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.