Food, Family and Females: (Southern) Italy in U.S. Advertising

At the cross-over of Italian and North American lingua-cultural frameworks the complex issue of national identities plays a pivotal role, which is variously represented and advertised in media communication. A country is not only represented through its geography and landscapes, arts, products and artefacts, but also through the verbal output and receptivity of its speech community that shares metaphors, images, icons (Hymes 1980), and through the recurring topics (and even commonplaces or truisms) that frequently occur in discursive interactions. Such mis/representation contributes to shape what Anderson defined Imagined Communities (1983). Imagined communities and national identities are not a clear-cut and a once-and-for-all affair: they mainly consist in a dynamic interplay of symbols, clichés and conventional, anachronistic behavioural models, which are easily communicated through media, and commercials. It is by now a shared notion that when exposed to overused representations on a regular basis, viewers absorb biased contents a-critically. In this perspective, Gerbner (1993, 2002) among others illustrated how media are responsible for shaping or ‘cultivating’ viewers’ conceptions of social reality. By acting as a pervasive sixth sense, visual media often construct and broadcast unbalanced portrayals, which are predictably filtered through and mediated by the viewers’ race, socioeconomic status, area of residence, and racial predisposition. Such stereotypical representations are an effective way of simplifying and diffusing complex notions by representing marked clichéd traits, and may even increase emotional identification, contributing to the creation of cultural boundaries between Us and Others, i.e. insiders and outsiders of one’s specific national community. In our case, Americans of Italian heritage are frequently represented through anachronistic behavioural models, such as the ethnocentric sense of family, fixation on food, and mafia. Regardless of a multifaceted, ever-developing reality, these cultural etiquettes are perpetuated, often construing derogatory meanings that can alter audience attitudes towards minorities, such as American women of Italian heritage who are frequently represented through anachronistic behavioural models, especially in TV commercials. Indeed, the real societal groups can be very different from the frozen image of the ‘advertised’ communities. In 1980s-1990s US TV commercials, Italian American women were depicted either as caring mothers and good-cooks, or overweight grandmothers wearing housecoats or aprons – often with a funny or ironic effect. The typically Italian deli-food fixation is displayed in the setting of welcoming kitchens, and the sense of family appears to be ethnocentric/clannish. In late 1990s-2010 US TV commercials the evolution and foregrounding of ‘updated’ stereotypes is recognizable, though always revolving around food (facilitated) preparation and consumption as the pivot of family life. Drawing on selected TV commercials, we investigated from an evaluative semantic (Hunston &Thompson 2000; Martin & White 2005; Bednarek & Martin 2010; Fleitz 2010) and multimodal discourse analysis perspective (van Leeuwen 2008, 2013; Kress-van Leeuwen 2001, 2006) the (mis-)representation of Italian American women in US advertising in a diachronic perspective. Our analysis highlighted how nation-based stereotypes are re-mediated through inter/intra-textual references in a process of re-semiotization that appears to be a successful social practice and a fundamental component of marketing strategies. Is there any scope, however, for boundary-crossing, meaningful, informative memes in the contemporary US commercial semiosphere? Are genuine Italian artifacts and products actually advertised? Are authentic cultural values, practices, skills and traditions transmitted? Apparently not. Racisms and gender bias in their variety of forms and instantiations have a long history in advertising, inescapably leading to pervasive stereotyping, that is still being written. Not only Italian Americans, but also (or mainly) African Americans, or Asian Americans etc. are frequently framed into unflattering frozen portrayals by national or local brands and agencies to meet the audience expectations – a privilege of Italian Americans being the Mafia connection, not to mention the ‘Guidos’ and ‘Guidettes’ (Cavaliere 2012). However, with the world of social media acting as ‘taste-police’ and giving immediate feedback, many such campaigns quickly garner criticism for being (overtly) racist and get shut down. In this fluid scenario, we could even speak of a lively cross-media communication (or feedback) and reciprocal influence, which, in the long run, could change the dynamics of advertising. But, for the time being, ‘upgraded’ stereotypes are continuously shaped to meet and reinforce the perceptual expectations of the audience, according to the characteristics of the advertised goods. Such ongoing re-contextualization of the ‘Italian’ social/ethnic group in the US commercial semiosphere is mainly carried out through the advertising practices of quoting, paraphrasing, genre-mixing and hybridization, equivocation, ambiguity and shift in expectations – often leading to final effects of surprise. We can say that advertisers have re-voiced/ mimicked fictional old-worlds thanks to the potential of semiosis for mobility across boundaries and practices. Thus, local meanings and fossilized metaphors are continuously created, which can produce comic, grotesque and even paradoxical effects, and a persuasive, if inaccurate, meta-fictional setting is shaped, where the womanly stereotype is reinforced by the ethnic stereotype, thus creating an updated and more alluring commodification of the ‘Italian caring mamma’ and Womanly Homemaker.