Precarious digital mothering: creativity, entrepreneurship and hidden labor within digital foodscapes

ABSTRACT

Digital foodscapes not only transform our everyday relationships with food but offer creative and entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper works to expand the Anglo-American focus of digital foodscapes scholarship in analysis of Japanese Instagram food influencers and their relationship to gendered social reproduction. Japan’s most prominent influencers are mothers documenting the bentos (boxed lunches) they prepare for their children, a meal suffused with socio-cultural meaning about good food and good mothering. I develop the concept of precarious digital mothering to examine the hidden, gendered labor created and magnified through Instagram bento accounts. I argue that the creative and entrepreneurial opportunities offered to women though Instagram are inseparable from the cultural meaning of bento as a judgment on good mothering and create a bind where digital success cannot occur without taking on additional domestic food work. Precarity is created both for the mothers who take on unpaid and unrecognized labor in the pursuit of Instagram success, and those who consume their content and the problematic narratives of food and motherhood it normalizes in its idealized and mediated performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• digital foodscape
• gendered social reproduction
• mothering

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my colleagues at RHIN for their help and support during my visiting research in 2019, and particular thanks to Mai Kobayashi and Stephen McGreevy. Thank you to the comments from the two anonymous reviewers which have greatly improved the paper. I would also like to thank Ben Schrager for comments on an earlier draft, and his support and co-editorship throughout the long processes of bringing this special issue to publication.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature Visiting Research Fellow Programme.

Notes on contributors

Christine Barnes

Christine Barnes is a Lecturer in Cultural Geography at King’s College London. Her research interests center on the cultural politics of food and food media, with a particular interest in the mediation and circulation of good food discourses through digital foodscapes.