Seeing benevolently: Representational politics and digital race formation on ethnic food tour webpages
Introduction
In this paper we examine racialised and gendered representations on the website for Taste-Tours, a social enterprise which offers ethnic food tours in southwestern Sydney, a region with large numbers of refugees and migrants from Vietnam and Lebanon racially demonised in newspapers, radio and television. Established in 2011, Taste-Tours forms part of a community development programme with The Benevolent Society, Australia’s oldest not-for-profit organisation. The espoused aims for Taste-Tours are to change ‘negative perceptions’ of southwestern Sydney, provide jobs for local residents and generate sales for local ethnic food businesses. The website is designed to sell both the tours and the social mission to prospective customers: providing information about the tours, their purpose and the tour guides. Such food social enterprises offering employment creation and training for refugees and new migrant groups are burgeoning in Australia (Flowers and Swan, 2015). Given their hybrid character in pursuing both commercial and social goals, food social enterprises’ representational work takes on a complex hue (Douglas, 2015). Race and gender representation form part of their social mission and often underpin their economic aims, their digital marketing and public communications.
Whilst scholars study food media extensively, for instance: television programmes (Jones and Hollows, 2010, Hollows, 2003, Pike and Leahy, 2012); food writing (Mennell, 1996, Gallegos, 2005); and films such as Food Inc. or Chocolat (Lindenfeld, 2010), analyses of food websites and representational politics are relatively rare. For instance, we acknowledge that Signe Rousseau, 2012a, Rousseau, 2012b makes an important contribution to analysis of social media and food but note that her work gives little attention to representational politics of race and gender. Indeed, although the growing body of work by critical race food theorists show how racism and racialisation underpin the production, consumption and representation of food, including debates about the politics of ‘eating the Other’, the racialised representations of food websites are neglected (Guthman, 2008, Guthman, 2011, Slocum, 2007, Slocum, 2008, Slocum, 2011, Williams-Forson, 2006, Williams-Forson, 2010, Williams-Forson and Walker, 2013, Heldke, 2003, Hage, 1997, Duruz, 2010, Cappeliez and Johnston, 2013, Johnston and Baumann, 2007, Johnston and Baumann, 2009).
Analysis of food webpages and representational politics matters because the Internet forms part of daily life and is a site of racialised and gendered power. As Lisa Nakamura, 2002, Nakamura, 2008 insists, the Internet is a race-making technology, reproducing offline stereotypes online, and reconfiguring them as cybertypes through distinct media processes and affordances. Whilst tourism media may seem clichéd and inconsequential, ethnic food tour websites are of particular significance because they construct and reinforce asymmetrical power relations and systems of inequality.
Motivated by the lack of writing on new media, racialisation and food, and informed by studies of touristic Othering, our paper focuses on how Taste-Tours does racialised and gendered touristic representational work on its website. Given Taste-Tours’ hybridity as an ethnic food social enterprise, the site operates with both commercial and social mission webpage ‘sub-genres’ in a context in which circulating images and narratives of the region and its people are deeply racist (Cranny-Francis, 2007). The tours are visiting places not widely seen as tourist attractions and yet, to attract attention, commercial webpages have to advertise ‘seductively’ (Holman, 2011: 95).
To analyse the website meaning-making processes, we deploy a social semiotic multimodal approach designed to examine visual and verbal texts, and interactive affordances on webpages. In particular, we focus on ‘digital race formation’, namely how the Taste-Tours webpages construct race and gender through these resources to produce cybertypes (Nakamura, 2002, Nakamura, 2008). We identify how the website promotes the tours and its social mission, representing a region and people framed by offline racist stereotypes. Accordingly, through our multimodal analysis, we explore cultural processes of racialisation through discourses, representation, symbols and multimodal meaning-making, in contrast to food studies writers who examine economic and material practices of racialisation. Thus, we examine the representational practices of Taste-Tours on a website, and not material or cultural practices on their tours. We note that Taste-Tours operates in a context where racist representations of refugees, asylum seekers and racialised migrants dominate Australian media and politics. These sustain harsh policies towards, and austere funding of, support services for refugees and new migrants. Nonetheless, Taste-Tours’ guides report how much they enjoy working for the enterprise and running the tours and feedback from tourists is positive.
To situate our analysis, we discuss briefly how texts make meaning. Richard Johnston’s (1986) influential cultural circulation theory emphasises the need for a holistic analysis of how meanings are produced through stages of production, representation, consumption and lived experience. We recognise the complexities of meaning-making in relation to the production and consumption of the Taste-Tours’ website, including how actual users negotiate the meanings of the Taste-Tours pages and how actual web designers put together the website. We suggest, however, that a single case study enables a close-up analysis of verbal, visual and interactivity meaning-making strategies, which whilst partial, offers important insights into representational politics, digital racialisation, and Othering on websites. Such an approach is useful because websites are a relatively new genre and yet, ubiquitous and more work is needed on how website-specific strategies activate meaning-potential, draw on conventionalised meaning-making resources and position imagined users in distinctive ways (Cranny-Francis, 2005). Webpages reverberate with culturally resonant ways of thinking and at the same time, provide glimpses of oppositional ideas (Fürsich, 2009: 247).
