8 Vitalities and Visceralities Alternative Body/Food Politics in Digital Media

9781138300804C08.3D 151 [151–168] 6.10.2018 8:18AM 8 Vitalities and visceralities Alternative body/food politics in digital media Deborah Lupton Digital media have made activist groups, dissenting voices and food cultures visible to potentially very large audiences in unprecedented ways. Many relate to alternative ways of thinking about and engaging in food practices. Digital media platforms, such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, provide a multitude of opportunities for people to create their own content concerning their own or others’ bodies, as well as food production, preparation and consumption practices, to share this content and to comment on, curate or re-appropriate the material of others. In this chapter, I adopt a cultural studies perspective, drawing on feminist materialism, to identify some of the influential practices and forms of representation related to the circulation of forces and intensities about embodiment and food cultures as they are expressed in digital media, referring throughout to body/food politics to signify the close relationship between the two. My discussion here is based on the premise that political and power relations are enacted in the quotidian spaces of everyday routines and practices, and are produced through and with performances of embodiment and identity. Therefore, digital media representations of human bodies, or of food production and consumption practices, can be interpreted as political insofar as they privilege some meanings over others, and claim membership or speak to some social groups rather than others. While people uploading images of their restaurant or home-cooked meals to a social media platform may not seem overtly political, it represents the micro- political level of participatory culture on social media as users attempt to generate meaning and to portray their food practices (and, by extension, themselves) in a certain light. Other content and interactions have a more macro-political intention, directed at challenging or changing dominant structures, organisations or interests. Irrespective of the position taken, much of this online content can be viewed as ‘alternative’ in the broadest sense, in that it represents bodies and food in ways that promote some meanings and close off others. Advocates of vegan or vegetarian positions, or of ‘clean eating’, for example, provide an alternative perspective from those promoting other foods or diets on what kinds of foods should be consumed. Fat activists or those advocating body positivism seek to challenge normative assumptions about health, attractiveness, and body weight and size, providing a counter-representation to advocates of weight-loss and thin, or fit, embodiment. 9781138300804C08.3D 152 [151–168] 6.10.2018 8:18AM 152 Deborah Lupton Importantly for my focus here, digital media material about bodies/food often employs images and text that seek to incite intensities and affective forces to persuasively convey meaning and affect audiences. My discussion begins with an outline of the key theoretical perspectives offered by feminist materialist scholars and the contributions they can make to examining the micro- and macro-politics of body/food cultures in digital media. I take this approach to acknowledge the role played by non-humans, such as digital media and devices, in human embodiment and political practices, and to examine the embodied politics of human–non-human assemblages, focusing on the use of images and hashtags in what is fast becoming a digital culture dominated by these forms of communication. As I show, the features and affordances of digital media engagement are central to the political agential capacities, affects and vitalities that are generated in and with these media. The chapter is structured around a set of hashtags that are commonly used to invite interest and attention about bodies and food. I examine digital media portrayals of different types of food (particularly those typically coded as ‘clean’ and ‘healthy’, compared with those represented as ‘indulgent’,junkor‘excessive’), human bodies (principally those designated as ‘fit’, ‘thin’ or ‘fat’), and related concepts of fitness and health, vegetarianism and veganism, meat consumption, fat activism and pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’). In so doing, I seek to demonstrate the very different, but sometimes interrelated, political positions expressed in digital media. Feminist materialism, digital media and politics Sociomaterialist positions are useful for highlighting how humans construct and enact meaning with and through things, including digital devices and media. Such perspectives have begun to exert great influence in contemporary social and cultural theory as a result of their capacity to address the entanglements of humans and non-humans in a more-than-human world. This approach not only acknowledges the importance of symbolic ways of conveying meaning (such as language, discourse and image), but also the agency of material objects and how they generate, shape and order human action together with humans. As articulated in the work of feminist materialist scholars Donna Haraway (2008, 2015, 2016), Karen Barad (2003, 2007), Jane Bennett (2004, 2010) and Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2013) humans are entangled in broader ecologies of other living creatures and non-living objects and spaces. These relationships and assemblages are continually dynamic and emergent, as new actors enter into or leave them, and as humans move through time and space. From this perspective, all actors in these assemblages have agency and vitality, but always with and through other actors. Working together, they create vital forces and agential capacities for feeling, learning or action. In feminist materialist analyses, questions of ethics and politics are often central. For Bennett, Braidotti, Haraway and Barad, this includes a focus on environmental politics and the politics of embodiment. They contend that recognising non-human actors as agential and affective (in terms of possessing 9781138300804C08.3D 153 [151–168] 6.10.2018 8:18AM Vitalities and visceralities 153 the capacity to affect and be affected), allows greater recognition of the importance of the non-human world to human existence. For Braidotti (2002, 2013), the mutable and distributed nature of human agency offers a politics that is able to challenge current fears and preoccupations. Cartographies of power relations and their associated entitlements, agencies and capacities can provide detailed ways of thinking through and with political practices and subjectivities. They help to think differently about figurations of human action, belief and practice, their implications, boundaries and limitations, and how new modes of being and acting can be configured, and political change effected. Haraway similarly takes a self-declared feminist socialist stance that is more than human. In her most recent writing, she adopts the term ‘Chthulucene’ as an alternative to the Anthropocene (a term used to describe the contemporary epoch in world history in which humans are exerting a dominant force over living things and systems) (Haraway, 2015, 2016). For Haraway, the Chthulucene is a vision of the world in which multispecies assemblages of humans and non- humans (both technologies and living creatures) co-exist. She describes the ‘tentacular’ associations that involve ‘myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus’ (Haraway, 2015, p. 160). When identifying the political dimensions of this world order, Haraway contends that it is important to look at ‘which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters with figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems’ (Haraway, 2015, p. 15). Barad’s (2003) insistence on understanding ‘how matter comes to matter’ also draws attention to the political importance of material things. She proposes a post-human perspective on performativity, which involves recognition of the role of things, as well as of ideas and discourses in configuring the matter of bodies and ecologies of other living creatures. Bennett (2004, p. 348) uses the term ‘thing-power’ to describe the vital power of human–non-human assemblages, and describes the ‘material recalcitrance’ of cultural forms. She contends that a greater awareness of how this thing-power operates can draw attention to the wider political dimensions of human–non-human assemblages. As such, these assemblages can contribute to an ecological project of environmental sustain- ability by sensitising humans to their complexities, their agential powers and the impact of human interventions. Applying these philosophical approaches to alternative body/food politics, it can be posited that when humans interact with other humans, non-human living organ- isms, food and technologies as they move through space and time, assemblages are constantly configured and reconfigured. A micro-politics of relations and capacities operates at the level of the assemblage (Fox and Alldred, 2017), which can accumulate at the macro level to impel political action and change. Agential capacities are central to political motivations and practices. They stimulate and inspire politics, while political action, in turn, can generate further agential capacities. Feminist materialist perspectives have not yet been commonly employed to examine digital media material. I would argue, however, that

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