Iconographies of the everyday: Mediated whiteness and food hospitality activism

Elaine Swan

doi:10.1177/13675494211055737

Abstract

The category of the ‘everyday’ has been relatively un-theorised in studies of digital food culture. Drawing on theories that the everyday is not just a backdrop but through which race, class and gender are constituted, and the cultural production of whiteness, I analyse digital photographs from the Welcome Dinner Project’s webpages and social media. The Welcome Dinner Project is an Australian food hospitality activism charity, which organises and facilitates one-off dinners to bring ‘newly arrived’ and ‘established Australians’ together over potluck hospitality to address isolation and racism. My overall argument is that Welcome Dinner Project representations and media representations of Welcome Dinner Project are underscored by conflicting representations of race, diversity and privilege. Despite the good intentions of the Welcome Dinner Project, the formal images it disseminates work to service the status quo by enacting and reinforcing dominant notions of middle-class whiteness in Australia, moderating the transgressive potential of its activism. However, these processes are subverted by less formal and unruly images depicting people outside, in mess, in non-hierarchical groups and migrant hosting. Such imagery can be understood as a form of visual activism which challenges the iconographies of whiteness in digital food culture and normative ideals of race-neutral domesticity and everydayness.

Highlights

It’s a sunny day and we’re all seated in a circle in a training room of a small charity in Sydney
As I viewed our data set, I was struck that the Welcome Dinner Project (WDP) uploaded digital photographs of a whole range of differently classed, racialised and ethnicised rooms to its Facebook and Instagram pages, at variance with the domestic spaces represented on the webpages and in the media
The third type of visualisation is that of a non-epic everyday depicted by photographic images in a snapshot style of imagery taken by facilitators or guests at home dinners

Summary

Introduction

It’s a sunny day and we’re all seated in a circle in a training room of a small charity in Sydney. The literature reviewed presents and analyses the cultural production of whiteness through representations of domestic practices, taste, good manners and ideas about belonging at home in the nation Through these processes, whiteness becomes seen as the everyday, the normal and the familiar. Smith (2016) is at pains to stress that is the everyday where race happens, but that race is made out of the everyday, and the literature reviewed suggests ways in which whiteness may be made through the domestic and ideas of home, and how this may take specific forms in the settler context of Australia It raises questions about how or whose everydayness figures in the WDP images of hospitality; who is seen able to host the home and the nation

Methodology

Discussion and conclusion