Cooking and feminism through Argentine literature

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.