Genesis. XVI / 1 , 2017. Genere e cibo

Introduzione
Enrica Asquer e Paolo Capuzzo

Introduction. Gender and Food: Everyday Practices and Women’s Writing
With the aim to add to the extensive research that has emerged around food in the last decades by adopting a speci c gender perspective, this special issue of «Genesis» focuses on cooking as well as on the huge amount of writings and discourses devoted to everyday food preparation and consumption by women, from early modern to contemporary times. With a range of different sources, from early modern account books to 20th- and 21st-centuries cookbooks of women gastronomes, the articles of this issue explore in particular the controversial role of cooking and food writing as a tool of women’s agency, both in family life and the public arena.

Cucinare. La preparazione del cibo in prospettiva di genere (Europa occidentale, secc. XVI-XIX)
Raffaella Sarti

The Preparation of Food. A Gender Perspective (Western Europe, 16th-19th Centuries)
This paper analyses the preparation of food in Western Europe (16th-19th centuries), focusing on its gendered dimension. Three main variables are considered: social strati cation, geography and time. It suggests that in Italy, Spain and France in early modern times the cooks employed at the courts and by the aristocracy were generally men; a feminization of the preparation of food started in France from the 18th century onwards. In Central and Northern Europe women were much more involved in the preparation of food in the upper classes, too, even though the fashion for French cuisine in the 17th and 18th centuries implied a growing recourse to male cooks. The paper suggests explanations of these differences and trends over time and discusses the role of nurturing and cooking for the de nition of the female identity in different contexts.

Il cibo e la casa. Amministrazione domestica e consumi nelle scritture quotidiane di Silvia Rabatta Colloredo
Laura Casella, Albina De Martin Pinter

Food and the Household. Domestic Administration and Consumption in the Everyday Writings of Silvia Rabatta Colloredo
Through an examination of the case of Silvia Rabatta Colloredo, this article sets out to study the practices relating to the acquisition and consumption of food in an important noble household of 18th-century Friuli and to assess the degree of female responsibility for control over the production, acquisition, transformation, and use of food. The wealth of documentation relating to this noblewoman enables us to widen our view of the link between women and food: diverse books concerning foodstuffs, account books, notes of purchases, as well as letters on the subject of food addressed to family members, agents, and shopkeepers can all serve to illustrate various aspects of the material life of the nobility. The analysis of this documentation lends historical and social depth to the customs of the household relating to food, throws light on the practices of economic administration of a family belonging to the landed nobility, con rms the symbolic value of food as a vehicle for identity and regulator of hierarchies and social relations, and draws attention to the importance of women’s everyday writing and the research possibilities that it opens up.

Come le donne scrivono di cucina. Alle origini della trattatistica femminile in Italia
Agnese Portincasa

Women Cookbooks Writers in Italy. At the Origin of a History
The essay investigates the link between women and food writing in Italy in the rst fty years of the 20th century, the relationship with their audience, the cultural/ institutional role achieved by adapting to spaces granted or gaining unexpected areas of creativity and expression. In these spaces the everyday practice comes to the fore, for the rst time expressed in a feminine literature. Giulia Lazzari Turco, Angelica Devito Tommasi, Ada Boni and Petronilla are the protagonists of this “gender professionalization” with cultural, expressive, creative and identity signi cance.

From «The Diary of a Greedy Woman» to Food Porn. Appetite and Pleasure in the Discourse of Women Gastronomes
Julieta Flores Jurado

From «The Diary of a Greedy Woman» to Food Porn. Appetite and Pleasure in the Discourse of Women Gastronomes
Today, we encounter a wide array of texts authored by women, focused on a celebratory, hedonist personal relation with food. These texts continue to enrich the landscape of feminist food studies in many interesting ways. In this article, I read the work of Elizabeth Robins Pennell and M.F.K. Fisher as part of a crusade for legitimizing the expression of female pleasure through gastronomic writing. Then, I proceed to explore more recent transformations in the relation between food and femininities and their effect in contemporary phenomena, such as the highly sexualized persona of female cooks in TV programs or the online sharing of food porn, images that erotize food. I discuss different examples of gastronomical texts that describe a process of female empowerment through food, and I close with some considerations about the risks implied in promoting this new paradigm of pleasure as a normative model in the postfeminist context.

Feeding a Transnational Family. Culinary Practices among the Polish Mothers Abroad
Paula Pustułka, Magdalena Ślusarczyk

Feeding a Transnational Family. Culinary Practices among the Polish Mothers Abroad
The social and historical role of food and culinary practices has been one of the most under-researched areas within the broad discipline of migration studies. At the same time, the process of feeding the family is constitutive for identities, belonging, social anchoring, and home-making that migrants engage in abroad. Connecting the results of two studies revolving around transnational families, we propose to treat both the daily/routinized and the celebratory/special culinary practices as predicates of integration with the host society. In addition, we see them as the efforts aimed at maintaining a particular degree of uniqueness within By expanding a theoretical framework of dietary acculturation, we highlight the gender dimension of this realm. Relying on the qualitative interview material, the article argues that maintaining transnational and intrafamily bonds through food varies among women and families, yet encompasses a key lens for looking at how the migrant families are faring abroad.

Per Anna Rossi-Doria. Ricordo a più voci

La reintegrazione degli omosessuali nella Germania del secondo dopoguerra
Giovanna D’Amico

Genre et musique en Grande Guerre: le cas des écoles nationales de musique françaises
David Mastin

Recensioni

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