Gender, Food, and Loss

Abstract

Reading Homi Bhabha (1994) led me to contemplate the themes of food, loss, and gender as articulated in the narratives of the women and men in my family and how the pressure to assimilate and shed their immigrant identities expressed itself through what they cooked and what they ate and how they viewed their weight and bodies.

In this essay, I propose that historical forces in an immigrant's life can be expressed through the somatic experience of weight and the complex, often hidden, often distorted history of food and cooking. In the case of my own family, and I believe other Italian American immigrants, the liminal space created by them to form a new, yet old, unheimlich identity was through food, their kitchens, and their own bodies.

Notes

¹Beginning in the late 19th century through Mussolini's rule, Ethiopia became the target of military takeover in order to create a colony for the inferior peoples of Southern Italy and Sicily to emigrate to (Richards, 1999, p. 109). The Northern Italians referred to the Southerner as Tizzone, which meant a burning log or piece of wood that is black from being charred (DiTommaso as cited in Roediger, 2005, p. 113). The Italian immigrant turned this word into a vicious racial slur for African Americans, turning their own internalized racism toward another group in an effort not to be the object of the same racism in the United States.

²Italian anthropologists in the late 19th century offered “scientific proof” that “ … southern Italians were racially distinct from and hopelessly inferior to their northern compatriots” (T. A. Guglielmo, 2003, p. 33). In 1910, George A. Dorsey, an anthropologist for The Chicago Tribune, traveled through Southern Italy and reported that “these people … were unmanly and primitive barbarians who had clear “negroid” ancestry … they are of questionable value …” (T. A. Guglielmo, 2003, p. 34). The U.S. Immigration Commission of 1899 described Southern Italians as “excitable, impulsive, highly imaginative [with] little adaptability to highly organized society …” and Northern Italians as “ … cool, deliberate … capable of great progress in the political and social organization of modern civilization” (T. A. Guglielmo, 2003, p. 34).

³Rafael and Rafaelina's story was embedded in a larger piece of history: “While their husbands traveled near and far in search of work, Italian wives were left to support their households under conditions of increasing turmoil and scarcity. Often years passed before men returned or sent for their families. Although husbands usually sent money home, survival depended upon the labor, as well as the management, entrepreneurial, and artisanal skills of women” (Coser, Anker, and Perrin, 1999, p. 81). “The men have gone and the women have taken over,” Carlo Levi (1947) wrote in Christ Stopped at Eboli, his novel become film about a Southern Italian village that had experienced this heavy migration of men to the United States and other parts of Europe.

⁴Gutwill and others have linked this self-hatred of the body to the oppression working class, ethnic groups have felt from the culture at large to assimilate to a body type that would make them feel less foreign and “other” (Gutwill, 1994, pp. 1–28).