Discriminatory prejudices against women

RUFFINA You are not married, yeah? Tu non sei sposata, vero?

LIZ No. No.

RUFFINA to GIOVANNI

Ah. [Italian: Ma cosa c'è che non va con questa tua amica, non sarà mica lesbica?]

Ma cosa c'è che non va con questa tua amica, non sarà mica lesbica?

LIZ +((laughter))* +((laughter))*

GIOVANNI +[Italian: No mamma, non è

In this scene, Liz and her Italian friends have all gathered together at Giovanni’s mother’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving and to say goodbye to Liz, who is leaving the day after. She is preparing the meal with Ruffina, Giovanni’s mother. This scene allows us to make some observations about the use of food items in films to represent gender identity. Both women are physically engaged in stuffing the turkey: Liz is preparing the stuffing following her mother's recipe (‘‘My mother's stuffing. Stale bread, walnuts’’) while Ruffina is peeling potatoes (‘‘Mi peli ancora un po' di patate?’’). In this way, they symbolically respect the traditions and cook for the whole family, which is here symbolised by a group of international friends. These images could induce the viewer to think that, despite Liz’s status as a single woman and her unconventional trip around the world, she will end up integrating herself into the traditions and adopt a traditional feminine role. On the contrary, this conversation proves the opposite: here, the juxtaposition of contradictory meanings at the visual and at the verbal level stresses the prejudices and the stereotypes which are attributed to women in the food domain. Ruffina immediately relates the fact that Liz is not married with her presumed homosexuality, and asks Giovanni to confirm that. Her biased and suspicious attitude makes everyone laugh, especially Liz, who is used to hearing this kind of speculations.

RUFFINA to GIOVANNI

[Italian: Come fa a trovare un altro marito, metter su una famiglia dall'altra parte del mondo?]=

Come fa a trovare marito e a farsi una famiglia se va in giro per il mondo?=

RUFFINA to LUCA

=[Italian: Ahi, Luca!] =No Luca, +basta!*

GIOVANNI [Italian: Mamma!] +Mamma!

SOFI [Italian: Ma se uno dice ''voglio viaggiare per un anno, e cercare +il significato*]

Ma Ruffina, se un uomo dice ''voglio viaggiare per un anno, e..conoscere gente nuova--

GIOVANNI [Italian: Dai, mamma--] Ancora?

MARIA [Italian: E' molto più difficile per una donna sentire di avere dei diritti nella vita, fare delle

E' molto più difficile per una donna sentire di avere dei diritti nella vita, fare delle scelte..ci vuole coraggio!

SOFI [Italian: Sì] Già. RUFFINA [Italian: Sì certo, tu lo chami

coraggio, io lo chiamo stupidità.] Sì, addio! Tu lo chiami coraggio, a me sembra una follia!

Then, the old woman shows her perplexities about the way a woman can create a family while travelling around the world. She underlines that, differently from men, women have specific duties that they have to keep into consideration (‘‘ma lei non è un uomo’’), unaware of the fact that not all women want to have a family. Even when she faces the others’ different opinions, she firmly reiterates her beliefs, according to which Liz's journey is a crazy idea which will not bring any positive results.

This reaction, as well as Liz’s landlady’s one, can be partially justified by the advanced age of the character. Ruffina belongs to a generation which was deeply imbued with gender stereotypes; in the past it was inconceivable for women to imagine a life without marriage. For Ruffina, the unusual refusal of the ‘protective’ structure of marriage or the act of breaking free from it must be motivated by serious issues, e.g. homosexuality.

To sum up, it is not necessary that the whole conversation focuses on the dimension of food for conveying gender stereotypes. In Liz and her landlady’s dialogue, the allusion to the domain of food is made only in the last turn and food is not physically present on screen, while in Liz and Ruffina's conversation food is briefly mentioned only at the beginning of the scene, but the images of the preparation of dinner accompany the whole dialogue. Both modalities of reference to the domain of food indicate gender stereotypes and point at a ‘traditional’ feminine role, according to which choices which differ from 'standard' behaviour are regarded as evidence of ‘deviancy’, e.g. licentiousness or homosexuality.

5.

Conclusion

In this work, I have analysed some aspects of food talk, concentrating in particular on how the attitude towards food and alimentation has changed.

The contemporary era is characterised by a renewed awareness of food practices and of their ‘‘hypersignification’’ (Di Renzo 2010). Today, more than ever, the simple act of eating and alimentary habits are used as powerful marks to signal a wide range of aspects, e.g. religion, ethic ideals and social and economic status, and also largely contribute to the dynamics of personal interaction, to the development of personality and to its expression in talk (Lakoff 2006).

The most evident consequences of this cultural change are visible in the domain of gastronomy. The basic structure of restaurants has been modernised and the new modalities of writing menus reflect a greater interest in the form rather than in the substance of dishes. It is possible to observe a remarkable change in food-related discourse, a ‘‘metamorphosis’’ (Lakoff 2006:147), whose most evident feature is the frequent insertion of foreign languages in menus. This strategy is meant to enrich the text and to fascinate the intended customers, who are likely to perceive any dish as ‘prestigious’ only for its refined linguistic description. This tendency also contributed to change customers' approach to the menu, who at present are asked to interpret what is written in the menu and to have a background knowledge of the most used languages in culinary linguistics, mainly French and Italian. Thanks to their cultural and linguistic relevance in the US, these two Romance languages have been regarded by American restaurants as the perfect tools to give due importance to the linguistic description of dishes and to attract potential customers, and nowadays they have a central role in gastrolinguistics and in writing menus. As has been observed in the second chapter, Italian and French are involved in many interesting linguistic phenomena, among which the inaccurate reproduction of foreign words in order to imitate Italian or French linguistic style and the attribution of new meanings to meaningless French or Italian linguistic strings.