Drawing on these ideas, we ask how Taste-Tours’ webpages promote the organisational social mission and represent a region framed by racist stereotypes ‘seductively’ to tourists (Holman, 2011: 95). In focusing on one case study, we are able to examine in detail how the modes work to produce digital racialisation through Othering. Our paper makes three contributions to studies of food, media and politics. First, we extend media analyses through our focus on food websites; secondly, we build on studies of racialisation and food, extending Nakamura’s concepts of digital racial formation and cybertyping to food websites through applying analytical frameworks on visual racism and interactivity. Thirdly, we show how visual and verbal strategies produce gendered racial Others and cybertypes, positioned in relation to an imagined non-other. The paper begins by introducing Othering, racialisation, and cybertyping, followed by an explanation of our analytic framework and a detailed analysis of how distinct webpage modes of the visual and verbal and inter-active affordances represent race and gender.
Section snippets
Touristic Othering
Tourism has been described as the industry of Othering. Scholars have analysed how tourism media objectifies, essentialises, exoticises and homogenises the Other, reducing rich and complex lives to negative stereotypes (Mellinger, 1994, Santos et al., 2008, Santos and Buzinde, 2007). Typically, racialised Others are ascribed deferential, passive, subservient or demeaning roles. Tourism brochures, advertising, TV programmes, and guide books consolidate racist stereotypes, shape how people look
Racialisation
As indicated in our introduction, critical race theorists in food studies draw on the concept of racialisation taken from wider social theory. Racialisation refers to interpersonal, structural, and institutional practices which produce race on ongoing basis (Murji and Solomos, 2005). Hence, race is an ‘effect of racialisation’ rather than its cause (Ahmed, 2000: 47). Intersecting with class, gender and sexuality, race is gendered, and gender racialised (Ramji, 2009). Race-making processes
Cybertyping
In spite of extensive scholarship on critical race theory, few new media scholars study the Internet in relation to race. Nakamura is an exception, with a body of work examining race in social media, avatars, and music videos (2002, 2008). She insists that the Internet is not the utopian post-race space that transcends embodiment nor the force of grassroots democracy it was imagined to be. To stress the importance of representation in making race, and to highlight the specificities of
Taste-tours
At the time of our research in 2012/3, Taste-Tours had been running for three years under the aegis of The Benevolent Society. Staff included a team-leader, marketing manager, and a team of tour guides. Attracting between five and 20 tourists each tour, with extensive, positive media coverage, Taste-Tours expanded to several suburbs. All women and local residents, they are contracted on a casualised basis tour by tour. Most are from non-Anglo Australian ethnic backgrounds – Lebanese, Chinese,
Methodology
Our literature review brought certain questions to the fore: how does digital racial formation work through the multimodal resources on the website for Taste-Tours? Given that Taste-Tours wants to challenge racism and sell tours, how is race and gender mobilised through the affordances of the Taste-Tours webpages? Do the webpages reproduce cybertyping and Othering strategies, and if so how? To answer these questions, it was important for us to understand the specificities of websites as forms
Taste-Tours webpages
One of the most remarkable features about Taste-Tours webpages is that users have to navigate via the ‘source organisation,’ Benevolent Society’s website (Cranny-Francis, 2007). Taste-Tours forms part of a ten-year community development project called Growing Communities Together. The website has multiple purposes: to promote Benevolent Society’s brand; provide information on its services to clients; construct an authoritative and trustworthy identity; raise funds from donors and recruit
Composition
Other meaning-making systems on webpages include visual and verbal multimodal strategies, and in this next section we examine how verbal text, layout, colour, font and images are composed and combined, and contribute to the touristification and representational work of Taste-Tours’ webpages.
The guides
Verbal and visual text about the guides can be accessed by clicking on a hyperlink labeled ‘Our Tour Guides,’ the second link on the menu at the top of the page, foregrounding the tour guides in the designed reading path. Websites for other ethnic food tours such as Gourmet Food Safaris and Harlem Tours put information about the guides further ‘back’ in the hierarchy of pages. In positioning the guides upfront, and locating their photographs in the centre of the page, Taste-Tours signals that
Conclusion
We argued at the beginning of this paper that food webpages have been under-researched, particularly in relation to racialised and gendered politics of representation. Even though there is growing literature on food and racialisation, little attention to date has focused on the Internet and its medium-specific modes of meaning making around race, what Nakamura calls digital race formation and cybertyping. Our paper examines the representational work of the website for an ethnic food tour, an
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to The Benevolent Society for permission to use screenshots from their website, and to staff on the Taste Tours programme for their time and support.
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