (Subramanian and Lagerwey 2013: 3).

Historically in India, the advent of colonialism gave rise to the ideas of nationalism, which ushered in new gendered ideas of public and the private sphere (Chatterjee 1989). New ideas related to material culture such as dressing and food gained important symbolic meanings, especially in its gendered dimensions. Thus, food, ‘insofar as they carried symbolic meanings and “civilisational attributes”, cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content’ (Sengupta 2010: 81). The idea of authenticity related to the superior culture and food of the colonised very much rested on a gendered discourse, as women became the epicentre of it. For instance, in the context of Bengal, ‘Undoubtedly, women were the signpost of “tradition” in the middle-class discourse. However, the same discourse also assigned them the responsibility for producing a “modern” Bengali cuisine’ (Ray 2009: 60). Thus, performance of feminine domesticity was very significant for the creation of the much valued Bengali cuisine.

Consequently, the popular Indian imagery of a woman evokes the picture of a deity. At least the upper caste perpetuated this image of an ‘ideal’ women based on the Victorian model representing the purity of the upper-class women. Women as sexualised beings suggested a negative implication, only suitable for whores and vamps (Uberoi 1990: 42). Similarly, in the context of Assam, Deka (2013) indicates the patriarchal set up of society which has traditionally impacted the status and role of women in Assam. For instance, she narrates the popular myth of King Naraka.1

She further adds that, ‘In understanding the various societies in Assam, it should be noted that the Mother Goddess cult evolved over time from an independent tribal goddess, such as Tara, too became represented as a consort in the brahmanical patriarchal pantheon of gods’ (Deka 2013: 2). Moreover, such a figure of the mother goddess popularly is not someone who desires, be it food, sex, wealth or anything, rather she is a provider. In other words, she is seen as desire-less. For women not to possess, acknowledge or remember her desires is a sign of her being ‘good’. The desire-less ‘good’ woman is an embodiment of the goddess that she is expected to be in our patriarchal society. Furthermore, the way one accounts for her likes or desires and the manner in which practices in relation to food manifests, forms a crucial element of how women are placed in categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

While I went around having conversations and interviews with women during my fieldwork, I would often start off with questions such as—What kind of relationship you have with food. Do you have any special memories or events related to food? As a reply, if not all of them but most of the married, middle-aged, elderly and widowed women across various classes would evoke instances of cooking and feeding food to their family members. For them it would mostly be—‘so and so likes the chicken I make….or…so and so loved the pitha2

But does this mean that women do not have any liking for food or cannot possess any desire for food? Well, no. I argue that in the contrary to what is popularly assumed about women from a South Asian location, women here are not desire-less being. They can and do possess desires related to food. Here, the crucial question then arises is—Then why do they not know even what they like, forget desires? Why they themselves and others forget their food preferences? Why they never talk about the desires they have in relation to food?

This forgetting and not acknowledging one’s own likes and desires again is a marker of a ‘good’ unselfish woman that women expected to aspire for. Most of the time what was noticed was the fact that memories related directly to one’s consumption or desire for a certain food were either absent or did not go beyond pregnancy cravings or childhood fetishes. One of my female participants when asked about her food preferences uttered these following words:

However, I would like to point out here that the ‘good’ woman does not always view herself as a victim of a patriarchal set up. She considers herself empowered enough to gain pleasure of being the provider of food, by being a care-giver or having the adequate knowledge of providing appropriate food for her family. Nonetheless, as Johnston and Baumann (2009) points out:

Having defined the relation between the ‘good’ woman and food, it is also imperative here to point out the kind of relation the ‘bad’ woman shares with food. This ‘bad’ woman, contrary to the ‘good’ woman desires food. She has not forgotten what she prefers to eat while at home or otherwise. Herein, I would like to bring in the ‘issue’ of alcohol consumption by women. Although alcohol consumption by both men and women in pre-colonial times was not an uncommon phenomenon, in contemporary times women consuming alcohol is rather seen in a negative light, even when it is not uncommon. ‘Both men and women took it. Its harmful effects were not at all considered by them. People believed that opium cures dysentery, which was a major killer. Many went on believing that opium gives longevity’ (Saikia 2013: 5). Nonetheless, it is also not uncommon for women to have alcohol in contemporary times in Guwahati city. But then, it is only in certain kinds of spaces that it is possible for a woman to have alcohol, and enjoy it too. It is rather usual that consumption of alcohol is perceived to be one of the major characteristics of the ‘bad’ woman. I would like to quote a conversation with one of my middle aged female participants wherein the issue of women consuming alcohol came up:

