White and gendered aesthetics and attitudes of #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking

Sobande, Francesca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4788-4099 2024. White and gendered aesthetics and attitudes of #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1177/13675494231222855

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Abstract

Foodwork is a political matter, and baking is no exception. Many messages are associated with the symbolic significance of baking, such as idealised notions of white, middle-class domesticity, femininity, and visibility. The rise in homebaking during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in social media content which conveys much about the different meanings ascribed to baking. Relatedly, scholarship on ‘COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice’ (Swan, 2020) highlights that intersecting oppressions are implicated in such matters. Drawing on different lines of research that specify and address structural power relations (e.g., gendered whiteness), I analyse the aesthetics and accompanying attitudes conveyed via Instagram posts about #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. In doing so, I draw and build on critical studies of whiteness (Daniels, 2021) and digital food media (Perrier and Swan, 2020; Wilkes, 2021), and connections between consumerism and COVID-19 (Arzumanova, 2021; Sobande, 2022). This work considers what such online content suggests about the relationship between a ‘feminised, white, aestheticised ethos’ (Lupton, 2020: 10) and digital discourse and depictions regarding food, family, domesticity, work, and rest. Consequently, this research ponders over whether the labour and framing involved in documenting #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking on Instagram reflects a neoliberal form of entrepreneurial ‘freelance feminism’ which is animated by the tension between the ‘frequently polarized figures of “the feminist” and “the housewife”’ (Hollows, 2016: 179). I examine the significance of three key themes related to #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking: 1. Gendered domestic labour and digital depictions and discourses of motherhood, 2. Productivity, pausing, and so-called ‘soulfulness’, and 3. Domestic minimalism and aesthetics of whiteness. In turn, this article critically reflects on the relationship between mediated constructions of gendered whiteness and baking, while echoing calls for more research that explicitly addresses dynamics between digital whiteness, aesthetics, gendered racial capitalism, foodwork, feminism, and online content creation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	1367-5494
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 December 2023
Date of Acceptance:	11 December 2023
Last Modified:	12 Feb 2024 14:41
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164721

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