Navigating discipline and indulgence: the performance of contradiction on Instagram food posts in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

There is a contradictory dynamic in how Instagram seems to promote both profligate consumption habits in disregard of health and unprecedented health anxieties where people micromanage every ingredient they consume. Far from inhabiting disparate social worlds, these themes often coalesce within the same image. We argue that this phenomenon reflects consumers’ attempts to navigate a neoliberal double bind that simultaneously pressures them toward both dysfunctional extremes. By emphasizing the centrality of a politics of indulgence to US ideological warfare, especially during the Green Revolution, we interrogate a key limitation of much critical food scholarship in its reductive equation of whiteness and power with food discipline and thinness. We draw on postcolonial scholarship on mestiza/o whiteness and code-switching to argue that neocolonial privilege is better understood as the mobility to code-switch between the vocabularies of discipline and indulgence without being confined to one or the other. Then, we analyze Instagram food posts taken by customers at organic restaurants in urban Philippines, reading them as innovative but never innocent contestations against the double binds of discipline/indulgence and mestiza/o whiteness while highlighting the rich historical and cultural contingency of their meaning-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• postcolonialism
• nutritionism
• double bind
• whiteness
• code-switching
• food porn
• social media
• organic
• humor

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We do not list the restaurants here due to privacy concerns. Anyone who wishes to view our list may contact the corresponding author.

2. All captions taken from our dataset are anonymized and edited for brevity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kwok Yingchen

Kwok Yingchen is a Ph.D. student at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She obtained her bachelor’s degree with a major in environmental studies from Yale-NUS College, where she conducted her primary research for this paper. Her main research interests include the history of evolutionary biology, STS, and queer studies.Email: [email protected] (corresponding author)

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio is an Associate Professor of Social Science (Environmental Studies) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. His main research interest is critical food and agrarian studies, with a focus on the political economy and cultural politics of food sustainability in Southeast Asia.

Edson Tandoc

Edson Tandoc Jr. is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information and Director of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet (IN-cube) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. His studies have focused on the impact of journalistic roles, new technologies, and audience feedback on the news gatekeeping process. He has also looked at how readers make sense of critical incidents in journalism and take part in reconsidering journalistic norms; and how changing news consumption patterns facilitate the spread of fake news.