Ingredients for Revolution: Alex D. Ketchum In Conversation with Christina Pascucci-Ciampa

All She Wrote Books welcomes Alex D. Ketchum in conversation with Christina Pascucci-Ciampa for a celebration of Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses. A study of feminist restaurants in the United States, from 1972 to the present.

In 1972, a restaurant called Mother Courage opened in New York—followed by more than 230 feminist cafes, coffeehouses, and restaurants across the United States over the next fifty years. Ingredients for Revolution collects their stories for the first time, showcasing the vital role these institutions played in the fight for women’s liberation, LGBTQ equality, and food justice. Alex D. Ketchum surveys these businesses’ various financial models and dives into broader issues of labor, food sourcing, and cultural programming to understand how these women yoked feminist and capitalist commitments toward a more equitable marketplace. Brimming with archival research, interviews, and photographs, Ingredients for Revolution is a fundamental work of women’s, food, and cultural history.

Since 2018, Dr. Alex Ketchum has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, environmental, technological, and gender history. Ketchum's first peer-reviewed book, Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (Concordia University Press, 2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ketchum's second book, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (2022), is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. Ketchum's interest in past imaginings of utopia through business creation and the implementation of communications technologies has guided her new research and third book project on historically contextualizing the relationship between feminist ethics and AI. You can find out more about her other writings, podcasts, zines, exhibitions, and more at https://www.alexketchum.ca. 

This event is free and open to all people. Masks are required during the event. Please contact us

at info@allshewrotebooks.com or 617-440-4623 if you need any accommodations during the event.