Recipe for Female Identity

Ingredients:
– phallocentric culture
– invisible precedents
– predefined role models
– appropriation
– identification
– fulfilment of the feminine principle
– anxiety
– silence

Preparation:
Trim off any excess and mold it to an aesthetically pleasing shape. Secure with twine or netting to maintain its form. Then, cut into easily manageable pieces. If it’s robust or tough, tenderize with a specially textured hammer. If it’s more delicate, a gentle beating with a flat-surfaced mallet will suffice, ensuring it retains its desirable qualities. Minimize excessive handling during the process to avoid compromising its palatability.

Recipe:
To create female identity, take a large mixing bowl and a lifespan of time. Begin by mashing together the precedents inherited from our mothers and grandmothers. To this raw mixture, add a dash of impersonal muses of poets and painters and a pinch of vague archetypes from films and video games to taste. As the process progresses, you come to realize that there are no exact measurements, no prepared ingredients, only selecting and improvising as you go along. Yet, you may find yourself uncertain as to what you’re cooking. As your desperation grows, you may inadvertently add too many contradictory opinions and expectations, causing the mixture to become fluid. Oozing out of your hands, it sticks to your skin. Home is turned inside out and upside down – the soft fabric of your apron turns to chains, and reaching for the prepared kitchen knife, your hands clasp the hilt of a sword.

Achievement unlocked – can you modify the recipe, or do you always have to restart from the beginning?.

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The text was inspired by Orsolya Drozdik’s Walking Brains – Contemporary Feminist Discourse, Gerda Széplaky’s pieces Are women animals? and The Body of Man, and the Hungarian Wikipedia article on Kitchen Procedures dealing with the preparation of meat.

The title of the exhibition refers to Carol J. Clover’s study, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Films.”

Curator: Dorottya Balkó