Eating, serving, and self-realisation

Food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3977456
AutoresShari Daya (0000-0002-4030-045X, University of Cape Town, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen11
Número5
Páginas475-489
Fecha de publicación2010-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2010.488749
OpenAlexW2071616588
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas27

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them

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