<p> Current scholarship in food studies generally, and literary food studies in particular, has overlooked important assumptions about the act of eating and its implications for subjectivity, embodiment, and agency. The field has taken up the idea of &ldquo;eating&rdquo; as a natural and universal physical process, immune to discourse. I argue that in so doing, the field has missed important opportunities to examine how our beliefs about what eating is and why are discursively informed. And, further, I argue that the discourses of eating play a role in regulating subjectivity, the material body, and its access to agency. Chapter 1 explores two well-known texts within literary food studies, <i>The Edible Woman</i> and <i>Like Water for Chocolate,</i> and is critical of aspects of each text that have been thus far neglected in the food studies critical conversation. By examining these overlooked pieces, I discuss how the eating discourses in both texts inform the characters&rsquo; subjectivities, their embodiment, and their agency within the novels. Chapter 2 examines two texts infrequently discussed in literary food studies, <i>My Year of Meats</i> and <i>Xenogenesis, </i> in order to illustrate the limits of the field&rsquo;s scholarship so far and to explore how a discursive analysis of eating can provide new insight into how the subject, the body, and its agency can be conceptualized. Chapter 3 looks to contemporary cookery texts for clues about how we talk about eating outside a strictly academic purview and ways that a discursive analysis of the genre can demonstrate how eating shapes our everyday perceptions of subjectivity, embodiment, and agency.</p>

<p> Literary scholars have been examining and recreating the experiences of &ldquo;bonded&rdquo; female characters within Toni Morrison&rsquo;s novels for decades. However, the distinct experiences of these enslaved women, that are also mothers have not been astutely examined by scholars and deserves more attention. My thesis fleshes out the characterization of several of Morrison&rsquo;s bonded-mothers and identifies them as a part of a developing controlling image and theory, called the bondmother. Situating these characters within this category allows readers to trace their journeys towards freedom and personal redemption. This character tracing will occur by examining the following Toni Morrison novels: <i>Beloved</i> (1987) and <i> Paradise</i> (1997). In order to fully examine the experiences of these characters it will be necessary for me to expand the definition of bondage and mother.</p>

<p> This project examines Beat poet Elise Cowen&rsquo;s creative implementation and development of the cockroach image from culturally maligned pest to its symbolic representation of the marginalized Beat woman and artist. Set primarily against the backdrop of the cyclical gendered kitchen, the cockroach subject serves as the conduit from which Cowen underscores the Beats' relegation of women into the stifling roles of the caretaker, lover, and muse; roles that critically disable them of the time, freedom, and spontaneity of experience found outside of the home that informs the traditional Beat aesthetic. As a stand-in for her own oppressed subjectivity as a Beat artist, Cowen&rsquo;s solitary cockroach affords her the ability to reflect on and articulate her silenced frustrations and critique against her androcentric Beat community, un-fixing her marginal existence as a Beat &ldquo;other&rdquo; in the process. </p>

<p> In the South, as William Faulkner famously observed in his 1951 novel <i> Requiem for a Nun</i>, &ldquo;The past is never dead. It&rsquo;s not even past.&rdquo; The power of historical narrative is not lost on the region&rsquo;s contemporary writers either, including poets Minnie Bruce Pratt, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Natasha Trethewey. This thesis examines these poets&rsquo; works within the context of Southern studies, as well as the ways in which each poet grounds counter-narratives in Southern soil, and communal memories in the region&rsquo;s marginalized bodies. Establishing these bodies&mdash;those of black, mixed-race, and lesbian women in particular&mdash;as sources of intensely regionalized knowledge and memory legitimizes the kind of subjective histories from which these poets appear to draw while also establishing a tradition of multiplicity in narrative. Tracing memory&rsquo;s evolution and preservation in marginalized bodies also casts them as sources of collective memory capable of augmenting or dismantling the white patriarchal master narrative of Southern history.</p><p>

This study considers how some African American women use their cultural production (e.g., fictional/non-fictional writings, films, prose, plays, comics, art, and music) to show how hair is central to their identity (re)construction. This study is multidisciplinary in its approach, and uses paradigms from Afro-American studies, Black feminist thought, cultural studies, feminism, literary studies, and performance studies in order to investigate the ways that African American women (re)negotiate hair and identity politics in the world. An important aspect of this study is that for such women, hair is a part of their identity that has a performative dimension. Performance studies provides an alternative perspective that allows some scholars to contemplate African American women's hair politics and identities in a space of critical validation, self-reflexivity, and celebration. The selected works which I consider in this study utilize "natural" hair politics and identity performances that challenge derogatory images of African American women in an effort to present a more realistic and self-defined (re)presentations of African American women and, in turn, deemphasize hegemonic ideas about aesthetics and identity. ^