Performing eating out: organizing food-spaces and 'new' forms of working

Abstract

I seek to understand the processes of organising that emerges and manifests as food-spaces, where class and gender are constructed and performed. Such spaces may be constituted as 'eating-out' spaces, work-spaces and social spaces by a variety of visible and less visible inhabitants. This study furthers this understanding through my participation in two food-space sites (restaurants). I have sought to explore how claims of authenticity around food and construction of food-spaces are performed and shaped by new understandings of work and eisure, and are, in turn, shaping them. I argue that these food-spaces emerge through the construction of new forms of work unfolding at spaces that are not conventionally constructed as work spaces, for example, restaurants and cafes. Through such a process of experience construction, eating and activities around eating are arranged closely connected with work and work-life. I have tried to see these performances as continuous processes of conceiving, perceiving and living the space, using Lefebvrian spatial triad. This approach helps unravel the socio-political processes through which some forms of work, along with the activities of production and consumption of food, are being constructed and claimed as ‘new’ forms and other forms are separated from these new forms and are being hidden. The latter operations impose invisibility on performers of such forms of work and their rhythms of everyday life connected with these forms.