The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist Intervention SUE SAMUELSON AWARD FOR FOODWAYS SCHOLARSHIP 1st PLACE WINNER 2013

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Diana Garvin

Abstract

Food demonstrates how power works through narratives of design. It complicates the idea of an all-powerful government monolith by revealing the local variations of manufacturing, construction, and financing for state enterprises. Fascist Italy provides a particularly fruitful time and place for the analysis of gender and culture for two reasons: first, because the self-mythologizing tendency of dictatorships boosts the production of material culture and offers a wealth of materials to study, and second, because the period presents a hyperbolic cultural moment that makes subtle phenomena more readily observable to the historian. In mid-to-late 1930s Italy, the kitchen emerged as a primary domestic site for Regime intervention. With Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 and the onset of the League of Nations’ economic sanctions against Italy the following month, promotion of autarchy, or economic selfsufficiency, meant that female labor such as shopping, gardening, and cooking took on a heightened political charge. On the national level, the regime introduced a raft of policies aimed at rationalizing and modernizing Italian industry. 

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