Rosario Castellanos, one of Mexico’s most influential feminist voices, wrote the essay "Lección de cocina" (Cooking Lesson) as a direct response to the changing social landscape of the 1950s and 60s. A significant, though often subtextual, influence on her work during this period was the "Kinsey Reports"—the groundbreaking studies on human sexuality by Alfred Kinsey.

The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos

Rosario Castellanos’s fiction and essays consistently interrogate how gender and power shape subjectivity. The Kinsey Reports—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)—claimed to bring empirical rigor to a topic long governed by moral discourse. Juxtaposing Castellanos with Kinsey helps illuminate mid-century shifts in how sexuality was studied, represented, and regulated, and allows us to consider how translation into English (and into Spanish from English) mediates the flow of ideas across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Kinsey’s research, revolutionary as it was, still operated within the language of averages. In his female volume, Kinsey famously reported that around 50% of married women had experienced premarital intercourse, and that homosexual behavior was far more common than presumed. But Castellanos’s poem counters: statistics do not weep.

English translations and critical analyses of this work can be readily accessed through the comprehensive anthology A Rosario Castellanos Reader , translated and edited by Maureen Ahern. 🔬 Overview of the Poem

When the average reader hears "The Kinsey Report," they immediately think of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking (and controversial) mid-20th-century studies on human sexuality: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). These clinical volumes, filled with statistics, case histories, and dispassionate charts, revolutionized how America talked about sex.

The irony in "The Kinsey Report" is palpable. While Kinsey’s work aimed to normalize sexual variance and reduce shame, Castellanos’s characters use the report to reinforce their own repression. They treat the statistics as a judgement rather than an observation. The wife, in particular, navigates the text as if walking through a minefield, terrified that the "statistics" might apply to her. In doing so, Castellanos critiques the rigid gender roles that trap both men and women. The husband is trapped by the expectation of performative virility, and the wife is trapped by the expectation of performative ignorance.