August 8, 2011
Italianness in Jersey Shore season 4: Introduction
Since Jersey Shore began airing on MTV, there has been much criticism of how the show portrays Italian Americans, by UNICO, the National Italian American Foundation, and other Italian-American groups and foundations. The show has been accused of reinforcing stereotypes of Italian Americans, most notably that of the ‘Guido’: a derogatory term for working-class Italian Americans. The cast members of Jersey Shore, however, actually use the term Guido in a reappropriated positive/celebratory sense, meaning a tan, muscular Italian-American man with ‘fresh’ clothing and slicked-back hair (or, in the case of the ‘Guidette’, a tan girl/woman, often wearing her hair in a ‘Snooki-poof’).
From the start, Jersey Shore, both in terms of the show itself (music and background images, for instance) and the way it was promoted, was clearly positioned within an Italian-American context. The cast members themselves also often refer to their Italianness when speaking about their identity, family/background and appearance. This in spite of the fact that, as critics have noted, the cast members were all born in the U.S., have never been to Italy, and don’t (with the exception of Vinny) speak Italian. Furthermore, although several cast members have mixed ethnicities (and Snooki, having been adopted into an Italian-American family, in fact isn’t even of Italian, but Latin-American descent), their identity is established (be it by the producers of the show or by the cast members themselves) as specifically (and exclusively) Italian/Italian-American, rather than, for instance, Italian-Irish-Spanish-American (JWoww), Puerto Rican-Italian-American (Ronnie), or, simply, American.
Since, in the previous seasons, Italian identity has been such an explicit part of the show, it will be interesting to see how this construction of the cast members’ identity as being ‘Italian’ holds up when faced with actual/other Italians in Florence, and certain Italian customs and cultural practices that might not match this (possibly) specifically East Coast/American version of Italianness. Will the notion of the Jersey Shorers’ Italianness be altered or called into question, both explicitly by the cast members and by the way the producers construct the show? Will they become Americans in Italy rather than Italians/Italian-Americans in America, as in the three previous seasons?
(Ronnie is big, like the Colosseum.)
I will try to answer some these questions by looking at how Italianness is constructed throughout (parts of) the episodes of the fourth season.
So stay tuned!
[...] is the character that has explicitly referred to his Italian background the most in previous seasons, and also the one whose identity has been established as being ‘the most Italian’. This [...]