Similarly, there were men who completely dismissed the idea that it can be acceptable for women to consume alcohol. As one of my male respondents said—‘Young women consuming alcohol does not look good…I mean it is not good for young men as well but then young boys try to experiment with various things in their youth. That is ok. But they should not continue with it’.5

Nonetheless, there were also some people for whom women and men consuming alcohol was not a complete aberration if not normal or common. This had a lot to do with class and age primarily. According to some college going students belonging to both male and female sex, similar in age and belonging to upper middle class families, consumption of alcohol both by women and men was common. They also had the knowledge about things like wine being more expensive than rum. However, their responses showed that a woman having ‘hard’ drinks especially in the presence of elders is not fine even in parties. For them, it does not look good and our society still has not become that ‘modern’. For upper class participants wine was a more favourable option for women than other drinks. After all, it is a ‘classy’ drink. More so, because not only wine costs higher than other drink but also the knowledge of wine is a rare quality to find among the masses. It is only the people with adequate cultural capital along with economic capital that can show off their status and class through consumption of wine.

Moreover, during my conversations with my male research participants, men were not all together absent from stories emanating from the kitchen space. Some fathers too have known to cook or still do it frequently. Even if they cook daily, for men to do so was seen as a rarity and an exception. Men cook in extraordinary situations such as—no female member in the family, staying away from family because of various reasons, wife’s income is necessary to run the family and so on. If these exceptional situations are not present and men still prefer to cook, then they are either termed as ‘hand packed husbands’, ‘girly’ or raised to a level of a great human soul who is considerate enough to cook. Furthermore, ‘In all other cases, men entered into foodie memories with traditionally masculine performances as cooking professionals, intrepid explorers, and culinary artists’ (Johnston and Baumann 2009: 188).

It is interesting how the process of memory and forgetting is intertwined with each other. For the ‘good’ woman, this forgetting about oneself and remembering about others, especially in relation to food becomes an important facet of one’s lives. As I went through and analysed my conversations with both men and women, I realised the crucial gendered dimension of memory, remembrance and forgetting. In other words, neither memory nor the process of forgetting is simple and innocent. Gender plays a very important role in these processes and the idea of the ‘good’ woman is integral to all these processes. Neat categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are already put in place. Both men and women take recourse to such categorisation to evaluate women and their characters.

Now, how this relationship between women, food and desires gets translated to public spaces of food consumption? How do women depict or negotiate with the imageries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women? What are the desires explored in such spaces and how?

Women and Eating-out Spaces

During my fieldwork, a particular image caught my attention. It was a picture inside the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet which has a close up of a girl licking her finger assumedly while having KFC chicken alone with a halo above her head. It was different from the images which gives importance to eating together that adorn the walls of Dominos; also one of my fieldwork sites. It is not that Dominos devalue women having pizza alone. But nonetheless, the importance is more on creating, re-creating and maintaining family and friendship bonds while having pizza at Dominos. Moreover, the amount of space that this particular picture at KFC occupied was rather an unusual site for me. Women in general are depicted as serving or preparing food than enjoying food themselves. It is the same logic of the significance of Indian Family life and the values of living and eating together that Dominos has co-opted in its strategy of marketing in the Indian scenario. However, being aware of the ‘liberal’ culture that American fast food chains symbolises, I understood that the image at KFC might not be an uncommon thing in this ‘foreign’ or ‘international’ context, even though the relation between women and food might not be imagined in the same sense in a traditional Assamese scenario in the city space of Guwahati. However, I realised that I was not completely correct. I thought that only ‘Un-Assamese’ spaces like KFC or Dominos could somehow afford to acknowledge the desire by women for food. This realisation that my perception was not fully correct occurred to me when I went to Paakghor,6

As one could notice, Paakghor had a couple of pictures with mostly the image of a woman dressed in traditional Assamese clothes, that is, the Mekhela-Chador offering food and welcoming people. The other images that adorned its walls and which had a more explicit visual appeal, was that of the lady dressed similarly in various poses while serving and offering food. There was however one picture which showed the same women as having a piece of chicken from a bowl of chicken curry herself rather than offering it or serving it. The women appeared to relish her desire for chicken instead of just eating it to fulfil her nutritional needs. I realised that the idea that women could desire food, if not a common idea is however not altogether absent. Even the market takes account of what images are saleable to customers wherein social practices are part of that marketing strategy. Therefore, it appeared to me that such imagery is not totally absent from what we can term as the ‘traditional’ Assamese mind-set. Nonetheless, most of the time, such images simply serve as ‘food porn’ catered by the market. As feminist critic Rosalind Coward in 1984 who popularised the term ‘food-porn’ reminds us that such glossy imagery of food and food practices are common market strategies. They are not meant to liberate women from gender norms related to food. These are re-packaged patriarchal market strategies, at times to attract potential female customers who would view such images as being liberating to them and to woo male customers with their pornographic intent.

