Code-Switching, Queering Food and Narrative Construction in Monica Meneghetti’s Memoir What the Mouth Wants

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the extent to which the Italian-Canadian queer writer Monica Meneghetti, in her memoir What the Mouth Wants, challenges and disrupts heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality through the code-switching of food terms in Italian or in a Northern Italian dialect. Code-switching is used primarily to evoke memories of Meneghetti’s late mother through the author’s favourite dishes, and of the homophobia (or rather biphobia) directed at her by her father, with whom she used to make fresh pasta and cook Italian meals. The memories and flashbacks, interspersed with present-day accounts of the preparation of Italian childhood meals with her polyamorous family, allow the memoir’s protagonist to build a new sense of family: a queer Italian-Canadian family. Drawing on feminist and queer food studies, the article reveals that Meneghetti uses code-switching to signal point of view and to construct the memoir’s characters and plot, as code-switched food items are also linked to the notion of memory and to what it means to write the memoir.