National cuisine and international sexuality: cultural politics and gender representation in the transnational remake from Eat Drink Man Woman to Tortilla Soup

Abstract

This article investigates the cultural politics and gender discourses embedded in the transnational remake of Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) into Tortilla Soup (2002) as the latter remaps Eat Drink Man Woman’s (intra)national text, and challenges the dynamics between the national and transnational to further de-stabilize the intricate dialectics of the local and the global. Specifically, it argues that although both films focus on a dysfunctional family with a patriarchal father, Eat Drink Man Woman exploits the spatiality of a transitional Taipei and deconstructs the stereotypical Confucian father figure in its breaking away from a normative patriarchal tradition, while Tortilla Soup re-inscribes a patriarchal Latino cultural identity for the father, which must remain stabilized in a centrifugal cosmopolis of Los Angeles where national cultures have gradually given way to a cultural politics that announces the transnational and spatial as the new paradigm. In other words, while the source film’s nationalistic representation of the Chinese cuisine increasingly gravitates toward transnationality, the ostensibly transnational Tortilla Soup contextualizes patriarchy in a uniformly nationalized cultural environment. Juxtaposing these films as cinematic counterparts and cultural mirror images, this article explores their intertextuality as a critical lens to reveal the dialectics between the national and the transnational in cinematic representations.

Keywords:

• Transnational remake
• Eat Drink Man Woman
• Tortilla Soup
• cuisine and sexuality
• gender politics
• Mexican-American identity

Notes

1. This trilogy refers to Ang Lee’s films that employ a traditional father figure as the center character for his family dramas. The trilogy includes Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).

2. KMT (国民党) refers to the Chinese Nationalist Party, whose headquarter locates in Taipei, Taiwan.