Location
2008 NACCS Conference Presentation
Abstract:
Even though the commodification of women by linking them erotically to food has been accepted for decades and used by women themselves to manipulate men and their desires, this has, in turn, led to behavioral and psychological problems. Using feminist as well as psychoanalytical criticism and theory by authors such as Nancy Chodorow, Nydia Garcia-Preto, Elspeth Probyn, Sigmund Freud, and others, “Latinas in the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of Food and Desire” explores how addiction to food and sex leads to unsuitable ways to satisfy one’s needs. Beginning with untreated emotional abuse that leads to inappropriate behavior between a father and daughter and that was caused by emotional abandonment by the daughter’s mother, readers can begin to develop an image of why a child grows into a woman who has an insatiable need for both sex and food. And even if a woman recognizes that she has a problem, failure to seek help from a psychiatrist can lead to a life of misery and an inability to understand why she behaves the way she does. This article argues that Lourdes Puentes, the major character in Christina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban, employs dysfunctional eating habits as sublimation of her sexual desire, and the text reveals rhetoric associated with the desire for both food and sex to disguise Lourdes Puentes’s sexual repression and her inability to solve personal problems.
Included in
Chicana/o Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons
Latinas in the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of Food and Desire
2008 NACCS Conference Presentation
Abstract:
Even though the commodification of women by linking them erotically to food has been accepted for decades and used by women themselves to manipulate men and their desires, this has, in turn, led to behavioral and psychological problems. Using feminist as well as psychoanalytical criticism and theory by authors such as Nancy Chodorow, Nydia Garcia-Preto, Elspeth Probyn, Sigmund Freud, and others, “Latinas in the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of Food and Desire” explores how addiction to food and sex leads to unsuitable ways to satisfy one’s needs. Beginning with untreated emotional abuse that leads to inappropriate behavior between a father and daughter and that was caused by emotional abandonment by the daughter’s mother, readers can begin to develop an image of why a child grows into a woman who has an insatiable need for both sex and food. And even if a woman recognizes that she has a problem, failure to seek help from a psychiatrist can lead to a life of misery and an inability to understand why she behaves the way she does. This article argues that Lourdes Puentes, the major character in Christina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban, employs dysfunctional eating habits as sublimation of her sexual desire, and the text reveals rhetoric associated with the desire for both food and sex to disguise Lourdes Puentes’s sexual repression and her inability to solve personal problems.
