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Food-the comprehensive, highly sexualized, process of its preparation and ingestion-figures among the most recurrent leitmotivs in erotic art and literature. Hispanic female erotic fiction is no exception: the food theme remains one of its favorite literary "dishes." Seen from a feminist perspective, however, the eager embracement of the kitchen and food by female writers of erotica becomes, to say the least, problematic. For one reason, misogynist imagination all too often depicts women in almost symbiotic conjunction with the hearth, but in the not very sexually appealing figure of mother and nurturer (Sceats 2000, Skubal 2002). On the other hand, and talking now specifically about erotic literature written by and for heterosexual males, the image of the "edible" woman-of the female body as the ultimate desert after a sumptuous dinner; of beautiful women covering their nakedness with the sinuous meanders of sprayed whipped cream; of alluring temptresses who allow champagne to flow between their breasts and into their vaginas-is so strongly embedded in sexist iconography, that it seems certainly difficult to convey a new, feminist meaning to the equation woman = food (Etxebarria and Nunez Puente 2002).The same can be said about the reverse image, namely, women seen not as digestible delicatessen, but as voracious eaters. In recent fiction and popular culture, the food-gulper (a female prototype linked to obesity and to illness and mental disorder, in the form of bulimia and/or anorexia) competes with the longer-standing figure of the man-eater, very often condensed to the terrifying symbol of a vagina dentata (Bornay 1989).
In the context of Hispanic literatures, one finds powerful representations of culinary eroticism in, among others, Laura Esquivel's Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate, 1989), in Mercedes Abad's Catalan short story "Light Sabbatical Divertimentos" ("Ligeros divertimentos sabaticos", 1990), in Isabel Allende's Chilean culinary and erotic treatise Aphrodite. A Memoir of the Senses (Afrodita. cuentos, recelas y otros afrodisiacos, 1992), in Rosa Maria RomePs Mexican novel Amora: She-Love (Amora, 1997), and, finally, in Ana Sampaloesi's short story "Pachacamac," published in Crazy About Cooking (Locas por la cocina, 1997), an Argentinean collection of culinary short stories and essays.1 Like Water for Chocolate remains the cornerstone of an erotic-culinary trend that has become a consecrated sub-genre in Hispanic women's fiction. Within...