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

As we observe in this quotation, irony is another weapon by which Sor Juana expresses her frustration at not being able to pursue her intellectual interests. By disclosing the cooking “secrets” she discovered and then by repeating the preposition “that” to describe the different stages of the preparation of a stew she demonstrates that women are perfectly capable of engaging in logical and analytical thinking. Moreover, with her comments about Aristotle, she equates those socially denigrated cooking skills to the elevated study of the sciences and philosophy that traditionally had been associated with the male. The kitchen then becomes another ploy in this remarkable nun’s arsenal. She transforms the kitchen, a place assigned to her by the dominant patriarchal culture, into an empowering and visible space from which to plea for the intellectual emancipation of all women.

“Lección de cocina”

Three centuries later, just like Sor Juana (whose writings resonate throughout this short story),³ in “Lección de cocina” (“Cooking Lesson”) Rosario Castellanos utilizes the culinary trope to generate a gender-based discourse that denounces women’s inferior standing in Mexico’s male-chauvinist society while she argues that women have as much right as men to pursue intellectual endeavors.

With her thesis “On Feminine Culture,” which she wrote to obtain her bachelor of philosophy degree at the University Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1950, Castellanos began a lifelong exploration of the role of women in Mexican society, an interest that one can ascertain from her large poetic and narrative