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University of Nevada, Reno

Watching Women Eat: A Critique of Magical Eating and Mukbang Videos

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of

Arts in Communication Studies

By Samantha Gillespie

Dr. Jenna N. Hanchey/Thesis Advisor

August, 2019

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the thesis

prepared under our supervision by

Entitled

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

, Advisor

, Committee Member

, Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

Samantha Gillespie

Watching Women Eat: A Critique of Magical Eating and Mukbang Vi

deos

Masters of Arts 

Jenna Hanchey

Amy Pason

Chris Mays

August, 2019

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Abstract

This project interrogates how Mukbang shows in online spaces both function to rebel

while simultaneously reinscribe hegemonic thinness culture. Through the audience’s

discourse and the way viewers discuss women eating in public spaces, audience members

reinforce narratives of thinness culture even when that is not the intention. This occurs

because of the dominant narrative that positions women eating in public as a taboo act. In

this project I introduce the concept of magical eating to explain how audiences use these

eating shows in an attempt to gain agentic capabilities over the constraints of thinness

culture, but only further restrain and reinscribe these constructs. This research captures

the current climate in how audiences interpret their own relationships with cultural eating

and thinness culture ideologies.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………. i

Introduction …………………………………........... 1

a. Methods …………………………………. 8

Chapter 2 (Theoretical Orientation).……………..…16

Chapter 3 (Eating)………………………………..….34

Chapter 4 (Body)……………………………….……65

Chapter 5 (Magical Eating) ………………....………93

Chapter 6 (Conclusion)……………………………..105

References ………………………………………….113

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Food culture in the U.S. is a pivotal part of U.S. American identity. Blogs,

magazine publications, television networks, and even Fortune 500 companies are

dedicated to how we talk, write, conceptualize, and film food. The food entertainment

industry continues to grow with show after show on network television positioning either

food or food consumption as the star. As social media continues to put agency in the

hands of the public, it is no surprise that user-generated content has become dedicated to

producing, discussing and consuming food. These narratives have quickly flooded and

dominated digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Nearly every kind of audience in every location has simple and easy access to

consuming food entertainment as technologies continue to advance applications of media.

How-to narratives and viral eating videos rapidly are becoming a staple in food culture on

social media and streaming platforms with channels such as BuzzFeed’s Tasty and well-

established vloggers bombarding their Instagram feeds with intimate and original food

videos. The popularity of this new method of eating as entertainment is making headlines

in our news media with top outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and

British Broadcasting Corporation (just to name a few) noting both the strangeness and

proliferation of this new craze (Kwaak, 2014; Hu, 2015; Pequenino, 2016; McCarthy,

2017; Barmore 2019). Videos like Mukbang and Autonomous Sensory Meridian

Response eating shows are trending at exponential rates, as more and more audiences

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flock to view deviations from the traditional form of food entertainment, performances

that offer a more intimate and focused portrayal of eating.

Media focused on food and food culture has been a long-established practice, and

has grown more pronounced over the decades—gaining serious popularity in the early

2000s and onward (Pason, 2015). Pason notes, citing O’Neill (2003), there was a

significant shift in the early 2000s with a boom in the production of food magazines and

the transformation of food reporting becoming a more distinguished beat (2015). Once

food blogging such as Yelp made its mark on the industry, there was another shift in how

food reviewing was perceived and executed. Pason (2015) wrote:

The genre of food reviewing has become a shared language, taken up by

professionals and the general public, and although might show thematic

difference, all food reviews work to shape and influence our collective tastes, how

we identify, and even position us politically (p. 50).

That is, the move from print to online publication, and the development of online

spaces, allowed the public to participate rather than just consume food related content.

This shift created a movement of more people being able to influence the cultural

narrative that used to be relegated only for the distinguished few. This change is

meaningful because of how significant food is to culture and its constitutive formation of

cultural identities and power systems (Pason, 2015). Now the latest shift in digital media

platforms has led to the general public (not just professionals) advancing beyond

reviewing food also cooking and eating food for the purpose of entertainment and media

content.

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However, with such swiftness in popularity, I think it is just as urgent to

interrogate the problematic impacts of this trend. I am particularly drawn to the new

forms of media centered around women and food. Given the historicity of women’s

bodies, eating behaviors, and media, I experienced a moral dissonance in my own

fascination, dear I say obsession, with these videos.

After watching my first Mukbang video, or binge-eating show (see the Methods

and Texts section for a more detailed definition), I was disturbed by my instinctual

reaction — jealousy, followed by a throbbing sense of longing. Watching, specifically,

the women in these videos eat with an unabashed freedom deeply triggered me in a way

that almost seemed primal. My own relationship with food and treatment of my body has

been a journey of self-loathing, harmfulness, and blame. In my past, I engaged in

dangerous eating behaviors such as binging, purging, and restricting for a number of

reasons: the primary one being to control the formation and appearance of my body. To

this day, I struggle with reconciling my relationship with eating and food. I find myself

trying to catch the fleeting comfort of how eating feels — desiring so badly to enjoy the

magical powers of food. Systematically each bite leaves me grasping desperately at the

euphoric feeling of my favorite meal before it is stolen away by the guilt and shame of an

old and familiar narrative—my body is not allowed to indulge. Each bite bitterly

dissolves into a painful swallow claiming consequence on my unruly body (Gay, 2017).

When investigating public reactions to Mukbang videos and other food videos, I

noticed I am not the only one experiencing this type of reaction. The dissonance between

Westernized normative standards of women’s bodies and eating culture juxtaposed with

recent popularization (thanks to social media platforms) of representations of women

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eating freely and without obvious consequence causes the concept I call magical eating.

That is, audiences of such media as Mukbang experience a fantasy of a consequence-free

indulgence and liberated engagement with food through their consumption of eating

entertainment. Thus, the audience is using the actors and the texts to fulfill their own

fantasies of eating and embodiment.

This project adds to the conversation of how food entertainment in online spaces

is further reinscribing hegemonic thinness culture, while also creating a space for people

to grapple with their own struggles with the norms of this culture. In addition, the concept

of magical eating complicates the way people experience these eating shows by removing

agentic capabilities from the actor to reconcile these struggles.

Therefore, this research captures the current climate in how audiences interpret

their own relationship with cultural eating ideology and thinness culture. A portion of this

project is dedicated to looking closely at how audiences react to public displays of

women eating. Through this work I find that there is a contradiction in these reactions

with viewers reinforcing both current hegemonic norms in gendered eating habits, and

rebellious fantasies of how to undermine these very constructs.

In addition, my work interrogates the power of thinness in U.S. culture. Discourse

focused on embodiment cannot be separated from text depicting women eating. Women,

corporeality, and eating seem to be constitutive in the perspective of many of the viewers.

I demonstrate the prevailing dominance of thin culture, and how audiences consciously

and unconsciously work to erase fat identity.

For this work I use a feminist cultural lens, which I explain and review the

scholarhip of in Chapter 2. By using this lens, I further the already established argument

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that thinness culture is intersectional and constitutive of other power systems in U.S.

culture, and, while other lenses focus on the individual forming dysfunctions with eating

or relationships with their body, a feminist cultural lens accounts for and forces

responsibility also on the dominate narratives and influence of culture.

More specifically, in Chapter 2, I review the historical constraints of thinness

culture, the oppression these constraints put on women, and the impact these restrictions

still have on today’s generations. Norms within this system including eating behaviors

and the presentation of the body are used to structure a significant cultural understanding

of femininity. Literature which underscores the power dynamics of thinness and the

sigma of fat identity are also reviewed in the chapter to aid in the understanding of why

audiences use these texts to fantasies about eating and thinness.

Then, in Chapter 3, I analyze the politics of eating by closely examining how audiences

react to the Mukbang stars’ presentations of eating in relation to their gender. Through

my examination of the formation of audience discourse and the Mukbang stars’ own

candied discussions, I was able to determine themes that focused on common points of

struggles with food and cultural eating norms presented in Western societies. I argue that

though Mukbang shows rebel against gendered eating norms, they also work to reinscribe

belief systems of thinness culture because of how audiences react to public displays of

women eating. In this chapter, I demonstrate moments of the audiences supporting and

encouraging the rebellious act of women eating in public spaces. However, also in this

chapter I also point to ways audience reinscribes thinness culture. I do this by observing

language which both emboldens and restrains eating behaviors. Through these

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observations I formed themes focused on audience reactions to eating aesthetics, fantasies

of indulgence, and desiring similar experiences with food.

Then in Chapter 4, I focus my work on how audiences are responding to

Mukbang stars with ideal and nonconforming body types. This is useful in understanding

the audiences’ fantasy of binge eating in relation to the presenting body featured in the

fantasy. This work leads to a larger discussion of how thinness functions in U.S. culture

and the Othering of fat bodies. The audience’s discourse encouraging Mukbang stars to

engage in rebellious acts seen in Chapter 3 departs from the narrative in this chapter. The

patterns I determined functioned to strongly reinscribe ideologies which privilege

thinness and actually erasing fat identity (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001) all together.

Lastly, in Chapter 5 I connect my work from chapters 3 and 4 to explain the

functionality of magical eating. I illustrate how the immediacy of this logic emerges from

a need to undermine the historic constraints placed on women for decades dictating

unattainable and oppressive eating norms and expectations of their bodies. These texts

create a false sense of relief for audiences from these norms. However, in using this form

of magical thinking, there also are ways that harmful ideologies continue to be

reinscribed, defer any real introspective on one’s own damage from the repercussions of

thinness culture, and abilities to transform eating and thinness culture all together.

Thus, this project captures the urgency of examining food entertainment

especially on social media platforms. These platforms often depict a less filtered narrative

of current perspectives and interpretations of culture, yet still have a similar reach in

viewership and thus indoctrination. The few texts a choose to critique have millions of

views and growing every second. It is imperative to continue to understand how the

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public sees gender, food and corporeal politics because of the implicit power entwined in

food and presentation of the gendered body.

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Methods and Texts

For this project I analyzed binge eating shows on social media platforms. The

methodology I used was rhetorical criticism of how the artifacts are discursively

functioning and what overarching arguments are being made through these texts

(Campbell & Burkholder, 1996). This process includes an interrogation of the descriptive

and rhetorical moves of each text because each artifact persuades audiences and actors

into different relationships to magical eating. This is conducted by analyzing the video

content and audience comments for each video.

While conducting this analysis I observed patterns in the public discourse from

which I drew conclusions to create each overarching theme and argument. The main

arguments I made from my observations were how audiences interpreted and then

reinscribed and rebelled against their current understanding of U.S. cultural eating norms,

how audiences read the texts to interpret their own relationships with eating and thinness

culture, and finally how the audience experienced the text to engage with magical eating

logic. This was carried out by looking closely at the participation and roles of the actors,

audience(s), structure(s), and material support of the texts (Campbell & Burkholder,

1996).

In my analysis, I considered the positionality and cultural location of all the

actors to the best of my abilities. I watched multiple videos that I did not use for analysis

in order to gain a stronger understanding of how they present themselves. By doing this I

was able to retrieve more insights into who they are, what culture they are positioned in,

and also a bit more of how audiences associate with these stars. Some of the information

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I discovered was one of the actors is from Canada, one identifies with having a food

addiction, and some of the stars are very open with audiences while others are reserved.

By gaining a more contextual understanding of these stars I created a more holistic

perspective of the texts (Campbell & Burkholder, 1996). Thus, I was able to cite relevant

and dominant patterns that I observed forming and emerging from these narratives.

Additionally, because I was using audience comments as the bulk of how I was

interpreting audience reactions, I needed to consider intentionality and intentionality.

This was difficult because I did not have any information on who the audience was—I

didn’t know how viewers identified themselves or their social location. This forced me to

observe the functionality of the discourse as a larger narrative rather than how groups of

people were reacting to the videos. For example, when looking at the discourse of one of

the actors who presents with a nonconforming body, I saw a large trend of have

audiences rejecting her actions because of her presentations, and some participating in

this trend of reinforcing thin culture despite using encouraging language. My main goal

was to understand how audiences were intentionally or unintentionally reinscribing

narratives of thinness culture. Throughout this process I needed to be continuously aware

of how I was interpreting the media and its discursive structure (Campbell & Burkholder,

1996).

By taking these details into account, my goal was to create sound arguments and

links when taking into consideration factors that occurred situationally or how audiences

were reading the videos in that moment and also how contextual factors shaped reactions.

In other words, when drawing conclusions from audience comments I would weigh

factors such as was a viewer referencing a past videos of an actor that impacted that

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viewer’s interpretation of the current video, whether actors were from Western cultures

or Eastern cultures, how the actors engaged with the audience—were they more open

with their audiences or more reserved. This was an important step in attempting to

capture how I saw audience discourse functioning, my claims in rhetoric working to

reinscribe harmful narratives, and draw out my thematic conclusions from these texts.

Artifacts

I examined nine Mukbang stars and observed three to four different shows per

star for this project. I was very selective in how I chose the Mukbang stars I wanted to

observe for this project. The parameters for who I chose and why were several factors. I

chose stars who all identified as women and were all around the same age. This was

important because though there are many Mukbang stars who are men, I wanted this

project to be focused on thinness culture and women. I wanted the stars to be all around

the same age (in their early 20s or 30s) because age is another decisive construct for

women in U.S. culture—thus I wanted to focus on gender and the constraints of eating

and body narratives.

The second criteria were choosing stars who were established in the community,

or at least have a large number of subscribers, and who had a YouTube channel that is

mostly dedicated to Mukbang. This was important because I saw this contextually

impacting how audiences watched these shows. The viewers who turned to these stars’

channels were ones who knew what Mukbang was (for the most part). This factor also

allowed me access to a form of consistency the videos I watched of each star and a verity

in the themes of videos. For example, some stars did 10, 000 calorie eating Mukbangs, or

eat foods that were particularly messy.

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Lastly, I felt it was important to consider body presentation when selecting the

Mukbang stars I would observe for this project. I wanted to observe stars from both

Westerns culture and Eastern cultures—and particularly a star from Korea where

Mukbang originated. Looking at videos of stars with both thin and nonconforming bodies

was a very important step in the process. I first found Trisha Paytas who considers herself

fat, and much of her audience identifies her a fat. Paytas if a very famous in the YouTube

community launching her career uploading vlogs and music videos she would make—she

then started dabbling in Mukbangs and then main that the center theme of her channel—

she is self-proclaimed as the “Mukbang Queen.” However, Paytas is not extremely

overweight and has told her audience that she wears a clothing in U.S. size 12 this is

below average for U.S. American women (Chirstel & Dunn, 2016).

Then, I discovered Mukbang star Candy. She presents, what the scientific

community would label, as morbidly obese. I actually had never heard of Candy, and

YouTube algorithms never suggested to me her shows. I found her through one of

Paytas’ shows, where she was casually discussing which fat Mukbang stars she

watches—after noting most Mukbang stars are skinny. Candy became an important and

essential part of this study. As Paytas had noted, many famous Mukbang stars present as

thin-bodied, and it was important for me to observe videos with a woman whose body

defied not only cultural norms but also the norms of this particular community.

For the analysis of the Mukbang shows, I observed both the actors and content in

the shows, and I also used viewers’ comments to interpret how audiences were reacting

to these videos. It was by using these comments that I was able to connect patterns within

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the discourse to create the themes cited above. My criteria for forming the patterns was to

choose similar reactions that were occurring frequently from different viewers.

The artifacts used in this project are all texts positioned in popular culture that

circulate on and in digital media platforms. All artifacts can be found on YouTube, which

is easily accessible and shareable. These artifacts are centered in food as entertainment.

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Mukbang

The Mukbang stars I critiqued in the project are all women whose ages range

from 20-30 years old. These stars use YouTube to mediate, share and promote their

shows. Below is a list of the Mukbang stars I observed for this project with contextual

information on how they present and how many followers subscribe to their YouTube

channels. I believe it is important to provide this basis of information to enable readers to

infer a better understanding of what audiences are seeing when watching these shows.

The names of the stars are the names they use on their YouTube station.

The Stars

· Trisha Paytas is a white, U.S. American woman and presents with a big body type.

She typically switches from wearing no make-up or to an amount of heavy make-up.

Currently she has 4 million subscribers to her YouTube channel.

· Veronica Wang is an Asian-Canadian woman who presents with a thin body type,

and almost always wears make-up. She currently has 1.3 million subscribers.

· Dorothy is a Korean woman from South Korea who presents a slim body type. She

always wears make-up, and she currently has 3 million subscribers.

· Lindsay Greene (her YouTube handle is Hunger Diaries) is a U.S. American woman

who presents with a slim body type. She wears little to no make-up and currently has just

under 50,000 subscribers.

· Candy (her YouTube handle is HungerFat Chick) is a U.S. American woman. She

presents with a very fat body and wears little to no make-up. Candy currently has

142,000 subscribers.

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About Mukbang

Originating in Korea, Mukbang videos began popping up on the internet around

2009 (Youm, 2016). The main idea behind these videos is simple: People film themselves

eating large quantities of food, sometimes while telling stories or sharing day-to-day

experiences. These shows quickly became a sensation in Korea, generating such

popularity that in 2013 South Korean broadcasting networks started implementing the

idea into reality television (Youm & Michaelmas, 2016). This phenomenon reached the

U.S. around 2015 with live-streaming videos on platforms such as YouTube and a

segment on the late TV personality Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show, Parts

Unknown (McCarthy, 2017; Youm & Michaelmas, 2016).

Though Mukbang stars are diverse in gender and race this project is interested in

focusing on feminine-presenting Mukbang stars. Many of these stars follow hegemonic

standards of beauty. These videos intrigued me because of the way women were

approaching eating behaviors. I am fascinated by the blatant way both men and women

are breaking eating norms by not only binging on an excessive amount of food, but also

how this taboo behavior is put on display. Mukbang videos offer a rich text for the

concept of magical eating because of the exoticism that these women embody because of

their departure from normative ideologies of food, eating, and embodiment.

In this chapter I introduced my project and gave an explanation of why I see this

work as important and urgent. That is, with the growing trend of food as entertainment

and the boom of technology and creation of online spaces, it is vital to interrogate the

formation of discourse in relation to ongoing narratives of gender eating habits and

thinness culture, along with understanding how these narratives are functioning in these

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spaces. In this chapter I also previewed what readers can expect to learn throughout this

work, and I explained the methods I used, along with giving background information of

the Mukbang, the videos I used, and the actors I observed. In the following chapter, I

explain my theoretical approach, and the literature I reference in which I based and

formed my arguments. This includes what using a feminist cultural lens means, why I

think it was the best lens to use, and in-depth understanding of the underpinnings of

thinness culture, and other theoretical frameworks I cite in my arguments.

