In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it. In The Joy Luck Club, the kitchen and, more broadly, the acts of cooking, sharing, and serving meals can be understood as a central domestic space where cultural identity, memory, and female agency are negotiated turning the spaces into functional sites for resistance, agency, intergenerational healing -making them connected to their cultures. 
In this panel, I am looking for papers to analyze how cooking, sharing and rejecting food becomes a form of securing agency for the female characters in American Literature. The panel also invites papers from immigrant American writers to understand how food becomes a medium through which they try to protect (and reject) their cultural heritage, turning the domesticity of the home as a space for acquiring female solidarity. Although, the domestic space is often not looked at as an inherently liberating space, they situate the female characters in a complex intersection of trauma, and healings that subverts expectations from these spaces, especially though sharing, cooking and rejecting food. Therefore, the domestic space is redefined by the people who inhabit it, providing narrative agency to the characters. 
The panel also welcomes approaches grounded in Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of borderlands and cultural hybridity, particularly her understanding that “the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other,” which helps illuminate the fragmented and negotiated identities within immigrant domestic spaces. 
In this panel, I would like to look at these redefinitions of the gendered domestic space by these characters (through food), and try to investigate it from the lens of collective and cultural trauma theory, and understand how these women transform these domestic spaces. This will help us to understand how important it is to include the women’s domestic experiences in literary historiography (to understand how women’s interior spaces are never devoid of history, and politics)- or to understand in bell hooks' term how the “homeplace” becomes a site of resistance and care shaped by their experiences, voices, and choices- imbuing newer significations of these spaces.
Suggested Topics for Papers
Food and cultural memory in American literature
Kitchens as spaces of resistance and agency
Culinary labor and feminine identity
Mother-daughter relationships and food practices
Food, migration, and diasporic identity
Rejecting food as resistance or trauma response
Domesticity and feminist historiography
Food and intergenerational trauma
Collective and cultural trauma in immigrant narratives
Recipes, storytelling, and oral histories
Domestic spaces as political and historical sites
Gendered labor and affect theory
Foodways and cultural preservation in immigrant writing
Homeplace, care, and female solidarity
Embodiment, nourishment, and identity formation
Comparative studies of immigrant women writers in America
Asian American, African American, Latinx, and diasporic food narratives