Yasmin Ibrahim
Social Identities
Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
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| By New York Times Current History Magazine - Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10773923 |
This paper examines the re-aestheticisation of hunger and poverty with
the emergence of austerity blogs. These blogs, which chronicle personal
narratives while re-directing gaze in creating food through limited
budgets and in sharing the intimate brutalities of hunger, bring a
renewed focus and interest to poverty through daily lived experiences of
hunger. Beyond personalising hunger in a climate of austerity, blogs as
a symbol of articulation of the laypeople for the general public become
interstitial spaces between government rhetoric and media
representations, making poverty an intimate, personal and present
proposition. Blogs as peoples’ archives of social history are hybrid
spaces of personal iterations amenable to public consumption and media
scrutiny. In the process these can re-mediate and disrupt the social
reality of first-world hunger, inviting a gaze through first-hand
narratives. Poverty becomes a contested entity online where blogs
perform both resistance and reiteration of the neo-liberal stereotypes
about the unemployed and those on benefits.
Full paper,
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/f4ytRGpfyBVCHFzXk4R8/full
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