Food, gender and Irishness– how Irish women in Coventry make home Moya Kneafsey and Rosie Cox Department of Geography, Coventry University ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the spaces and social relations of food consumption in order to examine how Irish migrants to Coventry, a city in the English West Midlands, form a sense of identity. On the basis of in depth interviews with first generation migrants, it is argued that food consumption practices are linked to Irish identity in three ways. First, migrants in Coventry were often part of extended family networks that exchanged foods between Britain and Ireland. Second, knowledge about foods and cooking was gained by many of the inter- viewees in Ireland, making them familiar and comfortable with specific local foods. Last, and related to this, certain foodstuffs were sought out by intervie- wees because they were Irish and remembered from ‘home’. Specific gender relations pervaded food consumption practices and it was found that women, through their involvement in food purchase and preparation, were key actors in constructing an often ambiguous sense of Irishness in Britain. Key index words: food, consumption, gender, Irishness. Introduction Food is now widely recognised as an important medium through which various aspects of self and community identities can be individually and collectively (re)constructed (Bell and Valentine, 1997; Caplan, 1997; Palmer, 1998). Yet although research examining the relationships between gender identities and food, and ethnicity and food exists, less has been said about how gender interacts with ethnicity to shape food consumption practices. The aim in this paper, therefore, is to investigate how aspects of gender and ethnicity inter-relate through a case study of the food consumption activities of Irish-born people living in Coventry. Food features in expressions of Irish identity, often exaggerated in popular culture such as the caricature of Mrs Doyle and her tea and cakes, and in anti-Irish jokes, usually making reference to potatoes. Women’s food consumption behaviour can be particularly significant as it is they who often most actively engage in creating ‘homespace’ for themselves and their families. This paper begins to examine how women have selected, used and interpreted food to (re)create gendered and ethnic visions of identity and homespace. It is suggested that a focus on the ordinary spaces and social relations of food consumption can provide an insight into the construction of an often ambiguous sense of Irishness in Britain. Irish women in Britain and Coventry - an ‘invisible diaspora’? Diasporic groups are usually thought of as those who have been forced to migrate, perhaps because of religious intolerance or economic necessity. Normally this migration has been sustained or repeated and the group will be dispersed to many new locations rather than remaining together. These groups have some kind of collective memory which constructs and Irish Geography, Volume 35(1), 2002, 6-15.