You Will Find Yourself Disoriented’: Food and the Disruption of Gendered, Political, and Literary Norms in Pat Mora’s House of Houses

Abstract

educated one: the narrator ‘knows’ that she shouldn’t bite or chew, because she has learned that from her grandmother. This evocation of appetite participates in the text’s depiction of a woman-centered sensuality, dissociated from masculine pleasure. Mora writes: ‘Mornings when I rub cream into my legs after a bath, I think of the women in my family in the rooms of my heart, each rubbing cream between her hands, then up her legs, enjoying the quiet and the feel of stroking, soothing, our own flesh’ (Mora, 2008a, p.181). This disruption of patriarchal norms is also achieved through revisiting myths and narratives that have been used historically to promote the suppression of women’s appetites and desires. One such narrative centers on the Virgin Mary, who, as the antidote to Eve, embodies the expectation that women should deny themselves the fulfillment of their appetites. In the Chicano cultural context, the Virgin Mary translates as ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe,’ a symbol of female sacrifice, devotion, and submissiveness, as feminist writer Sandra Cisneros explained: