Fantasies of food work and digital entrepreneurialism: postfeminist time panic on food blogs

In the postfeminist context, discourses of time panic and time scarcity are used to generate a culture of anxiety that justifies gender traditionalism. Food blogs offer unique insights into the ways that these postfeminist discourses of temporality and labour are negotiated in the daily, lived experiences of individual women. I draw on a sample of 19 Saveur Award-nominated food blogs to explore how they respond to concepts of time panic and time scarcity through discussions and depictions of women's work, retreatism, and postfeminist subjectivity. I perform a thematic analysis in conjunction with an architectural analysis of food blogs' database narratives to discuss how postfeminist time scarcity—and its attendant anxieties—are rejected through fantasised depictions of domesticity as a creative pursuit and digital entrepreneurialism as an empowering endeavour. While the reading of such fantasised representations is ultimately ambivalent, particularly given the diversity of ways an audience may respond to these positionalities, I find that food blogs tend to reinforce the focus on the individual's resilience, resourcefulness, and responsibility to make correct choices and resolve postfeminist contradictions, particularly through the affective management of food work.