Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

that an item of food “can carry a distinctively masculine or feminine charge … centered upon captions of strength with ‘strong’ foods symbolizing masculinity and the needs of men, and ‘weak’ foods seen as appropriate to feminine needs and inclinations” (52–53); because of this dichotomy, the patriarchy dictates that its members consume the appropriate foods in the appropriate ways.

In the literature, whereas an act of food consumption for a male and a female alike almost always signifies self-indulgence and autonomy—traditionally masculine qualities—an act of food preparation occupies a more ambiguous position in the process of culinary signification. Depending on its context, this domestic task may signify subordination, self-sacrifice, and submissiveness (traditionally feminine qualities) or creativity, autonomy, and resistance to oppression (qualities that the patriarchy does notdefine as feminine). Most gender theorists have argued that acts of food preparation “help to ensure the subordination of women” (Inness, Dinner Roles 1), and certainly the literature supports this claim.¹⁵ In Oscar Hijuelos’s novel Our House in the Last World, for example, as the food preparer Mercedes moves about her kitchen preparing her family’s daily meals, she appears physically spent and emotionally drained because she places the physical and emotional needs and desires of others before her own.

Furthermore, the literature suggests the similarities between a food preparer and the meals that she makes, for both she and her food become objects of masculine consumption.¹⁶ Though the patriarchy permits and even encourages males to indulge themselves in food and sex, it requires “proper” females not only to refrain from excessive acts of eating but also to ignore or deny their sexual appetites. As Susan Bordo explains, “such rigid and highly moralized restrictions on female appetite and eating” (20) may be traced to Victorian England, which made “restriction and denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity” (29). In the literature, such restrictions still exist; those “proper” women, ethnic and “American” alike, must work to suppress their physical and sexual appetites.

Despite its oppressive quality, food preparation in a different context may signify autonomy and self-empowerment, qualities that all