Oh God, that's an ugly looking fish – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative discourse analysis of food‐related interactions in four U.K.‐based Polish–British families. The data include the families’ video‐recorded celebratory meals and audio‐recorded interviews. The analysis explores how food talk projects ‘stance’ (Du Bois ) – that is, how it indexes the speakers’ positioning towards their sociocultural field, thus shaping their identities. The data reveal that, as the speakers negotiate their stances in the culinary context, they recurrently ‘other’ their interlocutors’ foodscapes – represent them as different, abnormal and/or inferior. This othering could be interpreted as distancing from other speakers. However, the analysis shows that by humorously highlighting differences between their culinaro‐celebratory repertoires, the family members also reaffirm their sharedness. The speakers’ discursive collaboration during their difference talk demonstrates how othering can be unifying in these transnational families, the potential of which is understudied in face‐to‐face interactions and in the context of food.