Reading Food: Gender, Ethnicity, and Transnational Identities in Latina Literature

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Stapleton, Karen Cruz
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature

Abstract

This study analyzes intersections of gender, ethnicity, and transnational identities in the literature of Latina/o writers Ernesto Quiñonez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Loida Maritza Pérez. Although the project includes an analysis of Quiñonez's novel to demonstrate the novel's discursive approach to identity, this study focuses on the texts of Latina writers. I explore how their works explore the highly contested grounds of "Americanness"; and the ways in which these writings use representations of food as a means to establish, and sometimes resist, various gendered and ethnic identities. My critical lens combines Latina/o Studies and feminist theory as I interrogate the breadth of their transnational textual negotiations. This strategy lends itself to various forms of social critique and investigations of cross-cultural representations particularly since they occur in diasporic contexts as two of these authors, Ortiz Cofer and Pérez, hail from the Spanish Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Quiñonez is from New York City and has both Caribbean and Latin American roots. Their fiction maps experiences of migration to the Northeastern United States. The final chapter is an autoethnography, an analysis of a Puerto Rican food event, a holiday celebration that features a very important ethnic food, a Puerto Rican dish called pasteles.

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