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

Chapter 1

Intellectual Appetites

Through the centuries, women have used food (an element so close to their gender experience) to strengthen family relations, develop affiliations with other women, and to represent main concerns in their artistic creations. One could argue that, during colonial times, the discourse of food, as it relates to women’s issues, might have begun in Latin America with Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In her famous letter “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (“Reply to Sor Philotea,” 1691), Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, as she was known before taking her vows, employs tropes of eating and cooking to defend women’s right to write about any topic they desire in response to the ecclesiastic authorities who sought to reprimand her.

The nun’s conflicts with the clergy had intensified because of the “Carta Atenagórica” (The Athenagoric Letter, 1690). At the request of the Archbishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández