Iconographies of the everyday: Mediated whiteness and food hospitality activism

Abstract

The category of the ‘everyday’ has been relatively un-theorised in studies of digital food culture. Drawing on theories that the everyday is not just a backdrop but through which race, class and gender are constituted, and the cultural production of whiteness, I analyse digital photographs from the Welcome Dinner Project’s webpages and social media. The Welcome Dinner Project is an Australian food hospitality activism charity, which organises and facilitates one-off dinners to bring ‘newly arrived’ and ‘established Australians’ together over potluck hospitality to address isolation and racism. My overall argument is that Welcome Dinner Project representations and media representations of Welcome Dinner Project are underscored by conflicting representations of race, diversity and privilege. Despite the good intentions of the Welcome Dinner Project, the formal images it disseminates work to service the status quo by enacting and reinforcing dominant notions of middle-class whiteness in Australia, moderating the transgressive potential of its activism. However, these processes are subverted by less formal and unruly images depicting people outside, in mess, in non-hierarchical groups and migrant hosting. Such imagery can be understood as a form of visual activism which challenges the iconographies of whiteness in digital food culture and normative ideals of race-neutral domesticity and everydayness.