Thus, one crucial aspect of this recognition of women desiring food is not the presence of such imagery but rather one also needs to question how such images are interpreted by customers and non-customers of these spaces, be it American food spaces or Assamese. During my visit to Paakghor, I realised that the widowed owner is the same woman who modelled for the pictures that adorn the walls of the restaurant. I spoke to one of my research participants whom I refer to as CB about the pictures. CB said:

Hence, CB was completely dismissive of not only the fact that women can desire food but also that married women or widows can have male friends and be explicitly present in the ‘male’ public sphere such as owning a restaurant. I asked some workers and customers of KFC, if they have ever experienced or has seen a woman eating as the first picture I was referring to. Most of them replied with a No. Some of them said that they can expect this from young girls. But the young girls who saw this picture told me that they usually do not eat like that. Even if they do, it would be only when nobody is watching or with the people they are extremely comfortable with. When I asked the reason for it, some of them had the opinion that it degrades their status and class. Some related it to ‘being a women’, the idea of modesty attached to it and also marital status and age. For instance, they cannot expect a married elderly woman of a ‘decent’ family to eat as a desiring food at a public space. The variety of responses I got pointed out to the broader fact that it is not even a socially approved idea for women to relish food explicitly even with family members inside the households. It is an uncomfortable proposition for women, especially married and older daughters to explicitly show their love for food. If they simply come into these spaces as desiring beings who want to satisfy their desire for food, it is seen as an aberration. Women are not free to choose just any and every public space to satisfy their desires related to food. They have to ascribe to the already laid out definitions of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘authentic’, ’traditional’, etc.

Foucault throws light into the idea of panopticon (Foucault 1995) which shows modern day’s idea of surveillance. Space embodies power hierarchy but it is also important to analyse the contradictory processes that take place while negotiating one’s position in a certain space or place (de Certeau 1984: 29–42). Therefore, not only structures of power but also agency of individuals exercising their own agency within that structure should form an important component of analysis of space and visibility in it. Just because most women are always under the feeling of disapproval or being judged in a negative light does not translates into them not going out to eat. They do go out. I asked this woman around 45 years of age,8

On another occasion, I asked this woman in her late thirties if her drinking is accepted by her husband, who also drinks occasionally. She told me that she does not drink outside in bars or other restaurants. She drinks mostly at her best friend’s place. She prefers that place as she perceives that place to be safe and her friend would not judge her. Moreover, she also pointed out that more than drinking for fun, it is mostly when she is upset with something that she drinks. She has to take care of her house and family. If she drinks for fun, it is mostly with her husband in parties.9

Therefore, at one end of the scale, there are women who have forgotten their desires or have never been aware of their desires related to food and then there are those who can still afford to showcase and satisfy their desires of food and drinks with some moderation and negotiations. For some, they have to re-name their desires as ‘need’. And for some, they can only afford to satisfy their cravings for things like alcohol by being under someone’s guidance or selecting a place where they would be un-judged for pursuing such desires.

When Women ‘Go-out’

When talking about spaces and especially women in public spaces, we also need to rethink the dichotomy between the public and private. Can we actually say that these boundaries are rigid and one does not spill over the other? Isn’t it that when it comes to public spaces of food consumption, particularly by women, there appears a fuzzy boundary between the public and the private? For instance, even when some people find the food of Paakghor as highly priced, given the fact that it is just like home-made food, it is still mostly preferred by the ‘good’ Assamese women. It shows that they are not corrupted by ‘foreign’ tastes. Nonetheless, some married women still do not prefer to have food there on the basis of the fact that they would be regarded as lazy wives and mothers who cannot cook a decent meal for their family and thus they have a preference for such a space. As, ‘Every meal is a message, and where we eat is as important as what we eat in getting the message across’ (Fox 2003: 5).

