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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This paper explores how Asian American food bloggers engage postrace and postfeminist discourses in their self-branding strategies. I perform a close analysis of the autobiographical narratives on three Saveur-nominated blogs by Asian and Asian American women and find that race is made salient through a combination of postfeminist and postrace strategies, for instance, as a personal makeover project, a set of mutable personal characteristics, and an authentic commodity that is translated by food bloggers. While these self-representations offer a counternarrative to mainstream stereotypes of Asian women, they nevertheless work to sustain the trope of the postrace food blogger: cheerful, servile, and willingly commoditizing race for consumption by the reader. This trope forecloses the possibility for explicit discussions of racism or social injustice. However, I look at the reinvention of the genre and its accompanying identity performances in the wake of the post-2016 political and cultural landscape, marked by the Trump regime, the global pandemic, the rising visibility of prominent hashtag activist movements, and a youth-driven digital political sensibility. I illustrate some of the ways in which these political stirrings are referenced, in everyday and explicit ways, across Asian food blogs. I use this example to demonstrate the malleability of the food blogosphere, as a digital culture underpinned by commercial logics yet operating as site for nascent political potential that is nurtured through the thoughtful and critical work of individual bloggers.
Asian-Inspired: Postfeminism, postrace and politics in the Food Blogosphere
This paper explores how Asian American food bloggers engage postrace and postfeminist discourses in their self-branding strategies. I perform a close analysis of the autobiographical narratives on three Saveur-nominated blogs by Asian and Asian American women and find that race is made salient through a combination of postfeminist and postrace strategies, for instance, as a personal makeover project, a set of mutable personal characteristics, and an authentic commodity that is translated by food bloggers. While these self-representations offer a counternarrative to mainstream stereotypes of Asian women, they nevertheless work to sustain the trope of the postrace food blogger: cheerful, servile, and willingly commoditizing race for consumption by the reader. This trope forecloses the possibility for explicit discussions of racism or social injustice. However, I look at the reinvention of the genre and its accompanying identity performances in the wake of the post-2016 political and cultural landscape, marked by the Trump regime, the global pandemic, the rising visibility of prominent hashtag activist movements, and a youth-driven digital political sensibility. I illustrate some of the ways in which these political stirrings are referenced, in everyday and explicit ways, across Asian food blogs. I use this example to demonstrate the malleability of the food blogosphere, as a digital culture underpinned by commercial logics yet operating as site for nascent political potential that is nurtured through the thoughtful and critical work of individual bloggers.
Bio
Tisha Dejmanee is a lecturer in digital and media studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She completed her PhD in Communication at the University of Southern California and was previously an Associate Professor of Communication at Central Michigan University. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Television & New Media.