Fresh off the press! Academic Article on Monica Meneghetti by Prof. Michela Baldo (University of Birmingham, UK)

As Meneghetti emphasized in an interview, while writing the memoir, she realized how much food was an integral part of her Italian culture and the affective importance of it. Using code-switching in relation to food terms was not only the result of a deliberate choice, but also dictated by the sounds and language that specific memories evoked and by her willingness to carefully reproduce them. (Baldo, 123)

Here is a fresh-off-the-press article by Michela Baldo of the University of Birmingham on Meneghetti’s writing. This article, titled “Code-Switching, Queering Food and Narrative Construction in Monica Meneghetti’s Memoir What the Mouth Wants” (2024, Forum for Modern Language Studies), makes use of the Queer Italian Canadian Artists: Ethnic Belonging and Cultural Production qualitative interview corpus.

Baldo’s article dives into the use of Italian and of Venetian-language culinary terms in Meneghetti’s memoir What the Mouth Wants (2017). Baldo determines that Meneghetti’s linguistic code-switching subverts the family tradition of meal preparation for a queer Italian-Canadian context. This linguistic practice is linked to the unique perspective and memory of the narrator. Baldo makes use of our corpus by harvesting demographic and ethnolinguistic information about the author. Baldo uses our qualitative interview to make determinations around the tight link between food and Meneghetti’s sense of Italian-Canadian identity, and on how strongly these elements are tied to the author’s emotions and memory. 

We are very proud that our data can provide insight for scholarly research of this calibre, and grateful for Baldo’s scholarship on Italian-Canadian queer writers!