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

In this way, Mona’s actions demonstrate the fourth and most fulfilling way of changing one’s identity, constructing a multicultural identity that is based on both descent and the ability to consent.

Just as an item of food signifies an ethnic or “American” cultural identity, the acts performed on these edible signifying units—food preparation and food consumption—signify what these cultures define as feminine or masculine.¹⁴ In the literature, some individuals perform acts of culinary signification—cooking and eating—that serve not only to re/define themselves as ethnic, “American,” or a combination of both but also to validate or undermine their culturally prescribed gender roles. Just as the literature works to destabilize descent-based views of ethnicity, “Americanness,” and (more generally) cultural identity, so too it calls into question those essentialist theories of gender that equate one’s gender identity with one’s biological identity.

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler discredits the biological view of gender, or the “belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (6). Butler demonstrates that gender is “a shifting and contextual phenomenon” that “does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific relations” (10). Because gender is “radically independent of sex,” it functions as “a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (Butler 7). Similar to Sollors’ theory of ethnicity, Butler’s theory of gender suggests that the individual may undermine the “biology is destiny” (Butler 4) approach to life by assuming agency over his or her own identity and thus over his or her own life. It must be noted, however, that Butler cautions against switching one gender identity for the other because if this is done, the individual paradoxically works to preserve, not to dismantle, the binary gender system that dichotomizes masculinity and femininity. Instead, to find contentment, Butler suggests that the individual should work to construct a gender identity that functions as an open coalition or “an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences