This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Diana Garvin [Twitter]. Diana is an Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Oregon and the author of Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (University of Toronto Press, 2022):
Feeding Fascism explores how women fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor. Work songs sing of the political stakes of miscarriage in fields and breastfeeding on the factory line. Diaries provide first-hand accounts attesting to the treacherous politics of domestic work in the private kitchens of the wealthy. Personal letters reveal what it took for women to forge careers as cookbook authors and culinary entrepreneurs under a regime that dictated that a woman’s place was in the home. What is more, Feeding Fascism uncovers the surprising methods used by the Fascist party to seize control over food work, to further their goal of building more and better Italians for future military domination. At stake in this story lies the question of how the need for nourishment shaped women’s consent to Fascism – and their resistance.
See also : Mussolini’s Kitchen: On Diana Garvin’s “Feeding Fascism”, Anne Wingenter, Los Angeles Review of Books, October 3, 2022.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 9, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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