Food-centered discourses: Intellectual communities across fields of knowledge

Abstract

In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader , many contributors point out the ways in which Chicana/Latina writers used a multi-genre interconnection in their creative and non-creative work. This tradition is not new. Rosaura Sanches, Guillermo Padilla and others, working on the Recovery Hispanic Literary Project, indicate that the literary production of the late 1800s and early 1900s also reveals a combination of genres: folklore, ethnography, autobiography, prose and lyrical fiction. The argument set forth by the interconnection of genres is that writers speak for, about, to, and within a diverse community. Voices in the Kitchen , my forthcoming book, follows this history. I refer to the diverse communities I address within it as forming part of a non-academic and academic world. The different styles and multiple voices in the book aim at revealing the different discourses used mainly by feminist academics and working class-women on diverse issues dealing with acts of agency within the realm of food. The non-academic community's discourses are reflected by the ethnographic aspects of the book where Mexican working-class women and I charlamos (chat) about food. The academic communities’ discourses of theorizing and analyzing manifest themselves in the language of philosophy, architecture, anthropology, geography, literary and cultural criticism. The shift of food voices in my writing is rather prevalent. The theoretical implications of this methodology and the paradigm it offers involve a three-part exploration. First, how does the language of food speak differently according to its localized place? Second, what are the conceptual ways in which food-centered discourses overlap in such places? This overlap creates what I call a borderless boundary zone . The final exploration is to ask: what are the strengths, as well as the limitations, in bridging the food voices from different places and spaces?