“Plastic-Bag Housewives” and Postmodern Restaurants?: Public and Private in Bangkok's Foodscape

This paper provides evidence of alternative urban food strategies challenging ethnocentric public/private models of urban space that have their roots in a particular historical experience of the Western city. This will be achieved by painting a brief “foodscape” of the sprawling, dynamic metropolis of Bangkok. Specific attention will be devoted to the nature of gender relations in this urban food system, particularly with respect to the culture of public eating. I will argue that, traditionally, women and men in Bangkok occupy different socio-spatial positions in the Bangkok food system and that, more recently, femininity and masculinity are being spatially re-orchestrated in light of “postmodern” developments. The first example will detail the arrival of the “plastic-bag housewife,” who is instrumental in blurring public and private space in Bangkok. Quotidian, mass-based food strategies will be compared and contrasted with elite food establishments of recent vintage in the city. Many of these have a postmodern quality, blending nostalgic architectural and design pastiche with the contemporary restaurant. “Food gardens” and restaurants in an ostensibly “royal style” represent and promote specific and new forms of gender relations. The place of women within the constellation of these relations does not reflect the traditional economic and social prominence of women in the community. Instead, 6lite establishments either display women publicly as aesthetic objects or capitalize on their talents in the “back” areas of the kitchen. Thai men, who are a minority of small foodshop owners, are involved in key roles in the larger, more profitable food establishments. The nature of “public” and “private” in Bangkok civil society, as well as the postmodern blurring of points along the continuum, cannot be separated from the locally specific, dynamic Thai constructions and practices of gender.