“Instagrammable cafés prove that many Taiwanese have no taste.”: Food representation, taste judgement and gender in online multimodal discourse — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 3: Language, culture, and socialization A
  3. “Instagrammable cafés prove that many Taiwanese have no taste.”: Food representation, taste judgement and gender in online multimodal discourse

“Instagrammable cafés prove that many Taiwanese have no taste.”: Food representation, taste judgement and gender in online multimodal discourse (20338)

Wan-Hsin Ann Lee 1
  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

The study explores how visiting (non)instagrammable cafés is framed as socially distinctive and how taste and judgement of taste manifested in such discourse are intertwined with gender ideologies in Taiwan. Posting visits to instagrammable café online publicizes an emphasis on lifestyle. Expectedly, ‘instagrammable’ categorizes not merely restaurants but, significantly, their visitors. Interestingly, its nearest equivalent in Taiwan Mandarin, wangmei ‘Internet beauty’, contextualizes café visits (the practice) and sharing (the discourse) in heteronormativity. This also identifies an imminent trend of visiting non-instagrammable and “authentic” cafés as exclusively done by those who appear to be more tasteful and erudite. This differentiation is embodied in stigmatizing food underrepresentation in posts about instagrammable cafés, the lack of gustatory and social taste of their visitors and exaggerated popularity of these cafés among young females. Posting on social media, despite its availability to the general public, encompasses social implications concerning gender, taste and classification, all made possible through discourse. To attend to this phenomenon, the study collects 100 popular posts about instagrammable cafés respectively from two popular social media in Taiwan, Instagram and Dcard, and 31 online articles on non-instagrammable cafés through keyword searches. The study adopts multimodal discourse analysis to analyze the texts and photos in these 231 posts to address the following questions.

1) How are food, eating and taste presented, represented and/or underrepresented in two types of posts?

2) How are social meanings of visiting instagrammable cafes and non-instagrammable ones constructed and reinforced through multimodal social media?

3) How are gender ideologies of heteronormativity embedded in the meaning-making of online food discourse?

Discourse on café visits serves as a perfect platform to discuss how popular food culture relies on and reinforces social distinctions. The study hopes to pinpoint how social media play an active role in shaping the sociolinguistic profile of contemporary foodways.