This cultural change towards food and food practices had influences on audiovisual texts as well, a fact that can be observed especially at a linguistic level. At present, films show a remarkable number of contexts where food-related expressions are used. The analysis of food discourse in the film Eat, Pray, Love and the comparison of the English and the Italian dialogues constitute useful tools to investigate the current tendencies in food talk in the cinematographic domain. Moreover, as for the analysis of dubbing, two constant features (and constraints) turned out to be the main priority in translation: the necessity of keeping into consideration the visual and the auditory dimensions and the attention which must be paid to the audience’s expectations. Apart from the difficulties which are intrinsically related to any linguistic transfer, in fact, this analysis has highlighted that in audiovisual products the adapted script has to match the images on screen and also to comply with lip synchrony, kinetic synchrony and isochrony. At the same time, most of the changes are aimed at meeting the target viewers’ needs and expectations, for example making up new expressions when the audience is not likely to understand the original expression, when it might be offended by the content of the original turns or when the target language has semantic gaps.

In the first section, I have investigated the use of food-related words for the representation of identity. As for the allusion to the character's surname ‘‘Spaghetti’’, the insertion of such a descriptive proper names can immediately capture the attention of both American and Italian viewers thanks to the reference to a world-wide known Italian dish. In the second and in the third example, I compared two food-inspired nicknames, ‘‘Groceries’’ and ‘‘Mandibola’’, and two expressions which hint at the protagonist’s silhoutte, ‘‘muffin top’’ and ‘‘ciambella’’. I found out that allusion to one’s personality and physical appearance can be obtained through different linguistic expressions and that, in these two cases, the reason why the dubbed equivalents derive from different sources is due to the impossibility of a literal translation. As for the fourth and the fifth examples, the utterance ‘‘maybe my word is pizza’’ demonstrates that the definition of one’s identity can also pass through the domain of food and eating, with visible consequences on the level of linguistic expression. In the expressions ‘‘to be in love with pizza’’, ‘‘to have a relationship/to break up with pizza’’ (and in their Italian equivalents) the identification with food items broadens out to the lexicon of feelings, thus indicating that it is possible to make use of food talk in a metaphorical way. Finally, in

the sixth example the identification and integration in a new reality turn out to depend on being capable of fluently ordering for food in a foreign language, too.

As for the second part, the dialogues analysed highlight the role that food discourse has in contexts of socialisation and interaction. The study of the first two examples, the pun ‘‘baker’’/‘‘to get baked’’ and the brand name ‘‘Thums up’’ (and of their Italian equivalents ‘‘cannoli/canne’’ and ‘‘botta di vita’’, respectively), demonstrates the possibility to develop creative alternatives when, because of a semantic gap in the target language or because of the target audience’s knowledge, it is impossible to reuse the original expressions.

In the third example, the English utterance ‘‘language, gelato, spaghetti’’ and the corresponding Italian ‘‘linguine, Leonardo, limoncello’’ provide two engrossing insights. On the one hand, they show that food talk can be used in order to express mood and feelings and to idealise reality, while on the other the they allow to analyse the modalities of selection of words from a cultural and a linguistic point of view, too, with great attention paid to synchronisation constraints.

The fourth example, the scene of the linguistic tandem, shows that the original exchange must be adapted in order to preserve coherence with the context and the viewers’ expectations. As for food-inspired expressions in particular, if the comparison between ‘‘therapist’’ and ‘‘terapistus’’ shows minor linguistic modifications, in the process of script adaptation two food-related quotations which represent witty and creative references to both Italian culture and food have been added.

In the third part, I have analysed the role which is played by food in the expression of ethnic and gender stereotypes. As for the former, the analysed dialogues show clear examples of discrimination and/or stereotyping of three different ethnic groups: Italians, Neapolitans and Americans. Italians are depicted in a negative way through food both at a verbal and at a visual level. This demonstrates that not only food discourse, but also food-related scenes can convey discriminatory and stereotyped images. Linguistically speaking, then, the turns in which food items are mentioned have been carefully adapted: if for Americans generic references to ‘Italianness’ were sufficient, for Italians the dialogues have been enriched with specific terms in order to depict more in details devoted to the local habits and culinary traditions.

As for the scene which alludes to Neapolitans, it is among the most difficult to adapt. The starting point for talking about Neapolitans stems from reference to pizza, which is identified by foreigners as a typical Neapolitan dish, while the dialogue itself does not involve references to food. The analysis shows several modalities for softening the original script (e.g. the term ‘‘moron’’ and the allusion to illegal activities), as the target audience might be offended by the original implications.

As for gender stereotypes, on the other hand, the study of two scenes in particular proves that women can be easily discriminated through reference to the domain of food and eating, a fact which is due to the role women had in the past. Food items can be mentioned in order to hint at the sexual dimension, as is demonstrated by the expressions ‘‘pasta and sausage’’ and ‘‘pasta je sausizza’’. In this case, the choice of a marked linguistic variety plays a fundamental role in reinforcing the original meaning: if the utterance is in standard Italian in the original script, in the dubbed version it is characterised by the use of the Sicilian dialect, which is likely to be linked to the different audience’s presuppositions. Americans believe Italians to have sexist attitudes towards women, whereas Italian attribute these attitudes to people who come from the South of Italy; hence, the use of a specific linguistic variety for each script is functional.

Finally, in the scene of the turkey stuffing, the starting point for the allusion to the stereotype is given by the physical presence of food on screen, which accompanies the characters’ considerations about the role women should have in society and the stereotyped idea according to which, if a woman refuses to marry, she must necessarily be homosexual.

6.

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