TY - BOOK ID - 30666686 TI - Building houses out of chicken legs PY - 2006 SN - 0807877352 0807830224 080785686X 9780807877357 9781429453936 1429453931 9780807830222 9780807856864 9798890880079 PB - Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press DB - UniCat KW - Chickens KW - Meat KW - African Americans KW - African American women KW - African American cooking. KW - Cooking (Chicken) KW - Food habits KW - Food preferences KW - Social aspects. KW - Symbolic aspects. KW - Food. KW - Social conditions. KW - Food selection KW - Cookery (Chicken) KW - Cooking with chicken KW - African American cookery KW - Afro-American cookery KW - Cookery, Afro-American KW - Cookery, Negro KW - Soul food cooking KW - Afro-Americans KW - Black Americans KW - Colored people (United States) KW - Negroes KW - Meats KW - Gallus domesticus KW - Gallus gallus KW - Use in cooking KW - Nutrition KW - Taste KW - Cooking (Poultry) KW - Cooking, American KW - Africans KW - Ethnology KW - Blacks KW - Food of animal origin KW - Poultry KW - Eggs KW - Psychological aspects KW - Production KW - Black people KW - African American women. KW - Afro-American women KW - Women, African American KW - Women, Negro KW - Women UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:30666686 AB - Chicken--both the bird and the food--has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these complex relationships clarifies how present associations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve. ER -