Twenty-first-century Galician food femininities in Lorena Conde’s Santa Inés and Oliver Laxe’s O que arde

Abstract

Food metaphors and symbols are found everywhere in contemporary cultural production in Galicia, where food constitutes a key identity marker. Given the close connections between food and gender, the artistic representation of food is an excellent field to investigate Galician food femininities. This article examines two such examples. The play Santa Inés (), written and directed by Lorena Conde, and produced by A Feroz Teatro, is a feminist response, rich in food symbolism, to the Judeo-Christian metaphor of woman as sacrificial lamb. Drawing on the historical figure St Agnes of Rome (CE 291–304) and the childhood memories visiting a local convent of Inés Salvado, who plays the only characters onstage, the play discusses bodily autonomy and female mysticism. The film O que arde (2019) by Oliver Laxe, a key filmmaker of the Novo Cinema Galego, is a spiritually oriented work about middle-aged Amador who returns home to his elderly mother, Benedicta, after serving an arson sentence for burning a forest down. In the film, food, constantly present but in a subtle way, is both an earthly and a spiritual element that plays a key role in the construction of Benedicta’s gendered ageing identity.