However, it is only a common phenomenon for women to go out at ‘eating out’ spaces in the contemporary urban space of Guwahati. Jan Whitaker (2005) evokes the importance of creating a ‘homely’ space in restaurants which was regarded as safe for women to go and consume food in early twentieth-century America. The moral ethos of the private sphere spills over to a public space. As culture and traditions are often intertwined with gender norms, it is very much manifested in restaurant spaces which are seen as ‘traditional’ like Paakghor. Mazurkiewicz (1983) too views that gender norms have always dictated terms to women consumers in public eating spaces. Women’s defined location in the private sphere at home, their prescribed roles and expected behaviour patterns, and male domination and control of women in the public areas of life, combine to generate social barriers which exclude unaccompanied women from public spaces. These patterns are reinforced by the managerial strategies of hotels and public houses which respond to female customers in terms of such stereotypes (Mazurkiewicz 1983: 118). As mentioned earlier, Dominos is perceived to be a space for family bonding and celebrating friendship ties. Paakghor again is a ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ space for families. The space in KFC, even though does not symbolise any such values of eating with one’s families, nonetheless most of the times portray enjoying food with one’s friends or dear ones. A lot of women also come to these spaces to pack food for their family members. It is this ‘need’ to meet the requirements of the family even when they come alone. But mostly, they come as mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends, that is, in relation to a male or in a group of women. This again points out to why even in such a space people are not able to conceptualise the idea of women eating alone beyond her ‘needs’.

Moreover, I have never come across any of my research participants who have spoken positively of such going out experiences, particularly at late evenings. There is a perpetual fear of getting unwanted stares, being questioned either implicitly or explicitly of one’s character or being harassed on the street. Many of my research participants themselves assessed the character of women negatively who go out to enjoy in the evenings without any essential purpose or the ‘need’ to go out. This ‘need’ to go out is primarily defined as, when a male member is not available in the house to meet the need, or the urgency of this need should be such that one cannot wait for the next morning. For instance, it is perfectly understood if someone’s husband is suffering from a serious health condition and there is no other capable male member in the house to get him medicines. Other than this kind of an exceptional situation women going out at night is neither perceived to be necessary nor is seen in a positive light.

After the first few days of my fieldwork, one particular evening I decided to go out for dinner at a restaurant which was also part of my fieldwork for this study. I noticed that the ratio of women to men would have been around 1:7 on the streets. I felt unsafe and was being stared at. Even in the restaurant, we could see the ratio of female to male customers was around 1:10. While returning after dinner, I could not find a bus. The autos were quoting almost ten times more than the fare of the bus. I had to walk back home after dinner. This experience of mine itself reflects a very important issue about the relation between women, safety, public spaces and the city space of Guwahati. And all of these issues come into play when studying and understanding women’s experiences of ‘Eating out’ in the city of Guwahati. This experience made me more aware and I could empathise more with women who did not go out because of concerns related to safety or disapproved when their fellow women

did so.

Moreover, before my fieldwork, I had a sense that women, especially elderly women were not fond of ‘foreign’ foods like pizzas, burgers, etc. In my assumption, I thought that it is the nature of food at KFC and Dominos that seemed alien to them which resulted in mere repulsion toward these kinds of food by this elderly female population. In other words, it seemed alien to their ‘traditional’ outlook. Later I found out that for these elderly women, it is not always the materiality of ‘foreign’ food that they are repulsive to but because they lack company or they have never had the experience of eating alone outside at a commercial space. They are afraid to go out in the absence of any company. There was an unease surrounding the question—‘What would people say?’ In addition to that there was a fear of being harassed and meeting with an accident. The elderly women did show some minor inclination to such ‘foreign’ food or at least were not always completely averse to the idea of tasting them. They did taste it whenever their children would bring home the food or order for a home delivery. Thus, it is quite unnatural for elderly women to go out and eat, especially when they do not have anybody to accompany them. This indicates that it can be absolutely naive to assume that it is always the ‘foreignness’ of food that the elderly women are repulsive to or because they are bound to some ideas of ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ food. They avoid going out to such spaces because there are myriad of reasons which goes much beyond the alien nature of these ‘foreign’ food. In other words, one can sense the unfriendly nature of the city space of Guwahati which clearly indicates that the elderly population of the city is an easily forgotten category that is not taken into account while thinking about the ‘modern’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘developed’ city of Guwahati. Their concern for safety might not be always to be safe from sexual harassment. It can be also about protecting oneself from other kinds of harm such as physical hurt caused by an accident on the city streets. It is not only about elderly women who find such spaces uncomfortable for them. These spaces implicitly exclude people such as elderly men, the differently abled and the lower class. All these categories of people find these places inaccessible or uncomfortable for reasons ranging from uncomfortable stairs, that is, hindrance to physically accessibility as there are no lifts and ramps most of the times in and around such spaces, to the fear of being mocked based on one’s class or not having the cultural capital to behave appropriately.

However, it should be asserted here that the ‘international’ spaces such as Dominos or KFCs are still preferred more by people. Both female workers and consumers prefer them for work and to eat. They appear safer than many local restaurants. They attribute this characteristic of spaces to their ‘international’ status wherein people are expected to be more professional and decent in their attitude and behaviour. They are still perceived to be capable of providing a safer ambience to workers as well as consumers in an unsafe city space of Guwahati. The underlying fact which gives rise to such a perception is the narrow class based hierarchy. The elite character of these spaces is seen as the reason for not letting unfortunate events to happen to women. According to them, the lower class (which is often criminalised) is kept out of such spaces. Similar is the case with Paakghor. Even if it is not an ‘International’ space, but nonetheless, it is not a space where people from all classes can afford to go. The food there is priced according to a middle class and upper middle class sensibility. Thus, Paakghor too is perceived to be a ‘safe’ place. These notions on safety intertwined with gender and class inequality points out the rather distorted picture of safety regarding women in the city of Guwahati and which is also relevant to other city spaces of India.

As pointed out earlier, this concept of safety again is not a one-dimensional concept. It is not only inter-wined in the notions of physical safety, that is, protecting oneself from getting raped or harassed but also issues of social and emotional safety. Social safety here would refer to women trying to refrain from portrayal of negative image about oneself to the world. As for most women, ‘What would people think?’ forms an important part of their day-to-day lives. Having and maintaining a positive image of a ‘good’ woman is very important. In terms of emotional safety, it is about not suffering from the guilt of eating out alone or eating something good alone without one’s family members. A good daughter and especially a good mother/daughter-in-law/grandmother would never think of enjoying a meal alone. In the broader schema of her life, it is more important for her that her family is well fed and happy rather than being concerned with her own needs and desires. If she ever gives more priority to herself rather than her family, she would be deemed selfish, egotistic and a ‘bad’ woman. Women eating alone in these spaces are still an unusual proposition.

Conclusion

Public spaces still do not treat people equally and gender inequality is one of the starkest manifestations of that. My interest in the broader question of—What does it mean for women to have and desire food at public spaces of food consumption? Reveals that such spaces of food consumption are embodiment of the unequal treatment that women face in the larger sphere of our patriarchal societies. Female desires are still viewed from a unilinear perspective, that is, either they are thought of as not existing or if they exist it is related to a selfish and lustful woman. The scope for women to meet various desires related to food consumption is thus constrained by such distorted formulations. However, it does not mean that they are passive victims. They are ‘passively active’, as I have suggested. They negotiate with these constraints.

The issue of visibility along with meanings that are attributed to a space which leads to evaluation of a woman’s character forms the core concerns when women think of exploring their desires in eating in out spaces. Nonetheless, the neo-liberal set that we find ourselves in has contributed to a certain cosmopolitan consumerist sensibility in women. This sensibility is extending an illusion of freedom and empowerment when it comes to women going out to eat. Media as an ally to it boosts this illusion through various forms of advertising. It clearly shows women as ‘active’ when it comes to pursuing their pleasures related to food. But, experiences of women in a study like this are a reminder to us what this ‘active’ role entails. However, a study exclusively on media-mediated image making on the relationship between women and food is something that needs further in-depth research.

The issue of various kinds of safety never fails to haunt any ‘empowered’ or ‘free’ women in public spaces of food-consumption. Nonetheless, this study has tried to extend the suggestion or rather the assertion by Mohanty (1984) to challenge the homogenous image of the third-world women as essentially passive victims. Thus, as I have mentioned earlier, women use various tactics of negotiation to justify their desires related to food and thus are not completely passive but are ‘passively active’.

To sum it up, all the ‘eating-out’ research sites were only a small prism to look into the larger concerns of inequality and exclusivity practiced in our society and the urban spaces such as that of Guwahati, especially related to gender. Spaces like KFC and Dominos under the garb of American democracy and Paakghor under the umbrella of Assamese authenticity have been only perpetuating elitist patriarchal exclusivity and inequality.

This present study on experiences of food consumption in relation to women in public spaces have indicated that ‘stories’ about food consumption are not only about amusement, pleasure or delight. These stories are equally about anxieties, resentment and at times resistance, even in the most subtle ways.