ABSTRACT
The concept of the act of cooking as a creative strategy of resistance has enjoyed a longstanding presence in Latin American literature since the seventeenth century. In the context of the Southern Cone in the twentieth century, Argentine and Chilean theatre practitioners have drawn on the space of the kitchen and the related acts of cooking, feeding, and eating as useful metaphors for responding to the region's military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. The emphasis on power, a frequently recurring theme in theatre of the Southern Cone, is not surprising given the region's relatively recent history. The very nature of food service implies an uneven relation of power. While the restaurant or domestic kitchen may appear to be unlikely framing devices for resistance to authoritarianism, they actually lend themselves to stark representation of unstable power relations.
