Diabetes, Culture, and Food: Posthumanist Nutrition in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive

Abstract

It might seem odd to talk about eating in the context of posthumanism since our food cultures seem to revolve around sustaining the human (often at the expense of the nonhuman world surrounding us). Posthumanism evokes cyborgs, indeterminacy, and decentered cultures. Food evokes nourishment, home, and cultural tradition, and this seems to be especially the case in Chicano/a representations. In novels like Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) and Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and films like Tortilla Soup (2001) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993), food is a sign of Mexican cultural memory, authenticity, and the passing down of tradition through female labor. But in thinking about Gloria Anzaldúa’s relationship to food after the onset of diabetes, I need a term that conveys boundary-crossings more radical than the cultural and national ones we usually associate with her work. Posthumanism is a term that stretches from post-structuralism through animal studies, ecocriticsm, and feminist science studies, and its definition seems to be continually evolving. When I invoke posthumanism, I also mean to invoke that range of sources as well as the fluidity and uncertainty surrounding the term. Most fundamentally, for understanding the work of Anzaldúa, we need a worldview that is no longer centered around the human or those epistemologies that privilege human reason and human transcendence over the nonhuman world (which includes animals, “nature,” and supposedly inert matter).