International Journal of Language & Linguistics

The Implications of Food in Michele Roberts’ Novels
Bárbara Cerrato Rodríguez

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore the significances of food developed by the writer Michèle Roberts. The female body provides a non-transferable identity, but it is a political and historical object upon which Power works. It utilizes the body to represent its vision of the world, which is suspicious, since representations are fictitious, but at the same time reality cannot exist outside representation. Hence, the body is an object of representation and signification. Women have apparently won sexual freedom and become owners of their own bodies, but this is not the case: Western society promotes unreal thinness, and yet, advocates for food as a space of socialization. This is a way to mix freedom, slavery, and dependence on global beauty canons imposed by men, consumerism, capitalism, and the fashion and beauty industries, which only serves to strengthen female dependence on male approval.

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