Food, politics, and female friendship in Silvia Ballestra’s Amiche mie (My Friends, 2014)

Description

Scholars have traditionally interpreted food as a symbol of the social structures in which women have alternatively occupied the position of nurturer or starver, have been described as greedy or inappetent, have been portrayed as bodies to be deprived of nutrition or to be devoured. On their part, women have used eating and its rituals as means to communicate their personal and social anxieties, and to protest against prescribed gender roles.

In Silvia Ballestra’s novel Amiche mie (My Friends, 2014) food features as a cultural signifier for the gender-specific anxieties of middle-class women in contemporary Italy, but also as an opportunity for political activism: one that plays out as ‘soft’ resistance against the profit-driven politics of the food industry, against the frantic pace of a urban culture where hurried consumption of pre-packaged meals has become the norm, against global trends that have transformed Italian cafes into places for ‘happy hours’ where it is impossible to order a simple espresso.

In this seminar, Dr Claudia Bernardi will discuss how Ballestra’s novel portrays a generation of Italian women who cannot or will not cook like their mothers and grandmothers, but who nevertheless find through their relationship with food moments of intellectual clarity, social engagement, female solidarity and personal redemption.