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Chapter 2

Theoretical Orientation

This chapter reviews the scholarship I use to form and confirm my arguments in

my analysis throughout this project. The first section is dedicated to explaining what a

feminist cultural lens means, and how I use this approach in my analysis. I cite

established researchers and scholarship to aid in my explanation of why it is important to

understand the historicity of gender, eating, and embodiment from the point-of-view that

considers culture rather than just the individual. I then describe the theoretical

frameworks of magical thinking, desire and fantasy to explain how I build my arguments

for my concept of magical eating.

Feminist Cultural Lens

This research could easily take a variety of different approaches resulting in

compelling findings. However, using a feminist approach enables me to interrogate these

texts with a focus on the ways rhetorical discourse is recursively constraining and/or

enabling gendered ideologies of the body and eating norms. Centering my argument

around magical eating, I use this lens to obtain an understanding of how new formats of

food and body narratives are either reinforcing or resisting historic and salient norms of

female embodiment and eating behaviors.

Additionally, living and experiencing life in a Westernized female body, the move

to critique these texts through a feminist cultural lens feels like the most significant

approach. As Joycelyn Bailey (2015) explains through Susan Bordo’s work, the

historicity of Othering femaleness and female bodies runs deep. Harkening back to an

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Aristotelian understanding of the Self, the female body’s devaluation is centered in

ideology by way of dualistic terms of femininity and the female body (Bailey, 2015).

This inescapable binary continues to govern the ways of representing and constraining

female embodiment.

Furthermore, enacted through media, national and global narratives of the female

body further establish expectations and definitions of what is considered to be the ideal

body. Though this is not a new phenomenon, the reach of this influence has greatly

increased due to the advances in technology. In the preface of the 10th anniversary edition

of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Bordo (2003)

underscores the enduring and dangerous impacts of gendered hegemonic standards on

gendered bodies exacerbated by new forms of technology and media advancement,

despite the more recent emergence of body positivity narratives.

In this preface Bordo (2003) offers an example that specifically points to the

insidious and rapid effects Western media messaging has on the female body despite a

short duration of exposure. In 1995, the island of Fiji received its first Western

broadcasting service, and after just three years of consuming these programs the

population experienced a shift in how women identified with their bodies. Prior to the

introduction of Western media, the island had no documented cases of eating disorders,

but rather, most Fiji women expressed feeling comfortable with their bodies at any size

(Bordo, 2003).

However, in 1998, 11 percent of Fiji women who were surveyed reported using

purging practices to lose weight, and 62 percent surveyed said they began dieting (Bordo,

2003). I outline this example to demonstrate the usefulness of conducting my research

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with a feminist lens because of the need to track and trace how the evolution of media

continues to constrain gendered bodies, as well as accentuate the evolution of how

publics are consuming media.

Thus, using a feminist cultural lens is imperative for approaching a historic

phenomenon that has found newer, faster methods of spreading. When examining eating

and thinness cultures, it became apparent that in many ways their salience and formations

are very much intertwined and constitutive of one another. Both culture’s rhetoric and

ideologies that are deemed most dangerous for women are both indoctrinated through

media and conceived in the medical and health communities (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001;

Bordo, 2003; LeBesco, 2004; Gay, 2017).

There is a strong argument in feminist scholarship (Grosz,1994; LeBesco &

Braziel, 2001; Bordo, 2003) that corporeality and identity must be examined through an

intersectional lens. It has long been established how thinness contributes to the

architecture of whiteness and power (Counihan & Kaplan, 1998; Garb, Garb and

Stunkard, 1975), so it only makes sense that scholarship views embodiment and thinness

as constitutive of the intersectional power dynamics in relation to other identities.

Likewise, the health and scientific communities, though important and necessary

in educating the public have also worked to reinscribe harmful ideologies of thinness

both in relations to eating habits and concepts of what healthy looks like (i.e. thin)

(LeBesco & Braziel, 2001; Bordo, 2003; Gay 2017). This is where a feminist cultural

lens works to resolve and denounce antiquated and dangerous narratives, in order to

portray a more holistic understanding of women’s perceptions of the body.

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First, a feminist cultural lens scrutinizes the impact media has caused overtime on

women’s relationships to food and eating behaviors. Bordo (2003) references back all the

way to the Victorian era in her work. She notes that nineteenth century Victorian era

ideologies were the first (documented) cultural influencer to impact gendered eating

habits.

Food politics have dictated the flow of power for decades (Counihan, 1992;

Goody 1982). In many cultures, still to this day, but certainly throughout history, food

politics governed caste, gender, race, and class. This did and still functions through who

has access to food, who farms food, who has access to nutritious food, and means to

education on food and cooking food (Counihan, 1992; Adams 1990). Bordo (2003)

connects the relationship of our current cultural norms, which regulate women’s appetite,

to the initial Victorian practices of starvation and restrictive eating in large mass. The

Victorian era also used mediated communication to indoctrinate women into ideologies

of restrictive eating with messages equating femininity with controlled portions and the

dangers of overindulgence (Bordo, 2003).

In addition, Bordo (2003) uses the work of Dijkstra (1986), to argue that this

phenomenon to start controlling women’s eating habits was birthed out of the

undercurrent to oppress the “new woman” which emerged during that time period (116).

Bordo (2003) also links the popularization of these norms (women practicing controlled

eating) to be driven by men’s fear of women’s sexuality. Historically women’s hunger

has been connected to their sexuality, this can be seen in the metaphor of the man-eater

and other interpretations which narrate women’s sexuality and power bore from her

uncontrollable urge to devour men (Bordo, 2003).

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Consequently, this has led to generations of harmful tropes of women eating (or

not eating). Sadie Stein (2009), a Jezebel writer, explores modern takes on these tropes in

sitcoms such as Will and Grace and 30 Rock. Stein argues that characters Grace Adler

and Liz Lemon both use food as comic relief during times of distress. These characters

binge on fatty foods constantly yet remain skinny—and this facet is integral to the

identity of these characters onscreen. Stein (2009) establishes a clear dominant pattern

through critiques of advertisements that reinforces a deep fear that women should be

constantly concerned with overindulgence and associating this act with shame.

Indeed, hiding transgressive acts of eating is something many feminist scholars

have written about. I intensely relate to Geis’s (1998) portrayal of how many women

present themselves eating in public—careful, dainty, neatly and never too much, in

juxtaposed to their perceived shameful messy binges when drawn away from the

spectacle of the world. Bordo (2003) underscores that this pattern of behavior is learned

through messages of how women ought to eat, and how contrary to women, most bulimic

men actually prefer to binge in public or with friends.

Similarly, Chis Shilling and Tanya Bunsell (2009) depict women and overeating

as taboo behavior in their ethnographic research of female bodybuilders. In this study, the

participant’s stigmatization is discursively created by friends, family and strangers in

reaction to the dissonance resulting from observing the participant embody and engage in

behaviors the defy traditional feminine activities. What I find particularly useful for this

project is understanding the gendered discrimination that occurs for women around eating

habits and food consumption. Through Shilling and Bunsell (2009) examples of negative

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reactions and rejection the participants face, partly due to over-eating, this study assists in

demonstrating that when women indulge in food, they are engaging in a rebellious act.

When women engage in transgressive eating habits they are engaging in acts of

resistance. Bordo’s (2003) discussion of targeted advertisements for male diets also

supports this idea. Despite dieting messages now targeting both women and men in the

pursuit of all bodies needing to be “perfect” bodies, it is still evident that media

representations of dieting reinforce the hegemonic belief that men should have insatiable

appetites while women should not (Bordo, 2003). Rather, Bordo argues through her

analysis of diet product advertisements either targeted to men or women, that despite both

promoting dieting products the male advertisements encourage satisfying hunger, while

the ads for women primarily encourage suppressing hunger.

In addition, Bordo argues that depictions of women eating in media are either

rarely displayed (because this act is taboo) or are used as metaphors for sexuality. I see

women displaying transgressional eating behaviors as resistant because it deviates from

eating norms. Shilling and Bunsell (2009) note that female bodybuilders received

criticism from inside and outside of their community because of the amount of food they

consumed. One participant in this study said, “People are always really shocked when I

tell them that I eat 3000 calories a day, they say stuff like ‘aren’t women only supposed

to eat around 2000?’” (Shilling & Bunsell, 2009, p. 147).

Eating culture is intrinsically entwined with thinness culture. As I stated before

U.S. cultures perception of the ideal body is deeply influenced by the scientific and health

community. Bordo (2003) underscores the danger of negating culture as a major

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contributor to eating disorders and shifting the responsibility solely on the individual.

Bordo (2003) writes:

Most women in our culture, then, are ‘disordered’ when it comes to issues of self-

worth, self-entitlement, self-nourishment, and comfort with their own bodies;

eating disorders, far from ‘bizarre’ and anomalous, are utterly continuous with a

dominant element of the experience of being [a woman] in this culture. (p. 57)

Here, Bordo argues that not only are most women experiencing some sort of

disordered relationship to their body, but it is cultural ideologies that are major producers

and contributors to how women form this relationship. However, much of culture takes

its cue from the scientific and health communities. LeBesco and Braziel (2001) describe

two points of contention that these communities had a hand in perpetuating. First is the

construct of the fat body as the traumatized body, and second is the monetization of

thinness.

Rhetoric that depicts the fat body as the traumatized body functions to reinforce

thinness as happiness, and portrays the fat body as a symptom of something that is

damaged (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001). This is part of the larger narrative that works to

erase fat identity. LeBesco & Braziel (2001) note that many of the self-help books for

losing weight—which argue that one must fix the trauma that is causing the weight

gain—actually portray the fat literally eating away the healthy body.

This same notion is also depicted in how diet culture monetizes thinness. Despite

how dangerous and harmful must of the diet fads, trends, medical procedures and

supplements are for consumers, they promise to cut away, trim down and disappear the

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fat body. In both of these instances the importance is placed on ridding the fat and

replacing it with thin—again emphasizing that thin is healthy, thin is happy, thin is good.

Accordingly, this is the power of thin: not only is it positioned in the scientific

and health communities as the status to obtain, but it is sold to the masses as how to

achieve happiness. These narratives are what perpetuate the erasing of fat identity and

what LeBesco (2004) describes by using Goffman as the spoiling of fat identity—by

creating an association and understanding of an identity that is so abhorrent, so

“uninhabitable,” so despised that “[it] work[s] to create the protests of fat people against

their own bodies” (p. 3).

Gay’s (2017) work also portrays the ways in which women who inhabit “unruly

bodies” experience ways that because of their body part of their identity is erased. She

describes in her book the continuous contradiction she faces throughout her life, which is

the ways thinness culture works make large bodies invisible, yet the ironic nature that

large bodies claim space or are hyper-visible. She portrays this through a contradiction of

(in)visibility where it is necessary for women to enact strategies in order to accommodate

expectations constructed by dominant ideologies of women’s bodies. Gay adds to the

conversation by explaining her internal struggle of strategically taking actions to be

invisible in society which demands “unruly bodies” to be out-of-sight, and yet feels the

inevitability of being hypervisible due to being in a body which goes against social

norms.

Gay (2017) writes, “when you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of

public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display”

(p.120). This passage relates to the public discourse of obesity and the obesity crisis. Gay

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demonstrates how narratives of obesity are not only salient in the public consciousness

and internalized by women, but also are placed onto women by way of interpersonal

conversations making visibility feel impossible to avoid. It is through these channels of

communication that Gay explains feeling more out of control of her body as if she is only

her body and not a person. It is important to think about the personal experience of

visibility in this manner when understanding magical eating because of the role control

plays in this concept, which I will explain further in this project.

Additionally, Gay discusses this feeling of hypervisibility juxtaposed to the need

to be invisible. Gay (2017) paints a picture of having to constantly contort and

manipulate her body to fit into spaces in order to accommodate the ideology which tells

women that their bodies are not allowed to take up space. This dilemma pointedly

demonstrates a physical enactment of invisibility. “I deny myself the right to space when

I am in public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in

fact, grandly visible” (Gay, 2017, p. 171).

To summarize, using a feminist culturalist approach enables me to explore the

power dynamics occurring within the food entertainment through the texts at hand.

Through media, power structures construct expectations of female embodiment and food

behaviors. A feminist lens examines the ways this construction is constraining or

enabling female bodies. Thus, I will be able to expose the ways that these texts are either

contributing to or defying established restraints.

Turning from Magical Thinking to Magical Eating

Magical thinking is an important component to define when mapping the key role, it

plays in how audiences engage with these texts, but also its functionality in thinness

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culture and fantasies of non-consequential eating. In this section I will define magical

thinking in order to connect this concept to the emergence of what I call magical eating.

Originating from psychology and anthropology, magical thinking is “the belief

that one’s ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of

events in the material world” (Vandenberg, 2018; ph. 1). At first this concept was

predominantly studied in situations of religion or superstition as a way of using magical

forces in sense-making, however due to this, a neocolonial connotation of inferiority or

naivety came to be attached to this concept (Vandenberg, 2018).

Instead, I draw upon the perspective used by James, Handelman, and Taylor

(2011), which frames magical thinking as a useful coping tool in stressful situations

where the notion of “magic works to restore the experience of interconnectedness in

situations where this experience has been broken” (p. 633). That is, agency is gained by

enacting a thought process through which to cope with an uncontrollable outside force by

using a path of logic that would conjure a desired end. This is similar to the way Gunn

and Cloud (2010) use magical voluntarism, which is to theorize the movement of agency.

They explain how agency either moves from within the actor to enable a way of

understanding phenomenon or moves from outside the actor to change conditions within

a phenomenon.

Here, I turn to an example in the study by James et al. (2011) to demonstrate how

magical thinking works in the sense of attempting to gain agency through a line of logic

with the means to cope with uncontrollable experiences. James et al (2011) writes:

Celia’s mother, who had struggled with obesity all her life, eventually succumbed

to cancer. Having anguished over her mother’s suffering, it is perfectly rational

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for Celia to suspect that “breast cancer could be related to obesity” and as such be

motivated to become “very regimented” in her own weight management. But

Celia did not see a regimented diet as simply an action to lose weight in order to

stay healthy. By practicing a regimented diet, Celia was attempting to gain agency

over something she rationally knew she had no control over—her mother’s

illness. For Celia, this was a way to feel in control in the face of events over

which she had no power. (p. 639)

In this example the participant is using magical thinking in order to gain a sense of

empowerment from within while attempting to gain agency over an outside phenomenon

in relation to which she is rendered powerless. By using this method of logic, the

participant is attempting to still arrive at a desired outcome, even though she is using

faulty reasoning.

Gunn and Cloud (2010) explore a similar way of examining agency through a line

of reasoning that is faulty — magical voluntarism. “We have been particularly prone to a

philosophical belief in what we term ‘magical voluntarism,’ the notion that human

agency is better understood as the ability to control a given phenomenon through the

proper manipulation of thoughts and symbols (e.g., language)” (Gunn & Cloud, 2010, p.

51). For them, magical voluntarism describes a faulty agency that expects to control or

enact a particular outcome simply by thinking or claiming it to be so.

Here, I want to turn to how magical thinking and magical eating connect. The role

and popularity of food in the global entertainment industry is proving that audiences’

obsession with watching food preparation and consumption is only growing stronger.

Kelly (2017) notes that U.S. Americans are cooking less but consuming food programing

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more, creating a paradox around how consumers actually want to relate to their food.

Western consumers of the food and entertainment industry are watching food being

prepared and consumed not only out of practicality, but to consume an experience.

According to Kelly (2017), U.S. Americans do not just want to see food, but to “consume

a vision of social life, embodied in how different cultural groups produce, consume, and

relate to food” (p. 2). That is, audiences turn to food entertainment as a way to indulge in

a voyeuristic experience of other cultures and people within those cultures.

Despite the multiplicity of why and how mediated food culture continues to

emerge, I am concerned with how this phenomenon relates to fulfillment and fantasy

between relationships of the audience and actor, specifically female audiences and actors.

Though society as a whole is experiencing a recursively complicated relationship with

food and consumption, I am particularly interested in examining how magical eating,

under the guise of gendered constraints, functions with eating norms and feminine bodies.

As I stated, magical thinking is a line of logic that attempts to gain agency in

order to control an outside phenomenon of which there is little possibility to control, and

I argue that this is the same line of logic is inherent in magical eating. However, it is

important to establish that the faulty logic which occurs in magical thinking is often seen

as an outgrowth of the individual actor, which is not how I intend for the model of

magical eating to function. Bordo (2003) makes a case for why magical thinking in eating

disorder logic should not be placed on the actor, but rather the faulty logic is within the

culture of dieting and societal expectations of women’s bodies. Bordo (2004) writes:

To turn to the bulimic’s “flawed reasoning” concerning the importance of

slenderness in our culture: the absurdity of categorizing the belief that “I am

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special if I am thin” and women’s embarrassment over being seen as “distorted”

attitudes ought to be apparent. What reality do they distort? Our culture is one in

which Oprah Winfrey, a dazzling role model for female success, has said that the

most significant achievement of her life” was losing sixty-seven pounds on a

liquid diet. (She gained it all back within a year.) … [A] culture which personal

ads consistently list “slim,” “lean,” or “trim” as required of prospective dates. The

anorectic thus appears, not as the victim of a unique and “bizarre” pathology, but

as the bearer of very distressing tidings about our culture. (p. 60)

Using Bordo’s argument, I see magical eating as a strategy to satisfy fantasies of eating

in order to undermine constraints placed on women around eating and embodiment.

Though the logic of magical eating is still faulty in attempting to use these texts as a way

to gain agency over a seemingly uncontrollable phenomenon, the responsibility for the

faulty logic lies with the culture influencing how women can satisfy these fantasies, not

within the women themselves.

Returning to Gay’s (2017) work, her need to negotiate (in)visibility was

constructed by outside narratives of how unruly bodies must behave, which is similar to

how I see magical eating functioning to satisfy fantasies—a strategy constructed by

narratives of eating and embodiment. The constraints of thinness and restrictions of

eating leads audiences to seek ways to negotiate their own experience of these norms,

while also desiring ways to undermine them.

Thus, in this project, I use magical eating to look closely at how feminine bodies

are consuming eating shows with female actors. How women are turning to these shows

to rhetorically create a (false) sense of fulfillment—physically and figuratively. Magical

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eating is used to trace how agency is obtained and where it is located in relation to the

audience, and how the audience is orienting agency either onto the actor, the event, or the

object.

Desire and the Other

Additionally, when mapping magical eating, I turn to bell hooks’ (1992) work,

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance. The Other, or the exotic, in this project is the

representation produced by these Mukbang texts of a woman who can consume freely,

abandoning rules placed on feminine bodies. This image is of a woman who differs from

the gendered hegemonic rules of eating. To be clear, it is not the actors of the texts who

are being Othered, rather the characters what the actors represent to the audience, which

are ideal versions of women who can eat without consequence. This representation then

becomes exotic for the audience because of the difference between the actor’s eating

habits and audience’s own. Bordo (2003) writes of a similar phenomenon in

advertisements centered around food or metaphors of food. The representations produced

in these advertisements are of women who don’t care about eating, don’t desire to eat, or

can eat without consequence (Bordo, 2003).

