Sociology Program and Dean of the College Present
Fake It When You Make It: Authenticity Strategies and Ethnoracial Inequality in American Fine Dining
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Olin 102
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Gillian Gualtieri, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Barnard College
As creative workers face increasing calls to attend to concerns around diversity, equity, and inclusion, producers, critics, and consumers in these industries have navigated calls to attend to systems of racial inequality and devaluation in their work. In this paper, I use the case of American fine dining to attend to the ways in which the ethnoracial categories of both producers and their products in interaction shape how chefs and critics understand their value. I focus on one form of evaluative criteria—the elusive concept of authenticity—and show how chefs who have different relationships to whiteness and who cook products that are categorically associated or dissociated with whiteness enact distinct authenticity strategies to explain their creative work. I introduce the framework of producer/product (mis)match and then present a typology of six authenticity strategies that uniquely enable and constrain chefs’ and restaurants’ value depending on the categorical match or mismatch of chefs and their products and those categories’ racialized associations with whiteness. For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin 102