FOOD AND FOUCAULDIAN POWER ON TWO WEB FORUMS (Dr Francesco Buscemi, Bournemouth University)
Please see below for details of this Wednesday’s guest lecture from NRG member Francesco Buscemi – hope to see you there!
Wednesday 6 January, 4pm, W240
Narrative Research Group Guest Lecture
Dr Francesco Buscemi, Bournemouth University
Passing on Recipes or Passing an Examination? Food and Foucauldian Power on Two Web Forums in Italy and Britain
This paper analyses the representation of the social practice of passing on recipes on two popular Italian and British web forums, and the power relationships that they produce. It draws on Foucault’s category of examination; on Rosello’s links between Foucault’s examination and writing recipes; and on Appadurai theory that recipes are fundamental in the construction of national culture. Moreover, specific studies on Italian and British food culture highlight similarities and differences between the two countries.
Qualitative textual analysis is applied to the forums La Cucina Italiana and BBC Good Food. They have purposely been chosen because they represent two ‘food institutions’, and this research wants to analyse mainstream food media. The results show that the two forums generate different examples of Foucault’s examination. The Italian users (all women, or at least using female names) undergo their examination not on the forum, but at home or among friends, before or after writing the posts. The forum is seen either as a place of resistance, in which they ask help to the other users before being examined by relatives, or as a place in which they may show off that they have passed the exam. In Britain, the examination occurs within the forum, and users (man or woman hierarchically relating to each other) are both examiners and examined; the user is examined when posts a recipe, and examines the others when comments on the recipes of the others.
Francesco Buscemi is Lecturer in Creative Communications at Bournemouth University. Moreover, he teaches media studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at the Catholic University of Milan, where he also supervises degree theses. His PhD, gained at Queen Margaret University, is a Bourdieusian and semiotic analysis on how representations of food in the media support national ideologies in Italy and Britain. Another strand of research involves meat, cultured meat and their links to the living animal, death, religion, blood, gender and the relationships between Nature and Culture.