Slicing White Bre(a)d: Racial Identities, Recipes, and Italian-American Women

Abstract

This article focuses on Italian-American women and on how they construct, understand, and maintain their ethnic identity in relation to Whiteness and White privilege. Since language cannot serve as symbol for these women because speaking Italian was often forbidden in their homes, or spoken only between adults in covert communications, they often must cling to other symbols of Italianness in order to preserve their sense of gendered ethnic identities. I argue that one such symbol is food, wherein participants manipulate recipes and use food to navigate and negotiate being both Italian and American, Whiteness, femininity, and social class. Implications for therapy about how we understand our multiple identities in relation to others as part of larger systems of power and privilege are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian-American women
• food
• identity
• recipes
• whiteness