This image of a woman is so different from reality that she is seen as “foreign”

(Bordo, 2003). In these types of representation of women’s relationships with food

which resist against norms, they are enabling the audience's ability to vicariously walk

the line with danger and exoticism, similar to how hooks explain Black bodies. She

writes:

In the United States, where our senses are daily assaulted and bombarded to such

an extent that an emotional numbness sets in, it may take being “on the edge” for

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individuals to feel intensely. Hence the overall tendency in the culture is to see

young black men as both dangerous and desirable. (p. 377)

This experience then situates the audience in a position of desiring the actors in

the hopes of experiencing their fullness through an affective ecology of eating. Hooks

(1992) explains:

Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and

more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. In the

cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive, as

holding the secret that will allow those who venture and dare to break with the

cultural anhedonia (370)

Here, hooks are depicting how bodies that do not conform with white normative

standards are forced into a category of “exotic” because of the ways their bodies break

those norms. Thus, just by being, their Otherness is posited as a location of excitement to

be conquered.

When we turn to magical eating, we need to consider why this food media is so

seductive for the audience and how it functions. I see hooks’ project of “eating the Other”

as a useful tool in starting to unravel how the audience could share the experience

collectively with the representation of the texts in this project—the audience could feel a

sensation of fullness, satisfaction, and/or relief after watching the actor’s behavior and

engagement with food in a resistant and free manner.

When considering magical eating, desire, and the Other, the spectacle of binge

eating is a way to fulfill fantasies about uncontrolled eating behaviors while conforming

to normative body images. This fantasy entails consuming an excess amount of food

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without any consequences. This is a fantasy recirculated throughout popular culture. As

Stein (2009) argued, television tropes which depict thin women overindulging without

consequence allow the audience to indulge in a fantasy of magical eating. She (2009)

wrote:

It's especially depressing because these tend to be smart, sympathetic characters

designed to appeal to women - in some way is this contradiction playing into our

own fantasies? Because there's something deeply unhealthy about our liking for

this trope, our buying into the dissonant fantasy (para. 4-5).

In this passage, Stein underscores the danger of what this trope represents for women,

and the complicated nature of buying into a fantasy which further complicates an already

harmful narrative.

Fantasy and Orientation

Taking a deeper look into what fantasy and desire are and what causes fantasy,

Joshua Gunn’s work gives insight into this complex topic. To Gunn (2004), fantasy is

motivated by desire that cannot be achieved by the “I” as it is held by the “Other.”

Fantasy is a coping mechanism that was created by a traumatic shock in the “Real,”

which Gunn (2004) takes from Lacan. In Lucan’s theory, the order of the Real is

anything that cannot be captured in the Symbolic or Imaginary—meaning that which is

beyond language and simplicity. This trauma that creates the need for fantasy is called

castration, which Mulvey (1989) explains as the retaliation used against women for not

having a penis. Gunn (2004) complicates this view and disconnects it from direct relation

to sex, arguing that the trauma of encountering the Real is the “pleasurable and yet

traumatic moment when one submits to language in order to gain self-consciousness” (p.

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9). This trauma occurs when self-identification occurs. Thus, fantasies are a coping

mechanism in the subjects’ life-long struggle of striving for an impossible completeness.

These narratives can be internalized to explain why and what the Self desires in

order to fulfill a fantasy, called “fundamental fantasies” (Gunn, 2004). Through these

fantasies, an expression is manifest through the Other. That is, the Other is subjected by

the Self as having the attributes of a fantasy, thus creating desire (Gunn, 2004). By

projecting the fantasy onto the Other, this gives the Self (false) agency in order to achieve

the (unachievable) fantasy (Gunn, 2004, p. 11).

In this project I use Dana Cloud’s (2010) development of Gunn (2004), Purdy

(2003) and Žižek’s (1993) psychoanalysis of fantasy to form her interpretation of

‘traversing the fantasy.’ This is that actors use fantasies to keep masked the reality of the

separation from one’s “unrealized hopes” in order to protect one’s self from entering into

the “traumatic awareness that there is nothing behind it” unless they were to become

aware and work through their fantasy (p. 4). This functions in my work in Chapter 6

when analyzing how magical eating works to keep audiences immobile in their own

fantasies. That is because fantasies keep one in a masked reality, they are unable to

reconcile their own struggles with social norms and unable to transform narratives which

continue to reinscribe problematic ideologies.

My goal with using the theories and scholarships that I present in this chapter is to

demonstrate what exactly can be problematic with these texts, and the baseline and

structuring my arguments. There are several ways to interpret these Mukbang shows,

however, for me, analyzing the complications of thinness culture in these videos deems

the most compelling. My intention with this chapter is to help the reader understand not

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only how I would be analyzing these texts, but also give an in-depth understanding of

how dominant and prolific the narratives of thinness culture.

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Chapter 3

Eating

I love food but it is difficult to enjoy food.

It is difficult to believe I am allowed to enjoy food.

Mostly, food is a constant reminder of my body, my lack of willpower, my biggest flaws.

— Roxane Gay, Hunger

Dorothy greets the audience with excitement as if she is welcoming long-lost

friends. Despite her charisma and enthusiasm, the mound of food positioned in front of

her steals the scene. Her face floats behind the four oversized platters laying in front of

her, and which only appear more outrageously large and cartoonish when placed next to

her slender and small body. She explains the motivation behind today’s meal of Asian

stir-fried squid blossoms soaked in a creamy and alarmingly orange sauce.

She not only had this meal at a local restaurant but loved it so much that she had

to order take-out as well. Accompanying the squid, Dorothy explains, pointing her slim

finger, is a larger-than-life pile mixed with thin and Chinese glass noodles (a thick, wide,

and translucent noodle). She reveals that this meal would be just too heavy with rice. In

addition, and to create her own spin to the dish, Dorothy is also using seaweed sheets,

kimchi, and lettuce wraps for texture and taste. However, don’t forget that tasty beverage

to wash this all down! Dorothy’s mouth smirks, as on cue, she pulls out a large mason jar

filled to the brim with iced hibiscus tea from under her table. The audience is left to hear

nothing but long gulps and ice clinking for several seconds before she plops down the

glass and mysteriously pulls out a bowl of green chili peppers from the same location

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(leaving the audience to wonder what else she is hiding under there). Ever so delicately,

pieces of chopped peppers are sprinkled on top of the squid. Dorothy begins to mix the

squid and noodles with her hands, turning everything bright orange and glistening.

Dorothy starts eating. She swirls a heaping portion of noodles and squid with her

chopsticks and fits the entire bite into her mouth. Every chew and swallow are acutely

audible and becomes the soundtrack of the show. It is apparent that these noises are an

important element to Dorothy and her fans in creating an experience revolving around

eating. The visuals are just as crucial as the sounds.

Soon, she begins to display the food before putting it into her mouth. With her

next bite, Dorothy takes a large piece of squid secured between her chopsticks and

dangles it up close and in front of the camera before cheerfully tossing the seafood in her

mouth. In addition to these actions, her face reinforces that she is experiencing extreme

pleasure. She consistently grabs and consumes oversized bites, some so large that her

entire mouth and cheeks stretch and bulge in order to contain all the food—a feat she is

known for.

Not only does Dorothy never stop chewing, slurping or crunching—creating a

continuous loop of grabbing, stuffing and eating—but Dorothy never stops confirming

and reassuring the audience that she takes pleasure in this activity. She affirms her

satisfaction with wide smiles and gleaning eyes accompanying every bite, gasps and

giddy expels of excitement through nods of her head, and putting down her chopsticks

just long enough to give a thumbs up.

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This chapter analyzes the politics of eating by closely examining the relationships

between eating, food, gender, and identity. Through a critique of the discourse generated

through audience comments and the Mukbang stars’ own personal discussions on these

topics in their shows I was able to determine themes that focused on struggles with food

and eating cultural norms presented in Western societies. The three themes I constructed

were audience members reaction to the stars’ eating behaviors such as verbally policing

and/or monitoring their eating habits, how the audience negotiated hunger and

overindulgence, and how the audience discussed using these videos as a form of social

connection.

Contextualizing Mukbang and Eating

There was some rich information revealed within the Mukbang stars’ discussed

how they negotiate with cultural eating and body norms. Not all of the stars openly

discuss their feelings and struggles with food and eating, but several of them do, talking

about these topics candidly to their audiences.

Here, the strongest example is the discussions Trisha Paytas has with her

audiences. In nearly every video I analyzed, Paytas disclosed her long-time battle with

conforming to the concept of “healthy eating” or “healthy living.” Often, she contradicts

her actions with qualifying statements before or during her Mukbang shows that disclose

a dieting and fasting stint she is about to or currently engaging.

In her video, My 10k Calorie Lunch! EPIC CHEAT DAY MUKBANG, (which

also implies dieting in the title), Paytas starts of the show by giving a warning.

She explains,

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So, warning, what you are about to see in this Mukbang is extra crazy, um I woke

up this morning—it is two o’clock (p.m.), I haven’t eaten since about three

o’clock (p.m.) the day before. So technically it is like 24 hours of fasting.” And

within the same breath she then adds, “and I know that I say I am always on a

diet, but not today, today is my—going all out—I ordered all my favorite foods …

This statement demonstrates the qualifying many women do before eating an amount of

food or type of food that transgresses acceptable or appropriate eating behaviors in U.S.

American societies. Later in the chapter, I go into a deeper discussion of how eating and

public displays of eating are still taboo for women. Paytas often sets-up her shows with

an explanation that she is about to go on a diet and wants to “pig-out” before doing so.

Other Mukbang stars that are not in the study, but who I have researched prior, seem to

give a similar explanation, especially when eating a larger than average Mukbang (such

as a 10k calorie challenge). Peggie Nation (who is known for eating very large meals and

finishing all the food) often qualifies her actions by saying, “Now guys, I don’t normally

eat like this,” or “I do not eat like this every day.”

In this same video Paytas discloses battles she has with audience members online

or people in real life policing her eating habits. Paytas states,

Yesterday was a day, I couldn’t get away from people telling me how disgusting I

eat, as if I don’t know that I eat not the best. I don’t have a great diet,” she pauses

and looks at the camera, “People talk to me as if I am a slow person when they

talk about it.

This example involves two different points of struggle. It is clear that Paytas contends

with external sources of judgement, but this example also points to the conflict she

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grapples with due to her own internalized judgement that emerges from societal norms. I

also believe this example demonstrates what Gay (2017) writes about in her work, which

is when a woman transgresses from an acceptable body type and eating habits she

becomes a public spectacle and is on display for society to openly judge. I will discuss

similar issues in more depth in Chapter 3.

Other forms of discussion regarding eating and eating habits focus on how

Mukbang stars react to audiences acting to police their behaviors. As described in the

beginning of the chapter, eating sounds do enable the audience to become part of the

experience, however this also leads to situations where the audience reinscribes

oppressive patterns through their comments about the women. For example, Lindsay

Greene or Hunger Diaries TV engages in discourse with her audience about one audience

member who consistently tells her to “eat with your mouth closed” and to “stop smacking

(when she chews).” Greene is able to read the comments instantly because she is live

streaming the show. After reading these criticisms aloud, Greene seems to laugh them off

and says, “Guys to be honest, I don’t know what smacking is—I’m just chewing …. I

think it is hilarious, I don’t know how you feel, but I feel like people on YouTube just

come to these channels to just complain about these things.” Though is seems Greene

manages these policing behaviors in a positive manner (though we are only seeing her

front stage behavior (Goffman, 1959) and do not know her true feelings about these types

of interactions), some Mukbang stars seem to internalize these comments more than

others.

When examining Veronica Wang’s rhetoric regarding criticism she receives for

making “slurping sounds,” Wang appears more apologetic than Greene does for her

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eating behavior. That fact that she does get criticized for slurping shocked me because the

Chinese-Canadian seemed to be falling in line with traditional Mukbang practice, which

is the louder the slurp the more pleased your audience (Boscamp, 2017). However, when

slurping up a piece of flauta falling from her chin, she said, “there I go again, slurping

things that shouldn’t be slurped.” She finishes the rest of the flauta, and justifies these

noises, “It’s an addition, you guys who tell me to stop slurping, you seriously don’t

understand—it is an addition.”

In the next section, I conduct a closer analysis of ways eating ideologies and

norms emerge from the audiences’ reactions and interactions with these shows. This

analysis captures a snapshot of how people are struggling with Western societal

constraints and constructs about eating. This discourse reflects three major themes which

build toward larger conversations on power and eating. These themes are: disciplining

how one should eat (or the aesthetics of eating), monitoring one’s own agency with

eating (or not eating), and finally manifesting a sense of social connection through

watching people eat.

Disciplining Eating Aesthetics

Eating alone or together? Eating messy or neatly? Eating or not at all? This

section reflects on some of the most basic and gendered eating behaviors grappled by

women still to this day. When considering what looms beneath the surface of acceptable

eating patterns per gender, it seems apparent that one can find themselves walking the

tight ropes of power and food relationships. As Counihan (1992) using reminds us bluntly

in her introduction of Food and Gender, Identity and Power, “food was, and continues to

be, power in a most basic, tangible and inescapable form” (p.2). This section underscores

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the ways audiences work to both encourage acts of transgression, but simultaneously

reinscribes gendered eating norms.

Greene bites into an In-N-Out Animal Style, 3x3 (this is a three hamburger patties

in one burger with special sauce). She pushes as much of the food into her mouth as she

can in that first bite, and when she pulls the burger away, she reveals pink sauce smeared

across her cheeks and lettuce spilling out of her mouth as she continues chewing.

Laughing while trying to finish the bite, she licks the sauce off her cheeks, shoves the

lettuce back into her mouth and swallows all the food. Without skipping a beat, she takes

another bite, and then a third—all giant and just as “messy” as the first. Eventually, she

stops for a moment (nearly half of the 3x3 consumed), and she says, “I am eating so fast I

cannot breathe.”

Some Mukbang shows promote messy eating and use this behavior as the

description messy eating to promote certain videos to entice audiences. The Mukbang

stars in this study do not advertise their eating styles unless they feel it is necessary.

Wang cited a “messy warning” for a Mukbang involving King crab legs dunked in cheese

sauce—and yes it lived up to the expectations. Yet, despite these stars not intentionally

labeling and promoting their shows as messy eating videos—they still remain as major

foci of the audience. Also, eating messy is not the only behavior monitored by the

audience: conduct such as eating too much, eating too much in one bite, and breathing

too heavily, groaning with pleasure, and slurping are also points of contention in these

shows. In the following subsection, “Eating Messy,” I analyze comments focused on

reaction to the stars eating messy. This subsection is crucial in revealing how taboo

women it is for to not eating politely or dainty. In U.S. culture how women eat is bound

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by and to the construction of femininity. Thus, I want to demonstrate when women

transgress this constraint, there is an instinctual reaction for audiences to negotiate this

behavior.

Eating Messy

In this section, I begin with a comment that pointedly captures the contradiction

occurring in these texts. This contradiction further confirms my argument in how

Mukbang audiences both encourage transgressive eating but also reinscribe the ideologies

that makes this behavior deplorable. MegaSmuf wrote about Wang’s eating style, “I keep

seeing all these videos taking the p*ss because you take big bites which can be

considered "sloppy." You're a mukbanger that takes big bites, so I dont get why people

are getting so triggered by it.” With the booming trend of Mukbang, and women

dominating the market, the dilemma of watching women eat sloppily becomes a major

struggle or dissonance for audiences to reconcile.

Geis (1998) pointedly describes the dilemma of women and transgressional eating

in the book Eating Culture, as she sets the scene of a man riding on the subway to work

sloppily eating an Egg McMuffin letting crumbs drip down his chest and stomach—

enjoying his meal in public without a care in the world. This, Geis (1998) further

explains, is typically not the case for women:

Invariably, several [women] recount stories of “first dates” during which they

scanned the menu for something that would be easy to eat inconspicuously,

picking a salad or chicken breast for fear that devouring a plate of spaghetti would

expose an overeager appetite and would risk stains and spills and messiness; only

later, still hunger and safely away from the judging eye across the table, would

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they open the refrigerator and stuff themselves with cold pizza, ice cream straight

from the carton, anything deliciously gooey and sloppy (217)

In this quote, Geis is pointing to not only the fear for many women of eating in public

due to judgement and being on display, but why this fear exists for women in the first

place. I argue that the rules of how women should eat—daintily, controlled, with pose—

are the foundation of why women’s acts of public eating are in fact rebellious acts.

Discourse which both enables and constrains gendered eating norms is dominant

in the comments sections of the YouTube pages for these shows. I saw language in these

comments which either disciplined or encouraged the eating behaviors of the women in

this study. Yet, despite the intention of the language, both consistently reinforced the

notion that it is still radical for women to publicly eat the way they do.

First, I want to demonstrate a correlation between the inherent disapproval with

public displays of eating and these shows. The comments below directly reinforce Geis’

theory, that is the act of messy eating for women should be done in secret due to societal

expectations and eating norms. One of Wang’s audience members, Dulce Quintero, wrote

about Wang eating a traditional Mexican street food, “Yes girl, eat that elote like nobody

watching .” This is framed to reference the popular saying, “dance like nobody is

watching,” which implies to dance carefree and without worry of judgement, a woman

must be free of observation. This notion mirrors the idea that yes, women are judged by

the public or dinner partners when eating in a carefree manner or a messy fashion. So,

though this comment is encouraging this behavior, it is also reinforcing and affirming the

standard.

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In these other examples, a pattern manifests, showing a clear goal from the

audience to manage and police Wang’s resistant behavior— i.e. her messy eating. Monae

Miller wrote, “Damm boo the food ain't runnin off ya plate is it ;” LPS Floofer TV

commented, “Ok so, maybe not eat so like- messy and super quick? Otherwise I really

like the sounds and it looks good. Just my opinion :));” and CakeH4X wrote, “girl the

food isn't going anywhere, learn how to eat.” The most aggressive comment was made by

DenimAndLeather, who wrote:

You quite LITERALLY stuff your face when your eat girl! You are a lady, take

smaller bites and relax! Mukbangs are supposed to be enjoyable but the

combination of you inhaling your food and the squeamish sounds of you slurping

and chewing your food makes this quite cringey to watch. It is a shame because

you are beautiful and have a sweet personality!! You just don’t have table

etiquette lmao

As we can see, behavior that goes against the norms, such as eating sloppily and eating

too fast is met with discipline, and the goal to reinscribe these gendered eating norms—

women must eat lady-like or else it is offensive. Greene, whose eating style is, at times,

more outside of normative behavior, also receives comments with the goal to discipline.

