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while in Argentina, the percentage of women afflicted with eating disorders is three times greater than in the United States.8
In recent years, Latin American women authors have been revisiting the contested site of the kitchen and their own connections to food and its consumption in all forms (raw and cooked) in an effort to articulate and transform women’s relationship to each of these. Food is a momentous topic in their literary production because it acts as a code in a discourse that is conciliatory and recuperative of female subjectivity while it resists and subverts male hegemonic narrative. Latin American women are now once more appropriating the already socially assigned feminine metaphor of cooking to criticize the patriarchal social norms responsible for their oppression. Despite Jean Franco’s assertion in Plotting Woman (1989) that “contemporary women novelists not only in Mexico but all over Latin America…move[d] beyond the confines of domesticity,”9 for women authors, the kitchen is that elusive Woolfian “room of one’s own.”
In Chicanas and Latin American Women Writers Exploring the Realm of the Kitchen as a Self-Empowering Site (2001), María Claudia André agrees that, for contemporary writers, the kitchen is “a self-empowering site where gender and sexual identities (or subjectivities) may be explored and transformed.”10 Latin American literary critics also appropriate the language of the kitchen; for instance, Debra Castillo’s work, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992), symbolically begins in the kitchen, as the author is chatting with her mother-in-law about fish, spices, and measures.
What is eating Latin American women writers? Gender, class, and racial perceptions, which they believe are discriminatory to their gender. My study contributes to the ongoing critical dialogue about women and food by bringing together, for the first time, fictional texts that engage with the topics of food and the