What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers: Food, Weight, and Ea ...

texts that have received critical attention but also others that have yet to be translated into English or even recognized outside the countries where they were published. Although a number of books about food and eating in fictional texts have been published in recent years,¹¹ to the best of my knowledge, this is the only extensive analysis of food, weight, and eating disorders in Latin American literature.

What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers, then, fills a theoretical void because it speaks to an ever-growing concern in Latin American literature about women, food, and the body. It also addresses women authors across a spectrum that includes six different countries. Another essential aspect of this volume is its deliberate reflection on these topics by means of texts from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century.

The first chapter, “Intellectual Appetite,” considers texts that appropriate the language of the kitchen to articulate gender and intellectual issues. In “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (“Reply to Sor Philotea,” 1691), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz writes about eating and cooking while providing diverse anecdotes of her daily life in order to assert a woman’s right to develop her intellectual inquisitiveness. In so doing, Sor Juana not only disputes women’s banishment from the field of knowing, but she also atones for Eve’s first “transgression.” Three centuries later, Rosario Castellanos’ “Lección de cocina” (“Cooking Lesson,” 1971) eavesdrops on the monologue of an educated newlywed who, while preparing a meal for her husband, reflects on her marital life. In this short story, Castellanos makes use of the culinary trope to generate a gender-based discourse that denounces women’s inferior standing in a patriarchal society, while she argues that women have as much right as men to fulfill their intellectual vocation. The chapter concludes with an examination of Rosario Ferré’s essay “La cocina de la escritura” (The Writing Kitchen,