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

Austria, Freud noticed a propensity among his women patients to develop anorexia, which the analyst interpreted as a form of melancholia in the presence of a rudimentarily developed sexuality. Eating-related illnesses among women are present in contemporary literary texts as well. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the work of Victorian female authors, such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Emily Dickinson, and conclude that these authors’ characters were essentially “madwomen” because of the restrictive gender categories their societies forced upon them both privately and professionally. Gilbert and Gubar also observe the remarkably high number of female protagonists troubled with psychosomatic illnesses like anorexia. Had the social dictate of confining women to the kitchen and to its productions (while precluding them from other male-dominated social functions) played a part in their psychosomatic afflictions? Might women’s relegation to all concerns gastronomic be contributing to their malaise?

Women today face a cruel paradox. On the one hand, society still expects them to be engaged with food, as it implicates them as the principal providers of nourishment for the family. On the other hand, women are under constant pressure to maintain the stylish silhouette that has been widely promulgated by male-controlled media and gender industries like cosmetics, fashion, and fitness. Hence, the patriarchal system that for centuries positioned women in the kitchen, today also dictates to them how much food they can consume once they prepare it. Even though body image issues and eating disorders are often associated with “First World” countries, over the past few decades neoliberal economic policies and social and cultural factors have contributed to the emergence of disorderly eating behaviors in Latin America. In Chile, for instance, 70,000 women between the ages of 14 and 30 are anorexic and 350,000 are bulimic,