Jasmine Hana wrote, “ur trying too hard to be messy why though;” marc hegler

commented, “When you go out in public at a restaurant or bar or whatever and you're

eating your entree do you chew your food the same way in public;” and vciouus wrote,

“why you eating so nasty?”

These comments are strictly reinforcing gender eating norms. However, some of

the comments Greene and Wang received reveal more of a contradiction from the

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audience in terms of eating performances. For example, Kami Paige wrote about

Greene, “I am so in love with the fact that she eats like a pig, BECAUSE GIRL SAME.

Get messy queen!” While, Megan T, second this comment by writing below it, “You eat

like a pig... I LOVE IT!! ❤ .” These two audience members are acknowledging

that Greene is acting against expectations and either are relating to this behavior or

admiring this behavior because of its inherent resistance of status quo, yet they are

reinforcing these same standards simultaneously. Though they are supportive of the act of

transgression by equating Greene to a pig (a metaphor for eating in a disgusting way), the

audience members are also reinforcing the taboo nature of this behavior.

Likewise, some comments aim to directly address the disciplining rhetoric from

the audience and reposition the argument to be more supportive toward the Mukbang

stars. Madasyn Magee6 wrote in Wang’s defense, “I don’t get why everyone gets so mad

about her shoving so much food in her mouth like that’s how she eats leave her be y’all

food is good ,”while Jennifer Medina wrote regarding Paytas’s behavior, “Idc [I don’t

care] what anyone says about her eating. To me it’s satisfying to see someone be able to

stuff themselves with so much food and be able to swallow it like nothing.” However,

both of these comments still reinforce the idea that women eating like this is goes against

normative behavior. By writing “this is just how she eats” or “I don’t care what anyone

says” it implies that this one instances is OK but should be or is not a mainstream way of

eating.

Managing Other Eating Behaviors

Next, I evaluate two observations in this section. First, I analyze how the audience

reacts to food portions sizes and eating noises, and then I analyze how audiences react to

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eating noises from Candy who presents with a nonconforming body. This section points

to a broader picture of dissonance that occurs when women break eating norms, and

women with nonconforming bodies break eating norms. I am able to depict through this

analysis that audiences struggle with not just how women eat, but how much women eat,

and collective reactions to women expressing pleasure when eating. This section points

the power of the underpinning narrative of women being told to restrict food portions and

adhere to prescribed feminized behaviors with eating norms. In addition, this section

demonstrates the negotiations the audience faces with their own constrictions under these

norms and observing them being broken by the actors, and actors with bodies that

transgressive normative standards.

To begin, I point to a comment that I argue clearly demonstrates the uneasiness

and at times outrage audience members experience when watching or listening to women

engage in behavior which undermine what is deemed appropriate. Rita P wrote regarding

Greene eating during her show. Rita commented:

I’ve never seen somebody eating this way. I like watching mukbangs and I don’t

have a problem with eating sounds when they are appropriate. BUT to see a

grown woman eating like a toddler makes me feel uncomfortable, sorry. No hate

just honest review.

In this example it is unclear if it is just the eating noises or if it is also the messy eating

that disturbs Rita. Either way, her explanation harkens to a desire to have Greene change

her behavior to fit into the confined boundaries of what acceptable eating behaviors are

for women. To Rita, Greene’s crossing of those boundaries makes her child-like— she is

out-of-control and must be managed.

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This idea of engaging with behaviors that cross boundaries with disdain can also

be seen in comments around noise and pleasurable groans. The comments below are

directed at Wang.

Sharlyn Zamora wrote, “Learn how to eat and stop chewing so loud. It’s so disturbing.”

Another viewer, Paola Solis, commented, “Haven’t even started watching her eat yet but

I swear to god she better not slurp her food.” These audience members demonstrate an

anger toward this behavior, despite the fact that the eating sounds are supposed to be part

of the experience in traditional Mukbang. In Korea Mukbang audiences actually digitally

pay the actors to slurp loudly or eat loudly because the viewers find it pleasurable. Paola

Solis is so upset by the noises that they are feeling anger when just anticipating Wang’s

slurping. Again, I believe that these reactions come from the dissonance of watching

women act in ways that undermine expectation.

In the next pattern I constructed, I analyze audience comments that are

specifically regarding Candy or Hungry FatChick’s and the pleasurable moaning noises

that she makes while eating. Here are three comments which demonstrate the language

and tone used to police Candy’s reactions. The first comment is from, Lori Compton-

Amegadze, who wrote:

I apologize if this is offensive, but your pleasurable moaning over food is

unbearable to hear. Are you seriously this turned on over the flavor of the food or

are you doing it for your audience??? I cannot handle it...it's like smacking or

chewing with your mouth open...it is horrific! And please stop holding your

eating utensil like a shovel...it's really poor manners! And the creep factor at the

end when you blow kisses...10 out of 10! I'm out… .

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This, together with other comments that target Candy’s eating such as Lori Corpse who

wrote, “I don't watch your videos anymore cause I cannot stand the constant

moaning...sounds so desperate;” and Zuzanna chylińska wrote, “She has orgasm during

eating?”, signal two themes I noticed. First, the disturbance felt by the audience due to

Candy’s expression of pleasure with eating, and second, their discomfort with these

sounds eliciting a possible sexual feeling or experience. This discourse suggests that

audiences are disturbed by women openly expressing pleasure with eating, especially

women with bodies that do not fit the normative ideal. These comments also demonstrate

resistance toward women’s sexuality, which Bordo (2003) also connects with eating as I

discuss further in this chapter.

Next, I turn to examples that are concerned with food portion size and gender.

Portion size and gendered eating is possibly the most salient constraint on gendered

eating. The societal narratives in place on women in eating dictate that women must

adhere to the rules of consuming daintily and having complete self-control (Bordo, 2003).

Mukbangers purposefully eat large portions, typically eating a lot at once, and in a fast

pace. This notion of undermining the rules around portion-control is a continued theme in

my analysis.

Here, I focus on examining the discourse directed specifically toward portion

control. Interestingly, the two Mukbang stars who received the most comments were

Dorothy and Wang.

Damilka Denise wrote regarding a show Dorothy published, “She not playin noooo

games wit ha food ❤;” syafiqah Aqilah commented, “i just wonder......how big is

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your mouth? ;” Natalie Abramov wrote, “Huge bites and a fast eater, omg;” and Jenita

yesu nesa mony, “Don't eat too much of food ....it is not good for health.”

Though these comments do not evoke a straightforward sense of disciplining or

condemning, they do represent public shock and disbelief toward a woman is engaging in

transgressive eating. These types of reactions reinforce the norm that when women eat

large portions of food they are engaging in shocking behavior—which is typically and

historically seen as a dangerous or negative action (Shilling & Bunsell, 2009).

Wang received comments regarding the amount of food she ate that were not

overtly disciplining but demonstrated a sense of disbelief. Jennifer Medina wrote, “Idc [I

don’t care] what anyone says about her eating. To me it’s satisfying to see someone be

able to stuff themselves with so much food and be able to swallow it like nothing;” eleise

Serna wrote, “Pay attention to the edditing!!! No way she is eating all that!! ;”

Jimena Damn commented, “she can eat! My kinda girl subbed!;” Tammy Barton

wrote, “I love that you don’t play with your food. And I also love that you can throw

down!!! Get it girl!!! Mad respect;” and finally, Redon 17 commented, “****You got

decent bites for a women xD.”

These comments paint an even more dramatic picture of people experiencing a

type of dissonance in women eating large quantities of food. Eleise Serna accuses Wang

of not actually eating all her food, which suggests the public is more willing to believe a

woman is being deceptive about eating a large amount of food rather than actually eating

it. This accusation points to how intrinsic eating norms are, and which cause people

immersed in this culture an unwillingness to process the actions which could contradict

their understanding of this ideology. The other comments continue to reinforce the notion

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that women eating large portions of food is bewildering due to it undermining normative

behaviors. Despite the positive comments, the audience still is reinscribing these

constraints because audience members are reacting to the rarity and radicalness of the act.

Lastly, this section underlines the bias toward eating behaviors depending on

body types. As Bordo (2003) has explained in her work, due to mainstream rhetoric and

ideologies in the U.S. on health and healthy bodies, women who do not fit these

constructs typically are disciplined and condemned for undermining both the body image

and eating behaviors expected of women in society—making their actions even more

demonized to the public. Bodies that fit body types correlated with ideal beauty standards

are privileged, and though thin women are still scrutinized in these shows, I found

evidence of audiences privileging thin bodies when it came to certain behaviors.

Below, these examples demonstrate disdain for how Candy breathes because

audiences are correlating her heavy breathing with her body type, despite, in certain

instances, Candy’s explanation of her labored breathing due to a chest cold. The

following audience members made these comments on Candy’s breathing in her Popeye

Chicken video, Lisa Filion wrote, “Disturbing to watch she has difficulty breathing really

sad slowly killing herself,”; Caper Gal, wrote, “Your breathing is ridiculous, imagine

how enlarged your heart is from working so hard,” and finally Susan Forget, wrote

“Candy.. you better get checked out by a doctor.. you don't have a cold. Your heart is not

able to pump blood to your lungs in order for you to breathe. The food you eat is killing

you.. don\t you know that. or do you not care.” These comments consist of shaming

language and are all framed around a disdain of Candy’s actions. It seems the focus is on

her breathing as a means of justification for the shaming language. However, when

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compared with other Mukbang stars who have slim bodies, we see different reactions to

the same eating noises. In the above comments I see a correlation between how the

audience perceives body type and then how they frame their language.

For example, when watching Wang’s Mukbang show she carefully edits a section

of the video where she notes her own heavy breathing. She increased the speed so

audiences could still watch her eat, but not hear anything. She then puts a comment in the

video that explains why the edit was made, and asks her audience members how they feel

about heavy breathing. Though there were a few people who criticized the fact that she

would breathe heavily (like less than 10 out of nearly 3,000), most comments encouraged

or illustrated sympathy toward this behavior.

Overall, Wang’s audience reacting with encouragement to her editing her

breathing. For instance, Kashya Perez wrote, “Ur human I think heavy breathing is fine

girly ,”; Chris Martinez commented, “Ur mukbang vids are awesome... don’t worry

bout heavy breathing n stuff ”; and game girl wrote, “I just want to say I hate the

fact that you feel like you have to worry about your nails or breathing heavy or the

sounds you make, just because people are rude and can't keep their mouth shut. I'm a

strong believer in if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all, and if

you don't like it don't watch. Girl just live your life do you be happy and your true ones

your real ones will be here rooting you on no matter your breathing noise your nails or

anything else WE LOVE YOU!!! ” As expressed above, the audiences’ reactions

depict support and encouragement for Wang to not feel self-conscious or concerned about

her “heavy breathing.” In fact many were frustrated that Wang had to even be concerned

about something that is so “human.”

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Thus, when comparing the audiences’ reactions between Candy and Wang a

pattern of bias is evident. There is an established need for the public to discipline or

manage behaviors for women whose bodies defy normative standards, especially if the

public can correlate those behaviors to the body: “People project assumed narratives onto

[large] bod[ies] and are not at all interested in the truth of [those] bodies, whatever the

truth might be” (Gay, 2017; p. 120). Gay so eloquently underscores the way people will

openingly humiliate large bodies and find justification for doing so because those bodies

defy the ideal. Then, to contrast this situation, there is frustration when a woman who

meets normative body standards breathes heavily and feels concerned about it. The

audience is more willing to see the absurdity in culture that Wang feels embarrassed

about breathing loudly in her video, but cannot show the same compassion for Candy’s

breathing because of how her body presents. This shows the disdain collective the public

has toward fat bodies because of the dominant way they are portrayed in culture. This

subsection analyzed discourse which demonstrated how audiences struggle with eating

behaviors that go against culture ideologies of how the prescribed way women should be

eating. This section demonstrates the inherent struggle viewers have when wittenessing

acts that defy deep rooted beliefs, especially when those beliefs are challenged by a

woman whose body also defies normative standards.

Managing Hunger

Thousands of people are turning to Mukbang shows to watch women eat, but how

many are watching specifically to see them binge? This section examines how audience

members discuss their own motivations of watching women binge eat, revealing a theme

of wishful thinking around their own eating habits and desires of hunger and struggles

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with starvation. Further in this chapter I will analyze these concepts more thoroughly

using research that discusses binge eating and structures that constrain eating.

From this discourse I observed two central themes which focused on hunger.

First, audience members disclose their desires for and/or experiences of hunger when

watching these shows. And second, audiences disclose fantasies of eating and managing

hunger. I argue that these shows are a platform where people can engage and negotiate

with their own eating struggles because of the displays of radical eating. This analysis is

important because it demonstrates and established strive audiences have with current

eating norms and the desire to use these texts to fulfill fantasies.

The first pattern I observed in how audiences related to eating was demonstrated

through simple acts of disclosing a feeling of hunger when watching these videos. Some

comments include viewer, Disekiu Daily, who wrote regarding Dorothy’s Mukbang,

“Why i feel so hungry when im watching your videos? ;”mnemosyne phynx, “When i'm

hungry, i watched your videos;” and EliFoodie ASMR, “Now i am so hungry .”

These commenters all demonstrate the audience desiring to engage in a shared or

simultaneous experience of eating with the Mukbang star, along with using these videos

to focus on eating and food.

Second, audiences also revealed a complex relationship with these shows in

relation to their own eating habits. I noticed discourse that focused on eating disorders or

serious struggles with eating in which audiences commented that these shows either aid

in overcoming eating challenges or aided in starvation/dieting tactics. For instance,

viewer Simon Wyatt’s comment on Dorothy’s mukbang, they wrote, “I genuinely have

problems eating, I don't know why, but I just don't seem to ever get hungry and when I

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eat I get full so quick but watching your videos genuinely motivates me to eat more!

Thank you for helping me out so much.” Similarly, a comment thread on Paytas’

mukbang also suggested these shows motivate audiences to eat, skinnygod wrote, “i think

I am defeating my eating disorder;” to which Mackenzie M replied, “yessss!! I am too

and it’s weird sometimes watching these videos helps, like it’s okay to eat what you want

and treat yourself ”; and Miranda Burks wrote, “Sometimes I eat a handful of cheeetos

and 3 cookies and feel bad about myself, and then I watch these and don't feel bad

anymore lmao (laughing my ass off).”These comments all demonstrate how watching

radical eating helps the viewers to overcome their own battles with gendered constraints

on eating. However, there is also a more nuanced move I see occurring. As both

Mackenzie M and Miranda disclosed, watching these videos also enables the act of eating

without control or monitoring—defying a message historically targeted to women. As

Mackenzie M writes, “sometimes watching these videos helps, like it’s okay to eat what

you want and treat yourself,” underlining a self-acceptance of eating more freely because

of Paytas’ public display of binge eating.

Concurrently, I also saw how audience members negotiate their own desires to

both restrict and binge eat through watching these shows. I noticed multiple ways

audiences were discussing this dilemma. Rashellexo commented, “I watch these videos

because I know I physically can’t afford to eat like this because I gain weight too easily,”

Lissette Alveraz wrote regarding Paytas’ show, “Who else wishes that they can eat like

this without regretting it;” Marilyn’s Girl responded, “I feel hungry when I watch this but

I know that the guilt I would feel after isn’t worth it;” Suha A, wrote, “im on a diet.

..watching this is giving me some sort of satisfaction, like as tho i ate you knw (know);”

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and Emo Trash wrote, “I just wish I could eat any food without feeling guilty (Eating

disorders are fun).” In these comments there is an established struggle viewers are having

with the constraints of eating and thinness culture that prohibits overindulges, which

leads audience members to use these videos as a way to escape.

Similarly, I saw audience members revealing a conflict with wanting to eat like

the Mukbang stars but not feeling able to due to their fears, struggles and disorders with

eating. Viewers use these shows to experience the sensation of binge eating by watching

the stars, or they use these videos to curb their desire to binge. These comments also are

from Paytas’ shows Not Avocado wrote, “Yeah I’ve been eating 650 calories a day for

the past ~2 weeks, and am planning on going down to 500. Whenever I get cravings, I

just watch a few of these while chugging water and feel I 10x better;” and Danny Karim

wrote, “Water fast day 6 out of 30. I watch this to keep me motivated, also I'm hungry

af,” and Petra commented, “Me too lmao (laughing my ass off). I just drink plain water to

fight hunger while watching this.” This type of discourse demonstrates a magical

thinking mentality. These audience members are using Mukbang shows to fulfill desires

of eating without actually eating themselves. Rishika Sharma, who commented on Paytas,

wrote, “It’s weird but watching her eat just made me not want to eat. I was hungry before

I started watching this video but now I’m full and I haven’t even eaten ;” Chelsea

Baker, who wrote to another audience member on why they should watch these shows

while dieting, stated, “or DO and let them get fat FOR you. Drink some cold water your

growling stomach means it's applauding you;” and Hattie commented, “Yeah exactly, I’m

doing a 10 day fast so Trisha eats for me in the meantime .” These examples

demonstrate a shift in the rhetoric that suggests the audiences in negotiating their own

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experience and identities and replacing them with the experience of the Mukbang star’s.

The language moves from the audience’s reality to that of the actor—“let them get fat for

you.” This type of logic is used to undermine, and yet reinforce the restraints placed on

people because of thinness culture. The reasoning is that by watching the actors

transgressively eat they too are engaging in this action but escaping the reality of gaining

any weight. The viewer using the texts in this way creates a sense of escaping harm, yet

unintentionally further tightens the bounds of thinness culture onto themselves. Such

comments reinforce my argument that these spaces of radical eating behaviors present a

platform for audiences to reconcile their own desires against the constraints of

expectations and norms.

Fulfillment and Social Connection

This section looks closely at how audiences use these shows to connect with the

Mukbang stars and eating. Much in the vain of wishful thinking, these comments

revealed a longing to be with or be like the Mukbang stars. The specific themes that I

observed demonstrate three outcomes. The first outcome was consistent with previous

themes, which is a longing to emulate the Mukbang stars in breaking eating norms, the

second depicts a desire to not eat alone or eat socially with the star, and the last outcome

displayed a desire to feel the same sensations or experiences as the Mukbang stars.

First, there is a clear pattern of wishing to eat like the Mukbang stars. While some

comments were simple statements such as what Kim Chichu wrote about Dorothy, “How

do you eat so much I wish I could eat a lot but I just can't °^°,” other audience members

revealed more elaborate desires or fantasies to fulfill a shared or similar experience. This

can be seen in Nadia Ilham’s comment, also regarding Dorothy’s show:

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I really like to watch your vid [because] i can feel the mood.. i always love (even

though i dont do it often) to eat late at night with the slow light from the lamp

when everyone already went to sleep so that i can take my time to enjoy the

exciteness of eating what u’ve cooked.. omg i hope u know what i mean.. the diff

is u eat in front of camera.. but i eat in front of tv/pc watching movie or variety

show or what not.. but the sad thing is i cannot do it oftenly [because] i will

definitely gain weight unlike u.. .

