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

the home and thus did not have to spend their days confined to their kitchens, preparing their families’ meals. As William H. Chafe explains, because “[g]ender roles have altered significantly” since the late 1960s, “new opportunities now exist for women whose aspirations in the past would have been circumscribed by the ideology of hearth and home” (238). Although there was (and still is) some resistance to these changing roles, the Women’s Movement “brought together enough potential supporters so that there seemed at least a possibility that Americans might agree to the proposition that women should be as free as men to make choices about jobs, family, sex, and personal fulfillment” (Chafe 201). The expansion and thus subversion of traditional (and limiting) definitions of masculinity and femininity allowed many men and women, such as Andrew from Catfish and Mandala and Mona from Mona in the Promised Land, to assume gender identities that, like their cultural identities, granted them a sense of personal fulfillment.

It must be noted, however, that whereas all the literature in this analysis was written after the Civil and Women’s Rights Movements, about half of it is set prior to that period, during the years following the Second World War, an era of “American” nationalism and cultural conservatism that defined “Americanness” and ethnicity (as well as masculinity and femininity) as mutually exclusive terms. The dominant culture, as well as its legal and political systems, set up a rigid dichotomy between “Americanness” and ethnic Otherness, a division that prevented an individual from consenting to or constructing a socially acceptable identity of racial or ethnic hybridity. As Alba explains, “wartime situations have turned ethnic identity into a matter of national loyalty, thereby giving ethnicity a subversive appearance and ultimately hastening a deemphasis on nationality and differences” (“Twilight” 142). As a result of ethnicity’s “subversive” status, many individuals attempted to assimilate or at least pass into the dominant American culture. Thomas J. Archdeacon explains that after World War II, “men and women of the second and later generations … adapted their behavior to the manners and mores of the country” (201). As a result, many white ethnics, such as Peter’s parents in Black Dog of Fate, and people of color, such as Ralphin Typical