More often than not, the kitchen has been designated as a feminine space. Kitchen appliances, in turn, are often seen as extensions of the female body to which a range of temperatures and climatic conditions (ice cold, frigid, smoking hot, wet, dry, etc.) are disproportionately attributed. The colloquial expression for pregnancy “to have a bun in the oven,” though not complimentary insofar as it equates a pregnant woman with a household appliance, provides a telling example of a long-standing link between procreation, gestation, and kitchen technology. The phrase imagines the womb as an oven and, by the same logic, the oven as a womb, similar to “The Gingerbread Man” and other folktales of high-carb homunculi cooked up by women in the kitchen. Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), “a fairytale for grown-ups” according to the director, falls within that tradition, although instead of a bun in the oven, the story features a body in the refrigerator, and instead of piping-hot runaway baked goods, the woman of the house prepares a tentacular, glutinous golem through a miscarriage of groceries and bodily secretions expelled in the tunnels of the Berlin U-Bahn during an ecstatic trance. The aberrant offspring of a body in crisis disrupts a marriage, an affair, and two kitchens. When considered in relation to perishable food distribution, refrigerator-related household duties, and the desire of a woman to say “I” for herself, the miscarriage-birth emerges as an abject expression of identities both human and nonhuman, of a woman who runs hot and cold, and of refrigerators and their unspeakable contents.
Marc Oliver, excerpt from Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects
