This week’s reading offers a very peculiar and almost interpersonal approach to the dynamic of culture as food. Castellanos writes about a woman who is trapped within her kitchen without the skills or resources to succeed in preparing her husband good, quality meals. The strangest thing in this short story is the notion that from this woman’s internal monologue, she appears incredibly intelligent. She produces references to pre-Hispanic civilization, post-colonial literature, and even Spanish Classics. A motive behind this could be to show the great mind that is lost to daily household work, Castellanos displays a very smart woman, but one who presents to her society as stunted simply because she cannot cook red-meat. Castellanos wants to show how unfortunate it is that her mind goes to waste. She uses this character as a microcosm of a much larger societal problem (that she sees). What is questioned is: What is a home? Who lives in a home? What are my culture’s views on marriage? What are the roles of men and women? And, How does this affect me? She is bringing her entire culture under a microscope to examine the notion of Mexican culture and the institutions within it, should they, and if so why.<\/p>\n
This brings up a conversation that I really enjoy having about culture is if it works for all of us. As a queer person, I experience this entrapment that our heroine has, this general medium-heat fear that engulfs ours lives. This is a common barrier. When marginalized peoples don’t fit into the general culture there can be devastating consequences for the individual. Our main character doesn’t feel including within the general culture, nor the popular culture, and experiences this eerie dreadfulness. It is unfortunate that she never really finds peace or refuge within a culture or thing, but I think that the majority of the minorities generally cannot. I think this phenomenon is where sub-cultures form, think women’s movements, queer communities, ethnic or racial communities (think East-LA, DTES). The hypothetical end to our main character’s story would have ended kinder with an outlet for her to feel connected with something, a change of her dynamic where she can feel autonomous.<\/p>\n
Question: What are Castellanos’ comments on culture, and how does she view a woman’s place in culture, be it general, sub, or popular? And, what are the barriers that one may have to experience popular culture, are there ways to redeem this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week’s reading offers a very peculiar and almost interpersonal approach to the dynamic of culture as food. Castellanos writes about a woman who is trapped within her kitchen without the skills or resources to succeed in preparing her husband good, quality meals. The strangest thing in this short story is the notion that from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74389,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,12,11],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-castellanos","tag-culture","tag-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dylanmorinlast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}