Food and Female Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

Culinary literary criticism is a new field which has gathered interest among many scholars around the world. The cultural significance of gastronomic representations in literary texts is usually interconnected with the issues of gender, race, and class. The current study aims to examine the relation between food and gender identity in the selected works of two prominent Nigerian female writers in terms of Susan Bordo’s views on ‘food and the ideal body image’ and ‘cooking and gender roles’. In the present age, the ideas of having an ideal gendered body and also gender obligations have permeated more deeply among individuals by the social media, including advertisements, and thus have gained increasing prominence among scholars. Employing Foucault’s terminology, Bordo criticizes the individuals’ obsession and excess to shape their bodies according to the gendered ideals and thus turning to docile bodies and also the issue of cooking as a gendered micropractice. Here, it can be argued how Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the two feminist novelists, present the motif of food and cooking in their works to question the dominant patriarchal culture and the expected gender roles.

Keywords

• culinary literary criticism
• ideal body image
• docile body
• gender roles
• micropractice
• cooking