PAMLA proposal
Panel: Thinking Through Food: Culture, Identity and Symbolism in Literature and Film
Proposal: While many texts have examined the relationship between recent U.S. American domestic narratives and the public pressures for women to conform to the limited identities represented within them, few attempt to unpack the ways in which female authors have, in recent years, adapted the domestic narrative in order to express the contradictions of female identity, romantic attachment, and domestic labor. In the 1990s novels *Like Water for Chocolate* by Laura Esquivel and *Blue Jelly* by Debby Bull, female protagonists struggle to find coherent self-understanding in the face of romantic relationship failures, family upheaval, and even dangerous political strife, a struggle expressed through tales of food preparation. By locating both femininity and feminism in the kitchen, the authors claim a nurturant "female space" while also contesting the limitations imposed by the domestic labor expected of women up to the present day. This paper explores the ways in which the kitchen serves similar roles in the two novels, while also digging into the ways in which the authors' positioning, as well as the textual frame, changes the narrative uses of the kitchen as a space, and recipes as a motif. For Esquivel's main character, a Mexican woman at the time of the Mexican Revolution, cooking and caretaking are the main activities of her life, and the author uses a magical realist style in order to express the complex processes of identity formation and multiple transformations undergone by the protagonist, as well as others surrounding her. In this sense, cooking is not just domestic labor nor even caretaking; cooking expresses art, possibility, magic, and humanity. In Bull's novel, however, a contemporary white woman uses the lessons of cooking and canning as a means to nurture herself after a painful romantic failure. The rhetorical construction of the domestic labor is figured as extraneous, as hobby-craft, and as self-nurturance. A close reading of the two novels will allow an exploration of the different ways in which the authors use the kitchen as a locus of female identity and self-expression, as well as what these differences might indicate about the social realities they encode.
50 word abstract: Laura Esquivel's *Like Water for Chocolate* and Debby Bull's *Blue Jelly* claim kitchens as "female space" but contest the limitations imposed by domestic labor. In them, the kitchen serves as space for forming and expressing female identity, while author positioning and textual framing change the representations of kitchens and recipes.
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