|
|
American, attempted to pass as “Americans,” in part by moving to the suburbs and attempting to behave as members the dominant culture—at least in public. Of course, it was easier for white Americans like Peter’s parents, whose descent qualities did not identify them as ethnic Others, to pass as members of the dominant culture. Conversely, during the postwar years, other ethnic Americans, such as Alejo from Our House in the Last World, chose to embrace—or at least not try to conceal—their Other status, in part by remaining in their ethnic neighborhoods outside the parameters of the dominant American culture, where they performed behaviors, including the consumption of ethnic food, that worked to identify them as ethnic Others.
Just as the dominant postwar culture defined “Americanness” and “ethnicity” as mutually exclusive terms, so also it worked to reinforce biologically based views of gender. Chafe notes that during the two decades following the Second World War, “the new focus on conforming to traditional sex roles represented an act of ‘domestic containment’ that paralleled the act of ‘international containment’ whereby the Free World said no to the spread of Communism” (187); in this way, the “new ‘cult of domesticity’ reflected an apparently intense preoccupation with conformism in the 1950s” (187). The American patriarchy, “committed to a polarization between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ spheres” (Chafe 192), contained its women by forcing them to remain at home and prepare their families’ meals, and it required men to work outside of the home in America’s consumer economy. Because many ethnic patriarchies propagated a similar gender ideology, “proper” men and women, regardless of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, were required to assume identities that reinforced essentialist definitions of gender. Fortunately, after the Civil and Women’s Rights Movements, more men and women of all races and ethnicities had more freedom to undermine such restrictive and unfulfilling categories.
In each of the chapters that follow, I analyze two ethnic American texts written during the last thirty years of the twentieth century that prominently feature incidents of cooking and eating in a thematically similar way. I begin with a comparison of Our House in the Last World