Italian American Women, Food, and Identity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

   PDF

2. “You Were Right Down the Street”: Place and Space

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 1-17

3. “Even a Medigan Could Do It”: Racial Identities and Whiteness

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 19-36

4. Gendered Identities: Love and Labor

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 37-59

5. “She Was Always on a Diet”: Bodies and Shame

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 61-84

6. “I Remember You Most in the Kitchen”: Nostalgia—Love, Loss, and Longing

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 85-106

7. “But My Mother Ruled the Table”: Food and Power

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 107-135

8. Method: How to Survive Writing a Book with Your Mother/Daughter

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 137-152

9. “Beat Everything”: The Recipes

   • Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol Dottolo

   Pages 153-166

10. Back Matter

    Pages 167-202

    PDF

This book is about Italian American women, food, identity, and our stories at the table. This mother-daughter research team explores how Italian American working-class women from Syracuse, New York use food as a symbol and vehicle which carries multiple meanings. In these narratives, food represents home, loss, and longing. Food also stands in for race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, region, place, and space. The authors highlight how food is about family and tradition, as well as choice and change. These women's narratives reveal that food is related to celebration, love, power, and shame. As this study centers on the intergenerational transmission of culture, the authors' relationship mirrors these questions as they contend with their similar and disparate experiences and relationships with Italian American identity and food. The authors use the "recipe" as a conversational bridge to elicit narratives about identity and the self. They also encourage readers to listen closely to the stories at their own tables to consider how recipes and food are a way for us to claim who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be, and who we are not.

• Social Psychology
• Feminist Psychology
• Cultural Psychology
• Social Identities
• Italian-Americans
• Psychology of Gender
• Ethnic Identities
• Psychology of Women
• Intergenerational Transmission of Culture

“Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table is an important volume to those conducting interdisciplinary studies on working-class women, food, and identity.” (Nancy Caronia, Italian American Review, Vol. 10 (2), 2020)

• Department of Psychology, Rhode Island College, Providence, USA

  Andrea L. Dottolo

• Liverpool, USA

  Carol Dottolo

Andrea L. Dottolo is an assistant professor of psychology at Rhode Island College and a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, USA.

Carol A. Dottolo is a retired educator from Liverpool Central School District, Liverpool, NY, USA. She specializing in reading and has extensive experience in teaching language and comprehension.

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