Likewise, Francisca Gracia’s, comment depicts a similar reaction to Paytas’ Mukbang

shows:

Yeooo is it just me or like when I start every video I’m hungry but the more I

keep watching the more I feel like I’m there eating .. then again my stomach still

trembling lmao ALSOO ..can we just talk bout how amazing Trisha’s genes must

be because she stay eating w.e (whatever) she wants and drinking w.e (whatever)

and I’ve never seen her break out .. mbfn (must be fucking nice) .. skin clear as

the day Jesus got resurrected !!!! (Wait was it clear on that day?).

Both of these comments focus on a shared experience. Nadia is recreating how they

image Dorothy feels when eating. This is seen in their making of similar meals, eating in

front of an “audience” and how they wish they could binge eat often like Dorothy. With

Francisca, they explain feeling as if they are there eating with Paytas, and have a desire to

engage in eating without consequence—something Francisca fantasizes about Paytas’

experience. These comments reinforce my argument that audiences are using these videos

to escape from restrictions placed on them through narratives of thinness culture.

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Second, audience members fantasize about having a shared experience, watching

these shows to fulfill a social connection while eating. For example, David Branch wrote

about Paytas’ show, “I just wanna eat with Trisha. I love people that love food n know

what's good;” while shibz _phan and kpop commented on Wang’s show, “I love eating

while watching you, you have such an amazing personality and you make me feel less

alone so it genuinely means a lot, you're amazing and I wish people would realise that xx

♥;” Kyler Phelps commented, “Out of all mukbangers(?) you are my favorite. Like

honestly I’d love to eat with you. Much love❤;” and finally Katie Geiger wrote about

Paytas, “Watching this and eating food makes me feel like I’m eating with her.” As

shown, all four of these comments point to a situation where through consuming these

shows they are gaining a sense of belonging or social connection. Audience members are

longing for more than just an outlet to express their identification with food and eating,

but also a drive for a more meaningful way to relate with society—“watching this and

eating food makes me feel like I’m eating with her.”

Discussion

This chapter is an examination of how audiences are reacting to public displays of

women eating in transgressive ways. I argue that this data gives us deeper insight of the

outcomes and consequences of this phenomenon, specifically when dealing with women

as public spectacles, a reflection of how eating norms enable and constrain and the role

they play in gendered eating expectations, gendered eating and sexuality, and ways

audiences want to fulfill fantasies based in eating or social connection.

In each of these instances audiences are consistently reinforcing the status quo,

either by intentionally or unintentionally affirming current social structures constitutive

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of the relationships between power, gender, eating, and embodiment. Despite this

reinforcement, the audience is also grappling with participating in the disruption of these

constructs through the act of unbounded eating, as well as the gratification they

experience in watching these shows.

First, I discuss how these Mukbang shows are both reinforcing and deconstructing

salient eating politics, and the audience’s participation in this act. The control of who gets

to eat and who doesn’t is well-established in demonstrations of how cultural power

systems function through food. In many cultures throughout history caste, gender, race,

and class are determined by who has access to food (Counihan, 1992; Goody 1982). In

many cultures men eat first, eat the best and eat the most (Counihan, 1992; Adams 1990).

In my analysis, audiences reinforced the ideology that women are supposed to restrict

their food intake in order to conform to the construct of femininity.

Bordo (2003) cites that not really until the nineteenth-century Victorian era did

records [in Western cultures] show women practicing starvation and restrictive eating

behaviors in such masses. Also, during this time targeted messages, through pamphlets

and conduct books were equating femininity with controlled portions and appetites—

women were never to indulge. As I discuss in Chapter 2, Bordo (2003) argues that this

phenomenon, referencing the work of Dijkstra (1986), was constitutive of the “cultural

ideological counter-offensive” against the “new woman” (116). Along with oppressive

constraints cultivated from the fears of the “new woman,” there is a strong link to a

women’s hunger and to her sexuality (Bordo, 2003). The metaphor of the man-eater and

other tropes, myths, and artistic interpretations depicts a woman’s sexuality and power

bore from her hunger and would devour men—leading to a patriarchal campaign to

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suppressing women’s agency (Bordo, 2003). This cultural ideology remains prevalent in

current times, forming the current dominant eating norms.

So, when examining all the rhetorical moves occurring in these Mukbang shows

and how audiences are reacting to them, I argue how the audience, whether or not they

are in support of transgressive eating behaviors, still manage to reinforce eating

restrictions through the way they talk about women eating. This shows a desire and

conflict viewers feel bound to and restricted by, and this is why supportive messages still

reinforce norms and a desire to experience social eating through the internet. That tension

seems to bring out contradictory behavior that simultaneously wants to disrupt and

support norms.

First, when looking at the Disciplining Aesthetics data, the trends were

cultivations from audiences attempting to reconcile watching eating behaviors

historically associated with men. Culture has told the narrative that “the mark of the

manly is to eat spontaneously and expansively” (Bordo, 2003; p. 108). While women are

portrayed in media with “tiny, bite-sized portions,” they are perpetually told to stay

within “the bounds of appropriate feminine (eating) behavior” (Bordo, 2002; p. 129).

These dominant narratives play a significant role in how the audience discursively

interacts with these texts. The Mukbang stars are continuously told to clean-up their

eating habits, not slurp too loud, not smack their lips—learn how to eat properly. All of

this discourse aligns with hegemonic discourse working to “circumscribe and repress”

women’s hunger (Bordo, 2003). In addition, the tone and varicosity of the disciplinary

language seems to magnify for Candy, the Mukbang star who has a non-conforming body

type. This pattern is also consistent with the public justification in shaming bodies that

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are deemed unhealthy (Gay, 2017; Bordo 2003). “[The public] believe[s] they are

medical experts, listing a litany of health problems associated with fatness as personal

affronts. These tormentors bind themselves in righteousness when they point out the

obvious—that our bodies are unruly, defiant, fat” (Gay, 2017; pp. 188-189). This type of

rationalization behind the fat shaming is very much apparent in the comments on Candy’s

show. The majority of comments for Mukbang stars with thin bodies were about eating

appropriately, while Candy’s comments were focused on morality and health—as if to

say it is OK to ridicule her because she is gluteus and killing herself. Western societies

equate thinness with health and power, and though audiences want to engage with

Candy’s public eating, they simultaneously want to condemn it.

Furthermore, audiences depict discomfort and even disdain for Candy’s

pleasurable moans. As previously cited, historically women’s appetite is linked to

sexuality. Bordo (2003) conducted extensive research on how the contradiction of

sexualizing food in advertisements for both men and women, yet, dominantly portraying

women as only being allowed to indulge a little. There is still the prohibition of true

unabashed eating for women with evidence linked to media portrayals such as marketing

predominately diets foods or bite-sized treats to women—Bordo (2003) paints the picture

of two adds one for men, one for women—the man is diving into a sea of chocolate ice

cream, the women into a bowl of WeightWatchers pasta.

Thus, I argue, audiences discomfort with Candy’s moans that could be read as

sexual, is met with rejection for two reasons: one, women’s sexuality has historically

been repressed; and two, Candy’s sexuality is coupled with binge eating and eating rich

foods. Candy is indulging in multiple ways, and in many senses.

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Next, I examine the two themes, Managing Hunger and Fulfillment and Social

Connection. These two sections both function in similar ways to note how audiences use

these texts for demonstrating wishful thinking. Additionally, these themes demonstrate

the functionality of dominant norms in which women must restrictive their eating. This

underscores why women publicly eating as transgressive behavior. Typically when

women engage in indulgent eating, they do it alone and in private—this is true for women

who have eating disorders and women who do not (Gay, 2017; Bordo, 2003; Geis, 1998).

So, because women feel they need to indulge with food privately because they have been

told they must restrict their eating and eating daintily and this is directly tied to the

construction of femininity, Mukbang, on the surface, disrupts this belief system by

displaying women in public places binge eating.

When comparing Mukbang shows to the dominant constructs of appropriate

gendered eating behaviors—eating little, feeding others rather than themselves and

equating minimal and controlled eating with femininity—it seems logical that audiences

would turn to these texts to fulfill fantasies. As discussed in Chapter 2, magical thinking

is commonly used with habitual eating logic (Bordo, 2003). The audience members

whose discourse revolves around wishing they can eat like the Mukbang stars or

watching the Mukbang star instead of eating are using this outlet to gain agency over an

outside phenomena in which they feel they have no control over—"I wish I could eat like

you and not gain weight” or “I am watching you eat like this and it makes me feel better

about my issues with eating.” This theme arises again around eating and thinness in the

next chapter.

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When looking more closely at audiences who engage with Mukbang stars with the

drive for more social connection, I argue this relates back to eating in secret or alone. As

shown in the data many of the audience members pointed out feeling like they are eating

with the stars, wanting to eat with the star or even mimicking what it would be like to be

the star. I believe there is something powerful about watching women break the

constructs—in particular—the construct of holding back eating indulgently and in secret.

Bordo (2003) conveys this so dynamically:

The representation and denial of hunger central to features of the construction of

femininity and set up the compensatory binge as a virtual inevitability. Such

restrictions on appetite, moreover, are not merely about food intake. Rather, the

social control of female hunger operates as a practical “discipline” (to use

Foucault’s terms) that trains female bodies in the knowledge of their limits and

possibilities. Denying oneself food becomes the central micro-practice in the

education of feminine self-restraint and containment of impulse … to project the

appropriately attractive lack of appetite … really feel rewarded by a bite-sized

candy, no matter how much the chocolate “wallop” it pacts. In private, shamefully

and furtively, we binge (130).

Thus, these audience members are drawn to these shows because they are breaking every

rule about eating expectations. The women in these studies are eating messily, eating

larger-than-life portions that are all unhealthy rich foods, and they are allowing the whole

world to see. I argue that both genders find a bit of liberation and relatability—but

especially for the women audience members.

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Conclusion

Watching women eat is political. Audiences are turning to these shows either

unconsciously or consciously to watch women break the long-lived, historically-

oppressive homogenized gender norms of how women should eat. In this chapter, I argue

that the audience is reinforcing cultural gender eating constraints by the way they talk

about women eating, despite if their intention is to encourage this action.

Indeed, audiences are reinforcing norms through disciplining language to manage

the stars’ transgressive eating behaviors such as eating messy, being noisy, demonstrating

pleasure and eating too much. Yet, many audiences do come to these shows because they

enjoy seeing these actions, but still watch them as transgressive acts.

Additionally, the comments showed that thin bodies are more palatable to engage

with transgressive eating behaviors than (as Bordo (2003) puts it) “fleshy, space-claiming

bodies.” In particular, audiences demonstrated strong discomfort with Candy’s moans of

pleasure—which harkens back to the historic narrative of suppressing women’s sexuality

and the cultural link of women’s appetite and sexuality.

Next, I demonstrated how to audiences turn to these shows as a way to use

magical thinking in order to reconcile their own struggles with food. As femininity

continues to be equated with minimal eating, feeding others not yourself, and controlled

portions, audiences seem to find a sense of relief in Mukbang shows as a way to cope and

gain agency over realities that seem uncontrollable. However, the faulty line of

reasoning, as Bordo (2003) points out is not in the audience, but in the expectations of

gendered systems.

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Lastly, I argued that audiences of these shows are finding meaningful connection

to a show that on the surface may seem mindless. However, the audience discourse

demonstrates viewers wanting to really connect and desiring a connection with these

stars. I argue that one reason could because of the radical eating. Research shows how

impacted and conditioned humans are by culture, and eating culture is no different. Bordo

(2003) argues that disordered eating is predominately cultivated by culture. I see these

audiences finding a sense of themselves in these acts of rebellion. No longer do we want

to eat “in private, shamefully and furtively,” no longer do we want to feel the frustrations

of “feeding others and never being fed [our]selves,” no longer do we want to feel that

“our cravings are a dirty, shameful secret, to be indulged in only when no one is looking”

(Bordo, 2003; pp. 129-131). Eating behavior constraints placed on women is very real

and harmful, I see my analysis speaking to the impacts these restrictions have on people,

and how much people are struggling to be unburdened from them. The next chapter

demonstrates how eating behavior is also part of thinness culture, and the damage this

culture has done to the public.

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Chapter 4

Body

I have been living in this unruly body

for more than twenty years.

I have tried to make peace with this body.

I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body

in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it.

—Roxane Gay, Hunger

On YouTube and Instagram it is best practice for Mukbang stars to display an eye

catching thumbnail (a still captured from their video) to accompany all new uploads. This

is to entice new and currents fans to watch their latest content. Typically, these

thumbnails are manufactured in a flashy, click-bate type fashion with popular fast-food

logos contrasting a close-up shot of gooey cheese dripping down, juicy hamburgers

positioned above unhinged jaws emulating the preparation for that “perfect” bite. In these

thumbnails the food is prioritized over the body. Popular Mukbang star, Stephanie Soo

(who is not featured in this research) often exaggerates this method by positioning all her

food into the camera frame in larger-than-life piles, only allowing enough room for her

head to poke into the frame. This effect creates a feeling that Stephanie is literally

drowning in a sea of all the audience’s favorite foods.

However, Hungry FatChic (Candy) does not do this. Candy positions her body as

the dominant feature in her thumbnails. Thumbnail after thumbnail depicts Candy eating

Wendy’s, or Candy eating Mexican food, or Candy eating a family-size Stouffer’s

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Lasagna. Whatever the meal of choice, she directs the audience’s attention to the

corporal—her arms, hands, and mouth unapologetically taking up the space in the

frame—with the food as a secondary feature. It seems for Candy that she is featuring her

body as the star of her performance, rather than the food.

So, Candy highlights her body instead of the food in her YouTube thumbnails, so

what? The reason I am taking time to discuss this decision is because Candy’s body is

big—or as the scientific community would put it, morbidly obese. Her body is one that is

fleshy and claims space (Bordo, 2003), and from the outside Candy seems to celebrate

this. She exposes her skin, stretchmarks, and the soft folds of her body—which audiences

are typically used to seeing covered up by bulks of dark clothing in any movie or TV

show ever that features a fat character. Rather, Candy wears low-cut, spaghetti strapped

tank-tops, and unapologetically reveals all of her that is often hidden. This boldness is

coupled with binge eating—two taboos at once, scandalous. It is rare for audiences to

have access to visuals of fat women eating that are not used as a comedic or sympathetic

trope in a storyline—and even still I had to go digging to find Candy.

Audiences have a difficult time separating the food from the body, especially

when the texts display women eating. One of the most popular questions for the thin-

body Mukbang stars is, “How do you eat so much, but stay so thin?”. For Candy this

question is not posed; her body still is a major point of contention. This chapter analyzes

the dominant discourse underpinning the corporeal in the Mukbang videos I’ve

researched. Considering how connected fantasies of binge eating and remaining thin

appear in Mukbang discourse (reviewed in Chapter 3) I found three themes of

embodiment: what the secret is behind staying thin, Mukbang stars and eating disorders,

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and the danger of encouraging binge eating. Before going into my analysis for this

chapter I would like to contextualize how Mukbang stars talk about their own bodies in

relation to thinness culture.

Contextualizing Mukbang Stars and Thinness Culture

Although much of the body-focused rhetoric is predominantly driven by the

audience, the stars also talk about their bodies—either in response to the audience or

organically in an open dialogue as part of their videos. Nearly all of this discourse is

constructed around thinness—explaining their thinness, sustaining their thinness, or

striving for thinness. The most typical way these conversations are manifested is the stars

explaining how they maintain thinness. Hunger Dairies (Lindsay Greene) dedicated a

portion of her Live-streaming “Popeye’s Review Mukbang” to describing how she stays

thin. This was in response to an audience member who asked her, “how do you stay so

skinny” during the live viewing. Greene began with a qualification, “I know this is

something you all ask me a lot” as if she was slightly exhausted of having to justify her

body and her eating habits. She gave a typical answer of “This is just how my body

works.” This is a similar argument I have also heard from other Mukbang stars (such as

Peggy Nation) which encompasses explanations to their audience including: I don’t eat

like this for all my meals, I do work out, and genetics has a lot to do with it.

However, for some of the stars discourse focused on the body moves in a more

complex direction. Trisha Paytas, who refers to herself as overweight, “a bigger girl,” or

fat— which much of her audience affirms—often discusses her newest diet or body goals

in her videos. I would like to point out, that during the time of my research, Paytas said

she wears a U.S. women's clothing size 12, which is actually smaller than the national

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clothing size for U.S. women. According to a 2016 study (Chirstel & Dunn, 2016) the

average sizes women wear ranges from 16-18.

Accordingly, Paytas frequently begins her Mukbang videos by saying she is about

to go on a diet, or wants to go on a diet, or she is breaking her diet with a cheat-day. In

her most recent Mukbang videos Paytas qualifies her eating by saying “I technically

haven’t eaten for 24-hours,” or “I’ve fasted for 24-hours.” When looking closely at her

dialogue it is clear that Paytas feels a considerable amount of societal pressure to be thin

and engages in a cyclical dieting-followed-by-binging pattern. In her Mukbang, “My 10K

Calorie Lunch! Epic Cheat Day,” Paytas reveals the pressure she feels to lose weight:

Really overweight people — which I am overweight— get a lot of hate more so

on the internet then in real life, though people in real life get some too sometimes

and lately I have been getting a lot more jabs at my weight. I know I have gained

weight, I know I need to lose weight—I am saying that as I eat, we all know I

have a food addiction, I really struggle with food and eating.

In many ways, Paytas’ confessional discourse mirrors the dialogues of thousands of

women, women who may even watch her show. Her pattern—explaining or justifying her

eating behaviors—is a popular practice of negotiation many (if not most) women engage

in (Bordo, 2003) to not only justify their transgressive eating to friends or family, but also

to themselves. This is magical thinking behavior—eating myths or superstitious thinking

that women use to negotiate when breaking normative eating, such as binging on or

snacking on “forbidden foods.”The faulty logic is thatit’s OK to eat this cake if I go on a

diet straight after or not eat dinner (Bordo, 2003).

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However, as Bordo (2003) asks, is it this sort of logic that is faulty, or is the

cultural structuring of thinness that is faulty? The importance of thinness in U.S.

culture—which is accompanied by its own brand of problematic thinking, “I am special if

I am thin” (Bordo, 2003, p. 59)—sets up women to use this type of negotiation in order to

meet the required body type. This does not negate how seriously problematic this is on an

individual level, however, when “[o]ur culture is one where Oprah Winfrey, a dazzling

role model for female success, has said ‘that the most significant achievement of her life’

was losing sixty-seven pounds on a liquid diet (she gained it all back within a year)”

(Bordo, 2003; p. 60). I argue that this way of thinking is a product of privileging thinness

and thus an internalized fear of not being thin.

