Bits of bytes and bites of bits: Instagram and the gendered performance of food production in the South African Indian community

abstract

Social media have created electronic media platforms like Instagram that enables snapshots of offline lives to be commemorated online. The very nature of social media platforms allows for the accepted limits of humanity to be extended and the boundaries of anthropocentrism to be breached. Smartphone technologies have allowed us to re-examine our limitations − surpassing parameters of geography, memory, and communication. This article engages a techno-feminist approach to analysing Instagram posts about food production and consumption in the South African Indian community. It explores the ways in which the conventionally gendered everyday production of food is portrayed online. With new technologies embodied in smartphones becoming increasingly accessible to middle-class Indian women, the engagement with these technologies has allowed them to confront, challenge and overcome gendered, racial, and class positionalities. Using a posthumanist approach, the article explores the ways in which these women engage with and represent their online/ offline lives on this platform. It contends that, akin to Haraway’s cyborgs, Instagram content creators of South African Indian descent embody a multidimensional space that is free from humanist dualisms. In this way, performing food production for online consumption becomes an important marker of culture and belonging.

keywords:

• food
• posthumanism
• South African Indian
• Instagram
• women

Notes

1 Adhikari (2005), Radhakrishnan (2005) and Vahed and Desai (2010) all consider the lack of visibility for communities outside of the black/ white binary.

2 See Bolter (2016).

3 Usually a stainless-steel container, with various compartments or smaller bowls that hold different spices.

4 Indians arrived in South Africa in two waves. The first arrival of Indians were indentured labourers, brought to South Africa to work in the sugarcane fields. They were closely followed by passenger Indians, who arrived in search of lucrative business opportunities. Class differences between the two groups continue to exist to this day.

5 The bunny chow is a meal made of a hollowed-out half or quarter loaf of bread, filled with a spicy curry. Versions of curry vary, some meat-based and some with beans or lentils.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for The Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS).

Notes on contributors

Vidhya Sana

VIDHYA SANA (PhD) is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Pretoria. She completed a PhD in Media Studies through the University of Witwatersrand in 2020. Her research interests are primarily situated in the field of cultural studies, specifically in the complexities of race and gender and how the two intersect in post-Apartheid South Africa. The prevalence of popular culture as a means of negotiating and exploring identities in a post-Apartheid milieu has been a focal point of recent research. Her PhD thesis considered South African Indians and their use of the medium of comedy as means of negotiating identity and belonging in post-Apartheid South Africa. While a wealth of research has considered the socio-economic impact of Apartheid on communities across South Africa, she is interested in research on minority communities and their use of popular culture, as well as the representations in said popular culture products. By exploring how minority communities such as the South African Indian community use popular media, complexities of identity and belonging in post-Apartheid South Africa can be revealed. Email: [email protected]