Strategies off the menu: Gastrospaces and negotiating expectations of Chinese food

This dissertation examines how understandings of Chinese food within the multicultural nation are strategically negotiated by differently positioned groups. Through ethnographic research, the dissertation explores how Chinese food and the spaces of its production become transformed by consumers, producers, insiders and outsiders into active, strategic sites known as "gastrospaces" that dislocate and displace the idea of cultural and culinary wholeness in favour of more disjunctured and nuanced articulations. The production of these ideologically tactical sites is a complex process, often achieved in nuanced conjunction with and against the essentialisms that such gastrospaces seek to complicate. In privileging multiple sites of analyses to reveal conjunctural moments, the dissertation explores the lived experience of consuming and thinking about Chinese food in strategic ways. Analyses of archival and historical sources, cookbooks, culinary geographies and other spaces of food production reveal individual and group instances of food politicking or "gastro-manoeuvring". Contextualised against larger culinary, social and historical discourses, these negotiations demonstrate how agents manage their expectations of Chinese food and Chineseness and through that process, reterritorialise hegemonic meanings by disrupting linear representations that construct Chinese food as commensurate with Chineseness. It is this theoretical understanding of food as a transformative, active site that challenges individuals to resituate their interpretations of Chinese food within theoretical work on space, place, memory making, history making, ethnicity and identity.