Furthermore, the fear of not being thin also is reflected in the way audiences react

to the stars and the behavior in the videos—both for the conforming and nonconforming

bodied stars. As introduced earlier, I saw patterns in the audience comments that reflect a

desire of resolving the dissonance between both how the stars with ideal bodies engage in

transgressive eating and yet remain thin, or how the starts with big bodies continue to

engage in transgressive eating and not work toward becoming thin. In this chapter I argue

how these texts function as an outlet for the audience’s fears about the body. Audiences

negotiate their fears through rhetoric that affirms thin privilege, reinforces dominant

narratives of how bodies and eating behaviors should correspond, and connects how

Mukbangs are consumed to how the audience evaluates the stars.

Indeed, fear of being fat in U.S. culture makes perfect sense. These messages

have been instilled in our understanding of the body—think of how the medical

community discusses fat bodies, it is typically in terms of fear-based language that posits

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obesity as a threat, danger, or cost. This is reinforced, of course, by the limited and

problematic depictions of fat bodies and fat identity in media, paired with consumerist

promises to minimize, cut out, and disappear fatness (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001).

Moreover, thinness is profoundly privileged in U.S. culture. As Counihan (1998)

argues citing (Dyrenfoth, Wooley and Wooley, 1980), an ideology of success and

intelligence is partly constructed using thinness as a marker. Thinness, as a determiner of

wealth and social status, is also interconnected to whiteness. Counihan (1998)

demonstrates a disparity in obesity rates connected to white privilege that still remains

consistent today. Overall, people of Latinx and African American races are

predominately more obese than people who are White—this remains consistent to studies

conducted in 1975 (Counihan & Kaplan, 1998; Garb, Garb and Stunkard, 1975). This

historical difference in obesity rates is part of the intense structures of racial inequality in

the U.S. that not only impoverishes communities of color, but make it harder for them to

access affordable and healthy food, and cause severe health problems related to

intergenerational trauma. Thinness is part of the architecture of power in U.S. culture.

Also, it is important to point to the way bodies are constitutive of identity

formation. LeBesco (2004) cites Grosz’s (1994) work on rethinking how identity and fat

politics should be considered from a cultural and intersectional lens that moves beyond

the scientific realm of discourse. This is similar to Bordo’s (2003) use of a feminist

cultural lens to study eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Culture and the way culture

functions must be considered when studying embodiment. Just as identity categories (sex,

race, class) converge and are constitutive of each other, embodiment is also part of how

people categorize themselves and each other in relation to cultural status structures

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(LeBesco, 2004; Bordo, 2003). Thinness is part of the structuring and privileging of

class, race, sex, and gender. It is dangerous to ignore how these categories are working in

conjunction within larger power systems to constrain and enable society as a whole.

Although it is vital to understand the functionality of how thinness moves in

power systems, I believe it is just as important to capture the consequences and impacts

in a more personal way. Roxane Gay (2017) illuminates the feeling of being constrained

by these power systems. In her memoir she describes her experience of finally achieving

thinness after multiple attempts, enforced by her parents in grade school, to lose weight:

My parents tried to figure out why I was gaining so much weight. I had no

answers I could share with them. They put me on a medical supervised liquid diet

during the summer of my freshman year [of high school]. Every day, I drank 5

milkshakes that were chalky and disgusting. Of course, I lost weight—forty

pounds, maybe more. My parents were pleased that I had gotten my body under

control. I went back to school and my classmates admired my new body, offered

me compliments, wanted to hang out with me. That was the first time I realized

that weight loss, thinness really, was social currency. (66)

The pressure to be thin, especially for women, is the equivalent of going to a good

college, getting your dream job, earning that big promotion at work. Recently, a major

news outlet praised Paytas for losing 37-pounds—her weight loss was newsworthy

(Heller, 2019)! This is no different than headlines going viral when Hollywood stars gain

a significant (or even 5 pounds) amount of weight, lose the baby-bulge, and let’s not

forget how the internet nearly exploded with the news of Kim Kardashian forming

cellulite on the back of her thighs and buttocks. However, Gay also demonstrates that

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reinforcement of thinness is not only prevalent in societal expectations, but also through

interpersonal relationships—Gay became a good daughter and a popular student through

loss of weight.

Likewise, fatness has a polarizing mode of representation, limiting discourse to

either hyper-visibility or erasing all traces of space that would allow fatness to live.

LeBesco (2004) argues that through language fatness needs to be transformed from a

“spoiled, uninhabitable, invisible identity to a stronger subject position” (p. 3). The

current ideology of fatness uses rhetoric that reinscribes oppressive ideologies—rhetoric

“so powerful that even fat people abhor their own bodies (LeBesco, 2004; p. 3). This

mode of discourse then effectively renders fatness, as a position and as a lived

experience, invisible.

Additionally, Gay (2017) points out the situated contradiction which constructs

fatness. She too, writes about the ways cultural norms function to erase her identity and

rights to lived experiences. Gay explains:

My body is wildly undisciplined, and yet I deny myself nearly everything I desire.

I deny myself the right to space when I am in public, trying to fold in on myself,

to make my body more invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible (p. 145)

Here, Gay describes so pointedly the continuous battle of restricting herself, to withhold

and take away the permission to simply exist. Yet, Gay also underscores the nonsensical

norming of fatness where cultural narratives claim fat bodies as undisciplined, and are

demand these bodies to take up space despite the fact that bodies do indeed take up space.

Gay (2017) also describes the spectacle-like feeling when moving through everyday life,

receiving unsolicited health advice from strangers, being gawked at by small children,

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and receiving disgusted looks when eating in public. Ironically, even the spectacle of

fatness is used to reinscribe thin idealism and erase fat identity.

Returning to LeBesco’s (2004) description of how U.S. culture positions fatness

identity as “spoiled, uninhabitable, and invisible,” I would like to take a deeper

examination of how precisely this functions through public discourse. This closer look

with also help in understanding the phobic-culture of fatness.

First, I draw on Gay’s (2017) own perspective of living in an “unruly body.” Gay

describes the harshness of public criticism:

Fat shaming is real, constant and rather pointed. There are a shocking number of

people who believe they can simply torment fat people into weight loss and

disciplining their bodies or disappearing their bodies from the public sphere. They

believe they are medical experts, listing a litany of health problems associated

with fatness as personal affronts. These tormentors bind themselves in

righteousness when they point out the obvious—that our bodies are unruly,

defiant and fat. (188-189)

In this passage Gay is critiquing the problematic discourse cultivated from how fatness is

portrayed in the scientific and health community, along with the emergence of the

commercialization or capitalistic gains of thin privilege (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001). By

portraying fatness as something people ought to have control over or something people

need to have control over—fat bodies are then perceived as “reckless, excess, prodigality,

indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space, transgression of boundary”

(LeBesco & Braziel, 2001; p. 3).

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Accordingly, fatness is depicted as a transgressive behavior leading that deserves

judgment, which harkens to how Gay (2017) describes her experiences of being shamed

from strangers, friends, and family. This is then exacerbated by consumerism. Exploiting

people’s desperate desires to be thin, consumerism offers immediate and deadly ways to a

quick fix (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001; Bordo, 2003). Yet, the marketing of these products

(pills, surgeries, supplements, shakes, meal plans) further exacerbate the culture. Through

these strategies, companies are targeting fat bodies with the promise to erase them despite

the significant medical dangers, along with a common knowledge that typically any

weight loss is gained back within a year— and thus creating a continuous, profitable and

harmful cycle (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001).

Bordo (2003) offers insight into the ways women in particular are targeted

through media contradictions that pray on unattainable desires of the body. Bordo

introduces the unattainable women using hooks (1992) concept of eating the Other. The

unattainable woman is effortlessly slim, but furthermore has a nonchalant and easy

relationship with food. “[S]he has achieved a state beyond craving. Undominated by

unsatisfied, internal needs, she eats not only freely but without deep desire and without

apparent consequences” (p. 102). The representation depicted here is a trope created in

media that is unattainable, but also contradicts reality. This representation is pushed at

women among a plethora of other tropes telling women how to feel about food, yet this

one in particular is harmful because women desperately desire to achieve this state

because it means not feeling cravings therefore not being bound to the dysfunctional

narratives of eating and thinness culture. This woman, unattainable and therefore

impossible, presents a mystery. Many U.S. American women look at this figure and

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wonder—what is her secret? The idea of the secret is a major theme in dieting culture—

dieting food products, exercise commercials, etc.—promising to reveal mystical and

effortless ways to be slim (Bordo, 2003). This connects to my concept of magical eating

and why women also turn to Mukbang to fulfill fantasies of eating without any

consequences. This same rhetoric also has lead the modern woman to be skeptical that

there is any woman with an ideal body who truly has an easy and free relationship with

food—“almost all of us who can afford to be eating well are dieting—and hungry—

almost all of the time” (Bordo, 2003; p. 103). The narratives of thinness culture as

complicated women’s relationships with food and their body so much that women rarely

believe anyone has an effortless relationship with food anymore these days.

In the next section, I analyze the ways Mukbang audiences grapple with eating

behaviors and embodiment. Evaluating the audience rhetoric, I demonstrate the

negotiation of identity and ideologies when viewers are faced with transgressive eating

coupled with thin bodies, and transgressive eating coupled with transgressive bodies. I

establish how audiences reinscribe thin privilege through desire, skepticism, and fear-

based discourse. Then I discuss the impacts, consequences and implications of how this

rhetoric functions and reinforces current corporeal belief-systems.

It’s All About the Body Baby

As Gay (2017) so vividly captured in her passages discussed earlier in this

chapter, through a sense of justification, driven by an inscribed and constitutive corporeal

culture, the public feels motivated and a moral duty to evaluate the body when on display

(even if display means walking through the mall). At times this evaluation leads to a

desire of obtaining, or consuming others in hook’s (1992) sense, and other times this

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motivation is driven by the need to discipline the defiant body. This section considers

these avenues of discourse through a critique of audience reactions focused on the body.

What is Your Secret?

Dying to know the secret to thinness is one of the most popular themes in the texts

I reviewed. All of the thin bodied stars were asked variations of this question. This most

pointedly reinforces the crux of thinness-culture which is a shared belief in privileging

the thin body. However, this section also underscores the implications and repercussions

of this culture.

For most U.S. American’s there are rigid rules in place in order to accomplish and

maintain the ideal body—and typically this excludes binge eating. Thus, much of the

audience demonstrates an air of disbelief toward how the stars remain thin. In addition,

due to the salient rules of maintaining thinness and thus “healthiness,” the audience also

projects their judgements toward perceived rule-breaking and overindulgence because of

the inherent disruption of this ideology. This suggests a logic that positions even

perceived healthy bodies as unable to be absolved of the cultural rules of eating.

However, some stars endured more scrutiny than others. When analyzing

audience comments for Dorothy’s videos, I observed that she received the least amount

of skepticism toward her ability to engage in transgressive eating and maintaining

thinness. Predominantly, the audience read Dorothy’s behavior as inspiring, yet were still

baffled by her ability to override the laws of nature. This is demonstrated in such

comments as Karla Small who wrote, “how do you stay so thin what’s your secret,” leigh

dee diane lozano who commented,”why you're so thin and yet you eat too much

,” Gheraldine Ubaldo who wrote, “U eat so much doroth. But u not become chubby,”

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soso koko wrote, “i want to understand why she is not fat,” and Debbie Huser

commented, “All the noodles she eats are high in carbs. I don’t know how she doesn’t

gain weight?”

Here, these audience members depict a desire to reconcile Dorothy’s ability to

defy the unwritten rules of thinness, while also attempting to grapple with her capability

to face no consequences (as seen from the audience’s point of view). These comments

established a duality in the audience’s reading of the text, in which they are conflicted by

her ability to accomplish a seemingly miraculous act, while also wanting in on it. This is

particularly apparent in Karla Small’s posing of her question which wants to know

Dorothy’s secret to eating and staying thin. The other comments are less overt, revealing

a sense of wanting to know Dorothy’s secret, but still demonstrate a yearning to

understand how this star can skate free of any consequence unlike everyone else. Debbie

Huser’s comment signals one of the trendiest diet-culture taboos—carbs— the perceived

enemy to all adults over 25. This observation situates a need to resolve Dorothy’s

transgressive eating, but implies Dorothy is an exception to dieting logic—everyone

avoids carbs, even the movie stars! This makes her special and her type of thinness

unattainable.

However, Dorothy is not the only Mukbang star to receive this type of reaction.

Audience members also posted similar questions in response to Lindsey Greene’s and

Veronica Wang’s videos. Though there were fewer comments than what Dorothy

received, Wang also was accused of having a secret. Altina Ajeti wrote, “Can anyone

explain [to] me how she eats so much ?? And why she does not get fat, this girl is

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fabulous,” while Missy Nhicsy commented, “Hi! I was just wondering. How could you

eat this much and stay sexy all at the same time? You're super pretty.”

These comments are very close to the discourse about Dorothy, however, the

comments about Wang are even more aligned with rhetoric referenced in Bordo’s (2003)

work on the representation of the unattainable woman— wishing to be her, having what

she has, even consuming her (hooks, 1992). Greene’s comments, on the other hand,

remain confined to a more accessible, yet still skeptical read of her body and eating

behaviors. For instance, some 1 wrote, “what's your workout routine ?? & pls tell me this

[is] all you eat in a day ;” and tyler tyler wrote, “Do u work out ?? How do u stay so fit

??,” Greene openly discusses in her videos the fact that she exercises regularly. She

presents a very toned and defined body—which possibly influences the way her audience

reconciles her transgressive eating. Although, some 1 did jokingly remark that despite

this factor, her binge eating and staying fit still provokes disbelief.

Additionally, Dorothy received some criticism about her eating behaviors being

unhealthy. Jenita yesu nesa mony wrote, “Don't eat too much of food ....it is not good for

health.” However, most of her audience did not engage in judgmental criticism toward

her binges. Some even came to her defense. Jenita yesu nesa mony commented in rebuttal

to Kim Hyun Woo, stating, “Don't worry she knows what she is doing and she drink[s]

hibiscus tea. Hibiscus tea is good for body and also for digestion. It can be enjoy both hot

and cold and so i think she is ok.” Dorothy was even praised for eating all her food. R.

Dew commented, “I love your videos. A lot of other mukbangers don't even swallow

their food. They edit out them spitting out their food. You are genuine!” (There was

controversy in the Mukbang world when some stars were accused of not eating any of

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their food, rather using a “chew and spit” method, and editing this out of the final videos

in order to appear as if they were consuming everything. Some fans were outraged and

found this as a betrayal).

Unlike the other stars, Dorothy’s audience seems less concerned with eating

behaviors, and less skeptical about her thinness. In the comments I reviewed, she was

never accused of an eating disorder. The audience seemed more fixated on reconciling

her body size to her portion sizes.

One reason Dorothy’s audience may be less judgmental of her eating habits in

relation to her body may be because she is the only Mukbang star in this research who is

not part of a Westernized culture—though Wang is also an Asian woman, she is Asian-

Canadian, and currently lives in Canada. So, because Dorothy presents the most

differently for some of the audience members watching her, this leaves less space for

needing to speculate Dorothy’s norm-breaking, and more room for audiences to not

questions her ability to eat without apparent consequence because she presents as

different from women in Western cultures.

In this section, I examined a pattern of the audience’s desire to uncover the

mystery of thinness when located in rule-breaking situations. The audience is unable to

ignore the ways the stars contradict the dominant narratives of corpulence. These patterns

also demonstrate how the audience engages in a constraining and enabling effect toward

thin-culture. That is, through the audience yearns to rebel against the rules of thinness,

they still wanting to conform to them—how can I eat like that, but remain thin?

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You must have an eating disorder

In next pattern I identified is the how the audience used accusations of eating

disorders to reconcile binge eating and thinness. This rhetoric also functioned as a way to

make judgements of health, thinness and eating behaviors as understood in dominant

narratives of corporeal culture. This type of discourse was mostly directed at Wang and

Paytas—westernized women who seem to have a following that closely identifies with

them.

Here, Wang received accusations of engaging in eating disordered behavior from

viewer Abby Saito. Saito wrote, “She throws it up after tho, it’s a type of illness she has,”

while a different viewer, Patricia Costuna, made a similar criticism by disclosing her own

struggles with eating disordered behavior. She wrote:

I'm a recovering binge eater and your eating reminds me of my binging episodes

:( I hope you're not suffering from any [eating disorder] :( Anyway, from her

cheeks and neck, I can say that she purges what she eats :(

Both of these comments are uniquely positioned. Rather than speculating whether

or not Wang has an eating disorder, the audience members are stating that it must be fact

that she does. This suggests that some viewers see their own behaviors reflected in

Wang’s actions, identifying themselves as the same or similar to her, rather than finding

in her body a desired magical way of escaping consequences. Though there is still a need

to resolve how Wang remains thin, audiences instead reflect their own practices of

conformity to societal expectations of embodiment.

However, though Paytas also faced accusations of an eating disorder her audience

seemed less adapt to identify with her and readier to chastise her behavior. Audience

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member, Izzy Boi wrote, “She has an eating disorder,” My journey to a better smile

surmised a similar behavior, though showing some concern, writing, “She has an obvious

binging eating disorder. I pray she's not purging. I just don't know how she's not bigger

with the way she eats... she can kill some food!!!,” and finally abhx214 did not accuse her

of an eating disorder but did implicate issues with eating, commenting, “And you wonder

why you have struggles with your weight Trisha, this is a factor!” These comments

demonstrate very little fantasizing of Paytas, which is contrary to the audiences discourse

of Paytas in Chapter 3, and this rhetoric differs how viewers discussed Wang’s abilities to

stay thin. In Chapter 3, audiences discussed using Paytas’ videos as a way to fantasize

eating like her, and at times being like her (as in they wished they could eat like her), yet

once the fantasy includes her body and not just binge eating, the rhetoric shifts to one of

disciplining. That is because Paytas is not thin like Wang, audiences only want to use her

videos to fulfill desires of eating, but also want to shame her because her body is

nonconforming. This reaction is different from how audiences react to Wang, which is

still accusing her of not being naturally thin because of her eating behaviors, but they

show more compassion for her, rather than use shaming language.

Overall, this section demonstrated how health rhetoric plays a role in thinness and

eating culture. Though Paytas is open about her on-going battle with food and eating,

from my knowledge she has never said she has an eating disorder or bulimia. This is true

of Wang, as well. Wang has neither disclosed having bulimia or any issues around eating

disorders or food addiction. I surmise that audiences are projecting their own

relationships with food and body culture onto the stars, while also reading these texts

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through the dominant narrative, which says that overindulgence of food is unhealthy

despite how thin the stars’ present.

