I meant to write ‘ritual’ and wrote ‘dishes’ instead

By Susan Rudy

Just before I sit down to think about ritual and writing, we’re in the kitchen listening to the
radio and making coffee. My hands in warm dishwater cleaning the French press, I hear
today’s tough news for utopians. From September 2028, Andy Burnham’s Labour
government will expect schools in England to offer technical subjects to pupils from the age
of 14. [1] My (lesbian) partner complains. This will encourage boys into construction and girls
to stay home, she says. I’m furious. Even the Labour Party is contributing to the anti-feminist
backlash. But I have a piece to write and what I need first is coffee. Just then, a way into this
piece arrives: I’ve been doing research for decades; surely, I’ve thought about this before. I
will search through my archive to see what I’ve already written, read, or thought about
‘ritual’. I dry my hands, grab my laptop, and sit down to write the search term ‘ritual’. I write ‘dishes’ instead.

Freud had a lot to say about parapraxis, or slips of the tongue and pen: the way
apparently unintentional and minor mistakes reveal hidden thoughts, inner conflicts,
unconscious desires. [2] But what did this slip mean? I meant to write ‘ritual’ and wrote ‘dishes’
instead. Why? When Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa, and Diana Damian Martin invited us to
think about the present – blurry and hard to fathom on the one hand, blade-sharp, distinct and
unmistakeable on the other – why did I find myself thinking about my work in the kitchen?

The answer isn’t mysterious or unfathomable. Like the knives in my kitchen, it is
‘blade-sharp’. My partner is about to leave for work. I’m about to sit down to write. But I
don’t have to. The boy/girl distinction isn’t in operation here, but certain aspects of
femininity and masculinity certainly are. What are the ‘rituals of now’, Mary, Maddy, and
Diana ask? Surely, they’re calling for rituals of grief and joy at a civilisational scale when
what has arrived on my page is smaller. And wetter.

Sara Ahmed writes of what we can learn from queer domesticity research about
improper use. [3] You would think that, for my partner and me, there would be no inherited template, but gendered expectations remain in same-sex bodies. My partner is (just slightly!)
more masculine than me. She is twelve years younger. She is not a biological parent. I’ve had
a long career but gave up full-time work to focus on my writing. I’ve given birth to two
children, now adults. I have grandkids. I like being in my sunny kitchen, making everything
clean and lovely. My mother actively discouraged me from thinking of doing the dishes as a
ritual required of me (‘go do your homework,’ she’d say, ‘that’s more important’), yet I have
taken it on, and am learning – slowly – that cleaning a kitchen can be done, not out of
obligation but as comfort. And joy. Making a meal, doing the dishes, parenting a child can be
done, not out of gendered expectations, but because you’re hungry, the dishes are dirty, you
love your child.

Something Other’s call asks what repetitions, movements, sounds, evocations a ritual
requires. The dishes give us some answers. Repetition: same motion, same order, every day.
Sound: splashing water, jangling cutlery, accompanying radio. Movement: my body doing
something with my hands while my mind is elsewhere. But is that sufficient? Mary, Maddy,
and Diana suggest that, in the words of psychotherapist Francis Weller, this present moment
is the wild edge of sorrow, but his language moves toward opening and joy breaking
through. [4] Doing the dishes doesn’t offer that reliably. I wasn’t thrilled to be washing out that
coffee maker again. But I love having coffee with my partner, taking a second cup to my
desk, having time to think and read while she has to run out the door. Is this ritual by
attrition? Not chosen because it heals, but because it’s what’s left standing when the larger
rituals – collective, political, affective – feel insufficient or impossible?

Later, the sink is full. We’ve had our supper. We’ll do the dishes. And the pleasure I take in it
might not be about gender at all, but about tending and sharing a space. Making a nest, a fire,
a table, a garden: every culture has rituals of care that predate and exceed patriarchy, even if
patriarchy handed them to (most) women as unpaid labour. [5] My pleasure is in the tending
itself, and my rage comes from how thoroughly that tending has been gendered and devalued.
Doing the dishes is the ritual, and my slip is a small act of grief: that this pleasure has been
demoted from ritual to chore.

1 See Branwen Jeffreys, ‘Schools to offer technical subjects to pupils from age 14 in England, Burnham says’, BBC News, 12 July 2026.
2 See Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Benn, 1914).
3 See Sarah Ahmed, ‘What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use’ (Duke, 2019)

4 See Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (North Atlantic Books, 2015, 2025).
5 See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986).

Susan Rudy is a Canadian-born feminist theorist and writer based in London. Her chapbook Consequences (above/ground press, 2026) is an excerpt from Hand Over, an as-yet-unpublished and hybrid work ten years in the making. An earlier piece from that project, ‘Judith Butler, the jolly jumper, and me’, appeared in Something Other’s ‘The Thirteenth Chapter – On Elasticity’.

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