Politics of Food and Gender in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines and Eating Women, Telling Tales

ABSTRACT

Food is the most elementary aspect of human society and culture. It embeds in itself multiple contexts and discourses which makes it a perfect conveyor of social structures and cultural systems across diverse cultural spheres. Indian writer, Bulbul Sharma capitalizes on this discursive and multi-contextual significance of food to represent the gendered nature of the Hindu domestic sphere in her works by focusing on women’s culinary practices. The present paper attempts to analyze women’s food practices in two of her select works titled The Anger of Aubergines and Eating Women, Telling Tales to deconstruct how women are brought into the structures of patriarchy through their consumption and production of food. The paper intends to unveil the norms and politics of gender in shaping and controlling women’s food choices which keep them under the patriarchal yoke. The paper also aims to represent how food provides women with a site of agency to resist and subvert the normative structures of patriarchy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pradhan is a title used for the head of the villages in the northern parts of India. Generally, the pradhans have a hold over a lot of land, wealth and influence in the villages.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajbir Samal

Rajbir Samal is a Ph.D. Research Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. He is currently working on literary food studies for his doctoral thesis and his areas of research interest include Critical Sensory Studies, Gender Studies and Indian Writing in English.

Binod Mishra

Binod Mishra is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. He has to his credit 25 books and considerable number of research articles published in different reputed journals including Quarterly Review of Film and Video (T&F), Agenda (T&F) and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (T&F).