You should not be encouraged

In this section, I focus on ways audiences spectacularize and attempt to discipline

the defiant body (Gay, 2017). For the stars whose bodies fulfill the ideal of thinness, the

audience’s rhetoric did not show attempts to shame their behaviors, but rather fantasize

about them while attempting to reconcile norm breaking actions. In this section, I

establish a pattern showing how the audience overtly attempts to discipline through

means of shaming or exhibiting deep distress toward Paytas and Candy—the two stars in

the study with non-conforming bodies. Although demonstrating concern for other stars

such as Wang was also exhibited, the focus was not on her body, but rather her eating

habits. The discourse clearly establishes a sense of moral duty that audiences should not

be encouraging these stars’ eating habits because of how their bodies present.

Similarly to the way Paytas’ audiences assumed that she has an eating disorder,

audiences also unsympathetically observed her body as a consequence of her

transgressive eating habits. One audience member with the screen name Regina George

responded to a comment regarding her eating habits. They said, “Septic Mack Phan umm

she clearly does eat shit like this every day. She said it herself. Don’t be in denial. The

girl is overweight and it doesn’t take a genius to see that.” Then viewer Laura Snipes

made a jab referencing a video Paytas had made concerning her fears that her then-

boyfriend thought she was too overweight, Snipe commented, “Btw, this is why your

boyfriend doesn't think you're thin.” Viewer Keisha Sutherland made a comment

targeting Paytas’ eating habits by scrutinized Paytas’ logic around breaking a fast with a

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large meal, they wrote, “When you think fasting and then eating 10,000 calories is okay.”

While these comments do not aim at deterring the star from current behaviors, they do

take on the point-of-view that her behavior should change due to the perceived

ramifications—being overweight or your partner thinking you’re too fat to date. This

reasoning aligns with popular ways of thinking, especially for women—eliciting the age-

old philosophy grandmothers told mothers who then told daughters—watch what you eat,

you’ll never attract a boy if you’re anything other than thin. This heteronormative

slippage in logic teaches women that their bodies are objects that must be used to please

men. This reasoning causes a disparity in power where women must place their value in

expectations of they should present rather than in who they are. The comments also

demonstrate the moralistic language that Gay (2017) and LeBesco and Braziel (2001)

describe which is fat bodies are seen as inhabitable and gluttonous and it is the publics

duty to disapline them into thinness.

In these next comments, audiences also moralistic language that aims to discipline

Paytas into thinness. Audience member named, cairo ranjbar, wrote:

PEOPLE STOP ENCOURAGING HER. Body positivity shouldn't be telling

someone who's killing herself that she's inspiring. You should be showing her that

she will die if she doesn't stop, help her make changes before it's too late. I

believe you should only be body positive if you're living a healthy lifestyle and

taking care of your health. If you're doing that and you're still fat because of

reasons you can't control or you just still don't like you're body even though you're

perfectly healthy then body positivity is something you need. Fat people don't

need body positivity they need a reality check and a health plan. If you're fine

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with killing yourself then okay but stop complaining when the consequences bite

you in the ass.

This viewer has a clear perspective on the definition of body-positivity and who is

allowed to take part in the concept. I think it is important that Paytas’ viewers grapple

and critically think about the potentially harmful impacts of Mukbang. However, taking a

position of body-positive language can also be problematic and reinscribe thinness

culture. This viewer’s quote harkens back to Gay’s (2017) discussion of how the public

feels righteous in making claims and doulling out unwarrented advice to a person

whose’s body is defiant. Although Paytas does discuss that food is a trigger for her, this

does not automatically warrant moralistic responses from her audience. Also, the viewer

seems to be confused by their own logic in who is allowed to use body-positive language

and how it functions— “people who cannot control their body shapes need these

affirmations, but not fat people.” This is a clear contradiction, studies show many fat

people have little control over their body size due to issues such as health. Though the

notion of controlling one’s body should not be a point of contention because people

should be liberated from this constraint (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001; Bordo, 2003). Yet, it

is not surprising that this audience member is struggling to grasp what body-positive is

since the term’s meaning has historically been schizophrenic in this culture. Media

platforms sometimes takes on the body-positivity approach in an attempt to undermine

(and maybe undo) the damage of thinness narratives often implemented by these very

platforms such as the 2004 Dove “Real Beauty” campaign. However, many feminist and

embodiment scholars will argue that body-positivity rhetoric usually is working to

reinscribe thinness. For the most part it is still unclear how helpful this concept is when

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looking more closely at users’ intentionality. That is, when people say they are body-

positive are they still seeing fat bodies as lesser than thin bodies, despite wanting to be

inclusive?

Similarly, Candy’s videos received reactions focused on why she should change

her behavior. Audiences demonstrated a conflict in feeling both concern for her health

and contempt for her actions—though like in Chapter 3, there were some viewers who

commented on enjoying her channel and watching her eat. Yet, I identified a pattern

showing how audiences do not believe that Candy could be happy in a body that defies

the normative ideal. Jackie Land wrote:

Please don't think I'm a troll. I'm not...But are you happy? You have a pretty face

and I can tell you are kind hearted. I feel sad for you like I feel like you're crying

on the inside or screaming on the inside. May you find peace.

Here, the implication is that being thin is being happy. That is, despite Candy presenting

as a person who is satisfied with her life (in videos she often expresses how excited she is

to eat, and her “about” page on her YouTube channel explains that she really enjoys

eating on camera). The viewer assumes that Candy is depressed or “crying on the inside”

because of how her body presents. Thus, to the viewer, if Candy stopped eating so much

and she would be happy. This is a strong narrative in thinness culture—fatness is equated

with unhappiness, If someone has a fat body then they must be depressed or have some

type of underlying psychological issue (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001). It is not shocking that

some of Candy’s viewers would make this type of assumption. Holly Joy makes a similar

assumption in their comment, “I wish you could see the value of you and how beautiful

and sweet you are and take care of yourself.” This too, reinforces the popular trope that

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people with transgressive bodies are incapable of loving themselves or valuing

themselves—this narrative is rooted in ideology that suggests the body is a reflection of a

holistic sense of health including mental health.

While, these comments carry a tone of trying to spare Candy’s feelings, other

comments make no attempts to hold back judgment, revealing contempt for her actions.

These types of comments include SWIRLY4LIFE, who wrote, “STOP KILLING

YOURSELF!!!,” Momma Marijuana’s comment, “Mukbang and YouTube or money for

that matter is not worth losing your life this is really sad to me,” Joe Rubino, who wrote,

“Oh but hey, she’s drinking water........that should offset the 12,650 calories in carbs she

just consumed,” and finally Your Lord Kermit’s comment, “We should be encouraging

her to eat less/better and to exercise more... not to stuff herself and tell her she’s sooo

pretty while doing it.” Analogous to Candy’s comments regarding her eating (see in

Chapter 3), viewers exhibit a bias toward her body as opposed to videos starring woman

with ideal body types. The underlying message is that Candy’s engagement with binge

eating is abhorrent because of how her body presents. This is apparent when viewers

make contradictory comments such as I Am Legend, who wrote, “It should be illegal to

eat this much so sad...,” and xxlady which commented, “So are we all going to ignore

the fact that she had more than an average person’s daily calories for just one meal?”

These messages are positioned in ways that make Candy’s actions wrong or even

criminal instead of desirable despite her engaging in the exact same behavior as the thin-

bodied stars. Also, the audience do not read her videos the same way as they do with the

thin-bodied stars. That is, there is no dissonance or need to speculate her thinness—rather

they see Candy as a cautionary tale of what happens when you indulge in food.

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In this final section, I underscored the insidious and dominant narrative of

thinness represented in the discourse surrounding the stars whose bodies defy the norm.

Through observing the discourse from both Paytas and Candy’s audiences, I was able to

demonstrate the ideology which reinscribes thinness and works to erase fat identities. By

audiences reading Candy’s presentation as sick, depressed, and disgusting they are taking

away Candy’s position as a legitimate way of existing as a human. This is observed in the

contradictory ways audience identified the thin-bodied stars versus the stars with non-

conforming bodies. Audiences reacted to Paytas and Candy’s videos with the motivation

to discipline or reject these stars’ behaviors and actions despite having identical themes

and content to the videos of the stars with ideal bodies.

Discussion

In this chapter I called attention to the formation of body-focused discourse in

these videos, and explained its functionality. By linking patterns concentrated in current

body norms, I argue that audiences use these texts to interpret and perform interactions

governed by prevailing U.S. ideologies of thinness. The themes that I address in this

chapter depict a contradictory attitude toward bodies, while also desiring to reinforce and

rebel against the rules governing bodies.

In my observations of the secret of thinness, I showed how discourse was forming

around a deep desire to uncover the thin bodied stars’ abilities to defy eating norms and

yet remain free of any consequences (i.e. getting fat). This hyper-focused attention on

maintaining a slender body underscores U.S. cultures’ obsession with thinness.

Moreover, the audience’s fixation on sustaining a slim body was also matched with an

interest in rule-breaking. The audience was equally as excited about transgressive eating

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as they were with the stars’ ability to sustain ideal bodies. This reaction demonstrates a

unique phenomenon. That is, audiences instinctively reinforce ideologies of thinness,

while also finding themselves drawn to actions that undermine these belief-systems. They

are driven to conform by wishing to be the magical exception to the rules that they desire

to break along the way.

Thus, in my observed pattern of audiences wanting to uncover the secret of

thinness, the pattern both functions to establish the salience and insidious reinscribing of

thinness as power, but also ways audiences wish to undercut the oppressiveness of this

structure. Audiences are unable to reconcile how these women are so free of the rules

inherent in thinness culture—remaining thin while overindulging—yet desiring to

participate in the same acts only if they too can remain thin. This pattern demonstrates the

ways women are still bound by seemingly insignificant narratives that permeate all of

popular culture. This pattern shows the danger and damage these narratives still possess

and have carried out over the years.

In addition, this same logic was utilized in my second theme, which

demonstrates audiences’ attempts to resolve overindulgence with thinness through

accusations of stars’ disordered eating habits. Not only are the requirements of ideal

bodies salient in U.S. culture, so are the rules of how to achieve and maintain ideal

bodies—this is connected to gendered eating norms (Bordo, 2003). So when audiences

see women circumventing the homogenous understanding of eating and body culture

there is an immediate need to make sense of this phenomenon.

Furthermore, this pattern also suggests that audience members cannot believe that

women who binge eat and remain thin are healthy—even if they present with

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stereotypically healthy bodies such as Wang and Greene. I assert that audiences have

been indoctrinated with the ideology that women are not allowed to (over)indulge

without facing consequences such as gaining weight or having an eating disorder. Other

than those used for dramatic or comedic effect, the public has such little exposure to

tropes of women eating (Stein, 2009).

Concurrently, both of these patterns propose ways the audience is interpreting the

texts through their own understanding of thin culture and fears of fatness. As shown

above some disclosed their own struggles with eating disorders and most disclosed a fear

for the Western stars having an unhealthy relationship with eating. It seemed impossible

for the audience to not read these texts without assuming a negative relationship between

women and their eating habits. I see this as a reflection of the audience's own perception

and relationships to their experiences with eating norms. That is thinness culture has

complicated women’s relationships to eating because of body presentation expectations,

and possibly audiences are using Mukbang to work out their own understandings or even

experiences of the impacts of these constraints.

However, Dorothy became an exception to the audience’s accusation of an eating

disorder. I assert that this departure from the pattern is due to her perceived exotismism.

Bordo’s (2003) work on gendered advertisements offers a representation of the exotic

woman, who in contrast to the dominant culture in the U.S., has an easy relationship with

food and faces no consequences. This representation functions in a similar way with how

audiences received Dorothy, they still desired to uncover her mystical relationship with

food, but did not categorize and thus treat her the same as the other Westernized women.

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Her relationship to eating was more believable and glorified than the other stars because

she is seen as different from the other stars.

Finally, the last section I want to discuss is the audience’s reaction to the stars

with nonconforming bodies. This was addressed in the last theme I presented, which

underscored the ways fat identity is erased. It also captures the current climate of fat-

phobia in U.S. culture.

First, the most apparent pattern I saw was the aggressive assertion that the

audience should discipline or shame Candy and Paytas for their actions. As Gay (2017),

LeBesco and Braziel (2001) write, society has framed fat bodies as criminal and subjects

to be disciplined into thinness, which is a device that functions to erase fat identity.

“[T]he tendency is to collapse the fat body within the traumatized body”, or in other

words if you are fat there must be something deeply wrong with you (LeBesco & Braziel,

2001; p. 4).

Similarly, this narrative of the fat body is the traumatized body was frequently

represented in the discourse targeted at both Candy and Payas. Much of the language

assumed trauma, especially true for Candy. Comment after comment question Candy’s

happiness. This ties back to how Gay’s (2017) family and peers deeply believed that once

she was thin then she would be happy, and LeBesco’s (2004) concept of society viewing

the fat body as “uninhabitable” (p. 2). It was too much for the audience to accept Candy’s

transgressive eating and nonconforming body, leading to shaming language,

encouragement to stop eating (or killing herself), and to start exercising.

Additionally, audiences expressed a double-standard on Candy’s channel. There

were countless comments that criticized her for binge eating—which is the purpose of a

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Mukbang show. Audiences read Candy’s actions as criminal because her body does

presents as nonconforming. Popular tropes inscribe fat bodies as the result of “reckless

excess, prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint …” (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001; p. 3).

Despite the thin-bodied stars engaging in the same practices, it doesn’t matter because of

the “spoiled identity” fixed on Candy (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001)

I want to turn to how I first introduced Candy. I described her as a woman who

presents as big-bodied and is confident in her body—I mean her handle is literally

Hungery FatChick. She seems to love food and love her fleshy-space-claiming body—

and won’t apologize for either. Unlike Paytas, Candy rarely talks about her body to the

audience nor does she seem to really respond to comments about her weight or eating

habits. Though her audiences reinscribes privileging thinness, Candy, on her own, does

not.

Conclusion

In my observation for this chapter, I established evidence of the audience’s

understanding of thinness culture and fear of fatness. The way the audience talked about

the Mukbang’s stars and their relationship to food, and methods of staying thin, I argue

reflects viewers’ own struggles with the constraints of thinness culture. I make this

argument because of the way the audience discussed the stars’ bodies and eating habits

the audience’s relation to their own desires to obtain thinness but also indulge.

This chapter also introduced the idea of magical thinking logic with diet culture

and bell hook’s (1992) eating the Other with Bordo’s (2003) concept of eroticizing the

representation of the women who eats without consequences. This was predominately

useful in understanding how audiences reacted to Dorothy’s videos, and their need to

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uncover her mystical relationship with food. Viewers did not attempt to resolve her

thinness with accusations of an eating disorder, but rather accepted her ability to remain

thin because she presents so differently from the Western culture.

Lastly, I discussed the way the audience discussed Candy and Paytas. I argued

that this discourse worked to shame or discipline them into thinness. Disciplining rhetoric

functions to erase identities which presented as anything other than thin. Through the

audience’s language of shaming, disciplining, and essentializing, I established a pattern

which positioned the audience either intentionally or unintentionally reinscribe

hegemonic thinness and preserving a fat-phobic culture.

Thus, all three of these sections truly highlight the enduring and problematic

ideology of thinness in U.S. culture. These patterns represent how the public reacts to

bodies on display, and that feminist cultural research written at least 20 years ago still

rings true. Thinness is still privileged, women are still internalizing how to reach and

maintain such standards, and people are still instinctually disciplining those who break

the rules. Though there is evidence of a longing to rebel against thinness culture, this

desire is quickly erased by the overriding instinct to conform. It seems that the ideology

of thin is deeper and more rooted than ever. This notion leaves me with feelings of

despair because as I do this research, I see glimpses of change in representations of

women who have defiant bodies. I see these glimpses in fat women playing lead roles

who are written as happy and without some underlying psychological issue. However,

moment of satisfaction is overshadowed with the fear that these instances are not

occurring often and quickly enough to dismantle the prevailing and unrelenting power of

thin.

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Chapter 5

Magical Eating

Contextualizing My Own Experience with Thinness Culture

The first time, that I can recall, where I became really aware of my body was

when I was in the third or fourth grade and a family friend told me my breasts were

beginning to grow in. The second time I became aware of my body, or should I say

ashamed of my body, was in the fifth grade on summer vacation and my crush told me I

was a fat whale and I should lose weight. From then on, I never stopped feeling fat. It is

funny how memories work; I distinctly recall feeling giant, obese, crawling in my skin,

embarrassed of my waist and thighs—yet when I look back a photos of me from

kindergarten through my senior year of high school—I was actually quite thin.

In my freshman year of college (the first time, the time I dropped out), I embarked

on my long-term dysfunctional journey with food. Between the ages of 19 to 21 I

successfully starved myself to the malnourished and slender frame I desperately desired. I

remember feeling a sensation of achievement when I lay in bed at the end of the day and

said “good job you didn’t eat today,” or refusing food from family members who pushed

baked goods at me because they were worried about my weight.

Of course this success was short lived. I moved in with my then boyfriend at 22

and rapidly gained weight from binge drinking and binge eating. During these years, I

felt, were my monster years—but even looking back at those photos I was probably just

15 pounds overweight. The continuous hatred for my body was exacerbated by innocent

exhortations to lose weight from my then-boyfriend and suggestions from his brother that

he should date “skinnier chicks.”

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When eventually his drinking turned into sleeping with other women, landing in

jail for a DUI, and verbally and physically abusing me, I finally gained the courage to

leave him. I made serious attempts at living a healthier life. I rode my bike to work,

joined a gym, and ate organic (mostly, anyway). I wanted to lose weight in a healthy way.

And I did lose some weight. However, I couldn’t shake my urge to binge. I quickly found

myself in a cycle of starvation followed by binging followed by attempts to eat healthy,

before the cycle would repeat all over again. This led to very little weight-loss, but more

importantly it led to an even deeper resentment toward my body—something I

desperately needed to control but for which control was always out of reach.

My family has a weird relationship with food. My maternal side is mostly women,

and I remember always comparing my body to that of my aunts and cousins. My

grandmother instilled a neurotic need to be concerned with one’s weight; at 78 years old

she is still dieting and by societal standards is still overweight. My childhood is over-

ridden by my grandmother’s frequent conversations about her body. Every gathering was

riddled with non-fat, low-calorie snacks. This model trickled down to some family

members, but seemed to escape my mother. To me she always had an easy relationship

with food and could always stay slender—this is something I always envied.

However, my father’s side was instilled with the immigrant mentality of eating

until you literally are sick—this is a sign of happiness and success. I see my relationship

with my father also affecting my association with food in other ways. My parents

divorced when I was seven, and my father would disappear for months or even years at a

time. But my distinct memories of him always involved food. He loved to cook; cooking

was when he was at his happiest. My favorite times with him were when he was cooking

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in the kitchen. He’d blast music and start belting out lyrics as he stirred pots filled with

sauces and sautéed pungent vegetables and salty meats. The kitchen would suddenly turn

in a magical place, safe again from the battlegrounds of screaming matches, flying beer

bottles, and acrobatic furniture just the night before. My father would often let me help

cook. I have a crystal-clear memory of him teaching me how to make a rue at 6 years old.

