Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

Culinary Narratology 3
diaspora, views of food as part of life as it should be have ignored the fact that food discourse
is actually composed of “cultural scripts of gender” (Narayan 162). Counihan also responds
to this argument and notes that, regarding the preparation and consumption of food, the
well-established gender division of labor – men consume food and women prepare it – has
prevailed in social and cultural contexts (12-13). In other words, this notion of the gendered
nature of food as cultural praxis has mostly been taken for granted. Thus, this fact of
gendered inflection of food practices deserves more evaluation and exploration in a diasporic
condition within which women are considered responsible for preserving cultural resistance
to assimilation in a foreign land. The ambivalent position of the female diasporic subject
both as oppressed and maneuver becomes critical and deserves multiple-layered depth of
discussions, for “[w]omen are not only mobilized in the ‘service’ of the Nation, but they also
become the ground on which discourses of morality and nationalism are written” (Mohanty
356). The food discourses have thus become the terrain upon which the asymmetric power
networks of identity politics, cultural differences, and gender issues are mingled.
To contemplate the relationship between women’s bodies and foodways helps reveal the
rich textures of identity re-formation, especially for South Asian women immigrants in
diasporic contexts, for they are culturally displaced and thus more aware of what they have
lost and what they have been able to keep. Their perceptions of foodways represent an even
more poignant process involving a dynamic “gastro-political” network to problematize issues
of identity displacement and cultural praxis in terms of gender (Appadurai 494). For
women immigrants, seemingly simple acts of eating and food preparation are embedded with
complicated as well as contradictory cultural meanings that become inscribed on their bodies.
Although incapable of completely demolishing the structure of the dominant culture, be it the
process of Americanization or the constraints of Indian patriarchy, women immigrants have
forged themselves a space of power and creativity within it. With bodies dislocated and
displaced in an alien land, cooking as a metonym of culture serves as an artistic technique for