Gender and agency in a Keralan foodscape: the women of Aathi

This chapter considers the gendering and re-gendering of discourse around Asia's changing foodscapes, while arguing that any critique of such discourse should beware ideas of an essential feminine and an impossibly pure nature, along with the tendency to conflate these. It begins with an examination of ecofeminist concepts and their implication for Asian contexts, paying close attention to reductionist ecofeminist readings of Asian foodscapes that equate the female with land, locale, fecundity, and nurture on the grounds of myth, before turning to more nuanced understandings of hybrid and contingent female identity. It then analyses, in contrast, a complex representation of gender in a once traditional Asian (specifically, Keralan) foodscape under threat: Sarah Joseph's Gift in Green (2011) depicts women as protectors of this foodscape but revisits and revises entrenched and reductive gender roles as it does so. I argue that, even when the novel presents a seemingly essentialized objective correlative of women in or as nature, it does so in a gesture of "strategic essentialism," an ecofeminist concept adopted from Catriona Sandilands, and traceable to Elizabeth Carlassare, Diana Fuss, and, ultimately, Gayatri Spivak.