Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work by Diana Garvin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work by Diana Garvin Fabio Parasecoli Diana Garvin. Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), utorontopress.com/9781487528195/feeding-fascism, xvi+276 pages Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) marked world cinema with its raw representations of poverty in Italy following World War II. Faithful to its neorealist tenets, the filmmaker used food, from homemade frittata sandwiches to mozzarella in carrozza (fried mozzarella), to comment politically on the working-class Italians’ hopes and despairs after Fascism. While food predominates the narration of the film, its images of domestic kitchens also [End Page 220] provide ample information about the material lives of the protagonists, their poverty and their will to survive. Maybe less memorable than the famous scene where father and son share a meal to the notes of Tammurriata nera (Black Drumsong) in the Roman trattoria, stoves, pans and cooking utensils offer a more granular and lifelike sense of contemporaneous reality. Fascism had fallen but the material world it had built for Italians was all they had. Nearly thirty years later, Ettore Scola’s 1977 film, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), returns viewers to that reality, to the apartments in the projects built by Mussolini in Rome and other large Italian cities. Though our attention is focused on the interactions between a housewife and her gay neighbor—played by Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—we are also shown interiors where they interact with objects, fixtures and furnishings that organize the fabric of their experiences. While the rest of the neighborhood is away at a state parade, the two characters can finally live and express themselves in an environment where the woman would otherwise be ignored and the gay man ostracized. Reading Diana Garvin’s analysis of other historical artifacts in Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work may recall these films that draw our attention to kitchens as places of not only toil and duty but also negotiation with—and, at times, of direct resistance to—the powers ruling everything, from the head of the family to the government. Like the films, Garvin’s work announces that the comprehensibility of the feelings, stories and struggles from those kitchens can only be partial without understanding their physical, tangible, tactile features. In the afterword, Garvin invites future researchers to consider “the power of the small”: To get at the feel of women’s experiences of Fascism, we need to rummage through the dented cheese graters, crumpled chocolate wrappers, and scratched matchbooks that they touched every day. […] [P]ropaganda travels not through textual dictates but through material details. These meanings are so subtle, yet so ubiquitous, that even the designers themselves may be unaware of their presence.1 Garvin’s research showcases the material world that supported culinary practices and the discursive elements that surrounded and shaped them. Garvin constantly reminds us that the protagonists of these dynamics, even when they were barely acknowledged or nearly stripped of visibility, were women. “They are actors, interpreters, and critics”, she aptly observes: they accept, modify, and reject. Buildings, texts, and objects do not exist in a vacuum: they are processes of signification materialized by women’s use of them. […] The power of an individual may not be equal to that of the state, but even small choices create moments of independence. Even the smallest assertion of will constitutes a form of power.2 [End Page 221] Reflections like these that thread the volume echo Michel De Certeau on the tactics used by the seemingly powerless to resist those in power. Resistance thus proves a valuable index for research on a totalitarian regime determined to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, particularly for investigations into women’s reactions to propaganda, into governmental attempts to control both food production and family feeding and breastfeeding practices and even into the identification of food as an expression of nationalistic strength. Garvin’s approach builds on theories and methodology from gender studies, food studies and material culture studies. Each of her five chapters adopts a unique focus—first, the Battle for Grain and the...