Abstract

This essay analyzes women’s connections with cooking through the work of three female writers from Argentina. I uncover key moments in the history of the country in which culinary practices represent a channel for larger reflections on gender struggles and women’s rights. I distinguish three representative cases within the complex and rich relationship between women, cooking, and feminism in Argentine literature: the incursion of nineteenth-century writers in recipe books; the feminists of the 1980s and their use of the culinary language as a political and erotic expression; and cooking and food as an exploration of new social and sexual orders in contemporary literature. Within each period, I focus on a particular writer and literary work: Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica (1890), Tununa Mercado’s short story “Antieros” (1988), and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017). These Argentine authors provide their knowledge on the diverse cultural roots and habits in South American cooking and give predominance to senses and desire over rational prescriptions on women’s bodies, among other narrative strategies. Thus, analyzed as a corpus, these authors give us a broader idea of feminist practices through cooking and, ultimately, expand multiple meanings of feminism itself from a local perspective.

摘要

本文通过三位来自阿根廷的女作家的作品分析了女性与烹饪的联系。我揭示了这个国家历史上的关键时刻，在这些时刻，烹饪实践代表了对性别斗争和妇女权利进行更广泛反思的渠道。我区分了阿根廷文学中女性、烹饪和女权主义之间复杂而丰富的关系中的三个代表性案例：19世纪作家对食谱的入侵；1980 年代的女权主义者及其将烹饪语言用作政治和色情表达的方式；以及烹饪和食物作为对当代文学中新的社会和性秩序的探索。在每个时期，我都专注于特定的作家和文学作品：胡安娜·曼努埃拉·戈里蒂 (Juana Manuela Gorriti) 的《Cocina ecléctica》(1890)、Tununa Mercado 的短篇小说《Antieros》(1988) 和 Gabriela Cabezón Cámara 的Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017)。这些阿根廷作者提供了他们对南美烹饪中不同文化根源和习惯的了解，并在其他叙事策略中，将感官和欲望置于对女性身体的理性处方之上。因此，作为一个语料库进行分析，这些作者通过烹饪为我们提供了一个更广泛的女权主义实践概念，并最终从当地的角度扩展了女权主义本身的多重含义。