"Doing" and Redoing" Gender in Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate"

Gender has traditionally been perceived as either a natural attribute inextricably linked to sex, or as a cultural construct based on perceived physiological differences between men and women. Both perceptions see gender as fixed and static masculine and feminine attributes, which excludes the element of individual human agency. In their study “Doing Gender” (1987) and its sequel “Accounting for Doing Gender” (2009), Cadance West and Don H. Zimmerman advance a new understanding of gender as an “ongoing situated process, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’” in which individuals ‘do’ gender in response to their own individual desires in changing and changeable social situations and circumstances. This new approach to gender as a dynamic ‘doing’ allows a deeper understanding of the characters in the novel Like Water for Chocolate (1989/1993) by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel. The novel presents a host of characters who defy traditional conceptions of femininity and masculinity. Employing West and Zimmerman’s approach, this paper explores the tension between the characters’ human subjectivities and the gender expectations of their society. It argues that the female and male characters in the novel are represented as complex subjects who mostly do not fit into normative models and who “do” or “re-do” gender in a complex process in which their responses to their inner desires may overlap or conflict with their outer realities and the imperatives of their society and culture. They are thus represented as complex human beings whose exercise of their human agency defies facile categorization.