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body in the production of female authors from Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and the United States. Moreover, these authors express themselves in a range of genres that include epistle, essay, novel, poetry, short story, and film. Initially, I examine texts that deal with food and cooking; later I discuss others that deal with eating, weight, and eating disorders.
I analyze these texts with an interdisciplinary critical approach that considers cultural, sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. Thus far, American and European feminist scholars have advanced most of the existing theories regarding the complicated relationship between food, eating, and a woman’s body. What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers takes into consideration the specificity of Latin American cultures and it combines Latin American theories with those brought forth by North American and European critics in an effort to more accurately account for the idiosyncratic manifestations presently occurring in Latin American fiction.
The trope of food in Latin American women’s literature is not a recent phenomenon, as evidenced by my examination of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s well-known “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (“Reply to Sor Philotea”) in seventeenth-century Mexico. The reason why I included some texts and not others was based on the symbolic meanings that food acquires in Latin American women’s imagination that I wished to analyze. Latin American books and articles on weight and eating disorders abound, in particular in the fields of psychology and sociology. Nevertheless, in Latin America, fictional texts dealing with weight and eating disorders seem to be a new occurrence. These subjects have attracted the attention of female writers of fiction only in recent years, as these subjects have become prominent in public discourse and subsequently have filtered through popular culture. Herein lays another contribution of this volume: it features