I felt such accomplishment as I turned the silky powder of the flour into a thick, brown

sauce—just the right texture.

As the years went on, and I saw my father less and less, I’d relish the times we

met at a restaurant—usually a greasy spoon type place—and we’d sit and eat and enjoy

each other until the next time—when I would be much older and he’d look at me sadly

knowing this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. It was in these years I learned what

wanting meant. I learned what the pain of longing felt like. I remember sitting by the

window for what felt like hours imagining my heartache was enough to will my father to

the door. I’d cry myself to sleep when I finally understood he was gone.

It is probably safe to say this has something to do with my need to binge—I turn

to food to fill the void. But as I discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4 this is certainly not the

only factor. I also have memories of my grandmother feeding me one small bowl of

cereal for breakfast while my brother received heaping portions of French toast, eggs and

bacon. I remember learning what bulimia was from watching Tweety Goldberg in “All I

Wanna Do” and being excited about the idea of having an “easy” answer to binging. I

still can feel the sting of my aunt commenting to my father when I was 15 about my large

appetite, as if this was as dangerous as catching me smoking cigarettes (which I also did).

I’ll never forget comparing my body to every girlfriend who was thinner than me—

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measuring the length of their seat belts to mine. I remember the shame of sharing clothes

with my best friend in the sixth grade and seeing my pants hang loose and baggy around

her waist and thighs—I screamed at her to take them off. I knew I was supposed to be

skinnier, as thin as Britney Spears, Kiera Knightly, Kirsten Dunst (my thinsopration in

the early 2000s). This unfortunately was also when low-rider jeans were in-vogue and

created muffin-tops for anyone who wasn’t a size 0 to 2.

I hated myself every time I ate. I wanted so badly to not need food, to be immune

to any craving, to live on water and air. But I also loved food. I loved the exactingness of

preparing meals, all the sounds and smells, I loved the texture, the temperature, the way

food worked to bring people together, satisfy my hunger. I didn’t actually start purging

until my mid-twenties and it took me a while to get it down right. I found tips and tricks

on online forums to make the process easier, less detectable, and not taste as disgusting. I

found myself drawn to the high of the purge as much as the binge. A ritual began to take

place. I’d shop for my favorite-purge friendly foods, and with each placement in the cart

of macaroni and cheese, Ben and Jerry’s red velvet cheesecake ice cream, and four-packs

of hot pockets I could feel my mouth water and a rush of adrenaline pulsate through

me—this was going to be a great binge.

And it never was. Every binge is shrouded by the need to eat as much as you can

as fast as you can—the food is not enjoyed much as it is devoured. When it comes time to

purge, I faithfully take this time to degrade myself with the guilt-driven narrative of my

selfishness for wasting food, my disgustingness for overindulging, and how pathetic this

all is anyways—making myself throw up. Then I always finished each purge with the

thought that if my baby cousin ever did this to herself I would be heartbroken. It is not

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until the very end, when there is no more solid food to throw up and I watch everything

being flushed away, when my stomach is completely empty and my body is tired and

worn out that I feel a rush of pleasure, success, achievement.

I am a woman who has achieved many things denoting success in life, mostly

with very little help. I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I’ve worked high-pressured

jobs and did well, I was accepted into a Master’s program and a Doctorate program, I

married a wonderful man who is the love of my life. Yet, being thin remains my deepest,

most secret desire of them all. I too have been duped into believing that thinness is

happiness.

So when I discovered Mukbang I immediately became captivated with not only

the content of the shows, but also the potential functionality I observed within these texts.

I was drawn to these texts as rebellious acts, reveling in the challenges to the norms of

thinness; but as I continued to watch, I began to question my own intentionality in my

interpretations. I wondered if I was using these texts to fulfill my own fantasies of

enjoying food without enduring all the pain, guilt, and fear that comes with indulgence. I

confronted my own latent desires to be these stars. This was my first recognition of

magical eating. As I questioned my own approach to these videos, I thought, “I cannot be

the only one doing this.” It became my goal to understand the complexity that these

shows drew out of me, girding myself to seriously grapple with my own relationship with

eating, food, and norms of thinness.

In this chapter, I explain the functionality and implications of my concept of

magical eating. This concept is born out of the dissonance between Westernized

normative standards of women’s bodies juxtaposed with an eating culture that represents

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women eating freely and without obvious consequence. In magical eating, audiences of

such media as Mukbang experience a consequence-free indulgence and liberated

engagement with food through their consumption of eating entertainment. Thus, the

audience is using the texts to fulfill their own fantasies of eating and embodiment—

consuming texts rather than food to fulfill eating desires.

Through my work in chapters 3 and 4, I am able to make connections in this

chapter to demonstrate how audiences engage in magical eating with these texts. Viewers

exhibit this behavior because of the deep struggle with both eating and corporeality,

displayed in both how they reacted to the stars, and in their own disclosure of their

relationships with these structures. Audiences use Mukbang videos to try and reconcile

their own dissonance between the desire to liberate themselves from norms and the

instinctual need to conform. I argue that magical eating is a fantasy that audiences use to

cover subjective contradictions in relation to eating and corporeal culture.

Turning back to James, Handelman, and Taylor’s (2011) research on magical

thinking, which depicts women using faulty reasoning to gain agency over outside

phenomenon of which they have no control—specifically dieting logic—it is important to

remember the conundrum of magical thinking. That is, by using faulty logic, subjects are

actually furthering themselves from gaining any agency—and potentially causing more

harm to themselves.

A similar issue is evident in magical eating. Engaging in magical eating, which is

fulfilling a desire about eating through watching others eat, brings out two points of

contention. First, magical eating reinscribes problematic norms, such as thinness and

gendered eating expectations. Second, the viewer is not actually gaining any agency in

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their own struggles with these norms. This is why I argue that magical eating functions to

cover contradictions in eating and corporeality norms that keep subjects oppressed.

When looking more closely at how magical eating reinforces harmful ideologies

such as gendered eating norms and thinness culture, I also observe that engaging in

magical eating requires Othering what these texts represent in order to fantasize about

becoming these stars. As hooks (1992) explains, the dominant culture figuratively

consumes black bodies through their desire to experience both their perceived danger and

exoticisms positioned in their difference. That is, because the dominant culture others

black bodies, those who are within the dominant culture want to conquer black bodies

with the goal to have an experience. When black bodies are othered by the dominant

culture a representation of exoticisms and danger is placed on them, and it is this very

experience that the dominant culture wants to consume. I posit a similar argument using

Bordo’s (2003) concept of the ideal woman. The ideal woman who can eat freely without

consequence, or has a causal relationship with food, becomes eroticized by women who

desire to become her because they are unable to achieve this themselves (Bordo, 2003).

Mukbang manufactures the ideal woman. The thin-bodied stars seem to remain

unmarked despite their continuous engagement in the taboo of transgressive eating. Not

only does this representation of the stars make them exotic to audiences, but they also

embody a sense of danger in their difference—their free and easy attitude when going

against normative expectations of gendered eating habits.

This is both the promise and danger of magical eating. Mukbang texts generate a

representation of a woman who despite engaging in rebellious acts of transgressive

eating, still continues to reinscribe harmful tropes of thinness. Magical eating only works

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with thin-bodied stars because the functionality of the fantasy is to eat without

consequence, or to overindulge without getting fat.

Returning to Cloud (2010), audiences are thus unable to traverse the fantasy and

recognize their contradictions. Rather than working through what is foreclosed by their

fantasies, it is crucial to remember that magical thinking only works to keep audiences

stuck within their fantasies. Magical eating cloaks their contradictions, so audiences do

not have to become aware of what is outside of this fantasy.

Magical Eating

Magical eating functions to fulfill fantasies of engaging in carefree indulgent

eating while escaping any consequences. This is carried out through the action of

watching thin-bodied women binge eat in online spaces. The clearest examples of this are

the patterns I discussed in Chapter 3 where audience members disclosed watching

Mukbangs and feeling a sensation of binge eating themselves. Watching people eat in

ways that transgress social norms had the magical ability to make them feel full and

satisfied.

For instance, viewer Rishika Sharma commented, “It’s weird but watching her eat

just made me not want to eat. I was hungry before I started watching this video but now

I’m full and I haven’t even eaten .” Sharma depicts a phenomenon of actually feeling

full after watching one of Paytas’ videos. It also seemed popular to use the stars as a

proxy for eating. Audience member Chelsea Baker wrote, “ … let them get fat FOR you.

Drink some cold water your growling stomach means it's applauding you;” Hattie made a

similar comment, “Yeah exactly, I’m doing a 10 day fast so Trisha eats for me in the

meantime .” These examples embody the truest form of magical eating: viewers are

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creating a type of reality where they are actually eating through the stars, or becoming the

stars (consuming the stars) to fulfill their fantasies of eating. Other circumstances depict

audiences using these texts to fulfill a desire of wishing they could eat like the stars—or

eat like the stars and have their thin bodies. This is demonstrated in comments such as

viewers like Rashellexo who wrote, “I watch these videos because I know I physically

can’t afford to eat like this because I gain weight too easily,” Altina Ajeti who wrote,

“Can anyone explain [to] me how she eats so much ?? And why she does not get fat, this

girl is fabulous,” and Lissette Alveraz’s comment, “Who else wishes that they can eat

like this without regretting it.” In this discourse viewers are not overtly using the videos

to create a type of reality, but rather are fantasizing about having the same experience or

relationship the stars have with eating.

Just like magical thinking, magical eating functions in faulty reasoning. For some

of the viewers they are using this form of fantasizing to justify not eating. This is

obviously a dangerous and harmful use of these texts. However, as Bordo (2003) notes,

we cannot blame the faulty logic so much on the individual as the culture itself. Thinness

is a structural component in the architecture of power systems in U.S. culture, especially

for women. Despite the harm of idealizing thinness, narratives continue to circulate

telling people that thinness equals happiness, success, and achievement. More pointedly,

the construction of thinness places the value of women in their bodily presentation. By

being told that their worth is in the temperance and control of their bodies, it forces

women in a harmful cycle of consistently striving for something that is impermanent and

fundamentally unattainable. Ultimately it is not the women, but this culture that needs to

shift (Bordo, 2003).

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When observing other ways magical eating is used in these texts, the fantasy lies

in the desire to experience what it would be like to eat like the stars. This pattern

demonstrates audience members who are using these videos to evade their own fears of

eating because of the consequences they may face. Thus the danger in using magical

eating is reinforcing internalized ideologies of thinness and relinquishing their own

agency to transform their identities with eating and body politics.

Consequently, these patterns also depict my interpretation of Bordo’s (2003) ideal

woman in concert with hooks (1992) Eating the Other. The audience is consuming what

the texts represent which is something they desire to become or experience—the literal

feeling of eating, the act of overindulging in food, eating freely and remaining thin. These

audience members want to inhabit the representations the stars are depicting—women

who can eat without any repercussions. To me this feels alarmingly scary and sad, as it

not only functions as a way for thinness culture to thrive in unintentional ways, but it also

paints a picture of how deeply people are struggling under the constraints of eating norms

in this society.

Thus, magical eating presents with multiple facets of problematic dimensions.

Audiences using magical eating to fulfil fantasies of eating are only furthering themselves

from the opportunity to scrutinize their own struggles with hegemonic eating and body

norms. They also are implicitly perpetuating these narratives onto themselves back out

into the communities.

However, I also argue that magical eating works in a larger function than just for

using these texts to fulfill fantasies of eating, but also as an outlet to express their

interpretations of the very norms which bind them. Earlier I established how audiences

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also used these texts to discipline the stars’ transgressive behaviors including messy

eating, noisy eating, and stars who binge ate and had bodies that defied ideal types. These

audiences were drawn to these fringe texts, yet found themselves needing to reinforce the

hegemonic ideologies of eating and the body. Ultimately, what magical eating reveals is

that even the socially defiant eating in Mukbang serves to reinforce norms of thinness.

Here, these patterns work to show the contradiction of the larger audience—the

public. When women are transgressively eating on display, magical eating works to keep

both perspectives static in their points of views. Both sides of the continuum—I want to

eat like you, but you can’t eat like that, I want to look like you, but you must have an

eating disorder—are all using these texts to reconcile their own struggles with the current

social norms of eating and corporeality, yet because these contradictions are functioning

though fantasies, viewers are unable to transform or resolve any of these issues.

In my final thoughts on magical eating, I turn to the work of Hanchey (2018)

using Butler’s (2004) explanation of how fantasies reinforce harmful power structures,

but simultaneously allows people to gain agency within them. This is an important way to

approach the functionality of fantasies. That is, because fantasies work both to reinscribe

harmful and oppressive narratives, they also perform as a sense of self-protection from

seeing their own complicity in reinforcing harmful structures. However, this action also

allows space for agency to be gained. Hanchey (2018) writes, [t]hrough fantasy, a subject

can narrate her past experiences in a way that produces meaning, and thereby defend

herself from recognizing her own structural inability to ever be coherent as a Self. (p.

147). Narratives of thinness culture continuously work to keep women in a place of

constantly attempting to achieve a goal that is tempering and therefore unattainable

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because women’s values are placed on a presentation of the body. The unattainable

design of this construct takes agency away from women causing a need to turn to

fantasies to gain back a sense of agency. The fantasy of magical eating further reinscribes

harmful belief systems onto the people using the fantasy and back into the dominant

narrative, but because there is not foreseeable future of dismantling of this structure,

magical eating is also the only way people can undermine and gain a sense of agency

within this system.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

It would be an understatement to say this project was hard to write. I saw so much

of myself reflected in this research. It became critical, not just best practice, to use self-

reflexivity in this work. This of course, was necessary in my interpretation of the

audience’s comments, but also in how I wrote about the stars. I noticed this most

pointedly in both of my opening sections for chapter 2 and 3, but this felt most urgent for

Chapter 4. I knew I wanted to write about Candy, but I found myself emotionally

invested in how I portrayed her. I was so afraid of reinscribing thinness, of using

language that would further erase fat identity—that I was literally paralyzed in this

process.

During the course of my work, I kept thinking about LeBesco’s (2004) research in

“Revolting Bodies.” In her quest to transform through language the fat identity from one

that is invisible to visible, she writes, “I am aware, however, that the process of gaining

the upper hand, or redefining fat identity as palatable, will in turn produce its own subset

of unthinkable, unlivable, and abject bodies” (LeBesco, 2004, p. 5). In this passage

LeBesco is holding herself accountable for very real possibility of while working to

dismantle unequal power structures, she could unintentionally reinscribe their power.

However, I also learned from this project that I cannot be stagnate out of fear.

There needs to be room for messiness in order to get the work done. There were so many

times that I found myself unsure of the language I used, my interpretations, the

conclusions I drew. This does not absolve my need for critical scrutiny over my decisions

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and my research, but I feel obligated to disclose my biggest point of struggle with this

project.

Additionally, this project is incomplete, it is just the foundation to what I want to

achieve with my work. That is because this research only functions as a means to expose

problematic issues, rather than giving direction on how to transform those issues. Yet, it

is always important to have a sturdy jumping off point.

Hence, I urge future projects to take this groundwork and develop research which

moves toward transformation. The success of my work lays in pointing to the very real

and very damaging underpinning evolving through food entertainment, especially for

women. Yet, this project lacks a direction in how to transform the problematic issues I

underscore.

For this I suggest and again turn to LeBesco’s (2004) insights as she makes an

appeal to her readers using the work of Grosz (1995) and Butler (1997). It is not enough

to demand a change of beauty standards that only works to keep the structure intact

(Grosz, 1995). There needs to be a radicalization of what fat politics means, and “to force

it into a demanding resignification,” (Butler, 1997, p. 5; LeBesco, 2004, p. 5). By doing

this, there is more space to redefine the current valuation of the body into an inclusive

valuation of all bodies. LeBesco (2004) surmises that this society is not yet capable of

creating this type of change without reinscribing exclusion and abjection—I find this still

to be true. Our society is not there, but I also am afraid we are simply running out of time.

Just speaking in terms of the United States of America, as much as this country has

pushed, fought for, and demanded change for equality, liberation of bodies, and

inclusiveness in ideology, we have also seen violent and aggressive strides to undermine

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and even erase this progress—working to create deep oceans of space between the people

of this country and transformation in thought and spirit.

However, I see the promise in continuing to work. In this project, I urge readers to

focus on the politics of bodies and food, or more specifically eating, and how these

politics circulate in the ever-evolving and rapidly morphing world of online spaces. My

concept of magical eating allows for a means to understand the effects of food

entertainment, especially for women on social media platforms.

As stated in earlier chapters, the politics of women eating bears a historical

lineage instilled over generations (Bordo, 2003; Dijkstra, 1986). More pointedly, the

formation of these enduring constraints functions with the purpose to cut at women’s

power. These structures are not arbitrary, nor ambivalent; they were born out of the fear

of women becoming too independent, too radicalized, and thus were functioned to keep

women docile (Foucault, 1995). Bordo’s (2003) research on the eating culture ideologies

of the nineteenth century Victorian era explains that these ideologies were formed from

men striving to move upward in socio-economic status, but were unable to because of the

structuring of power during that time. So, in lieu of actually experience upward mobility,

this group of men wanted their wives to have “fragile frames and lack of appetite” to

mimic the aristocratic women. This presentation in body depicted a social liberation from

the “laboring striving economic body,” and “ … possessing a wife [with an] ethereal

body became a sort of fashion statement of his aristocratic tastes,” (Bordo, 2003, p. 117).

Accordingly, my research shows that not much has changed in how we perceive

the power of thinness—a hegemonic standard that serves to keep both men and women,

though historically women, oppressed. In my research I demonstrated the prevalence of

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eating disorders and using Mukbangs shows to literally curb hunger. Audiences turned to

the thin-bodied stars to imagine the sensation of eating, and more importantly the

sensation of eating without gaining weight. This was done repetitively, and encouraged

by viewers as a successful way to avoid cravings. Intertwined with thinness culture is the

construct of gendered eating norms. These rules also have not progressed much

throughout history. Chapter 3 demonstrates why these norms are so problematic. Though

they may seem harmless, they actually function to reinscribe thinness culture for women.

The expectations of women eating daintily, cautiously, and controlled is connected to

women appearing daintily, fragile, and small—that being the standard for femininity.

How my concept of magical eating contributes to these conversations is by

looking closely at the functionality of people’s fantasies of eating and embodiment, and

the contradictions in their fantasies. In this work I established that there is strong

attraction from audiences to watching women eat--and particularly, watching the binge

eat. I believe that in part this is a rebellious act. However, when scrutinized, my research

shows, the draw to these texts is really about people’s desires to escape their own internal

contradictions over standards of eating and embodiment. However, magical eating is but

a fantasy, not a way of traversing it.

Thus, using magical eating as a way to engage with food and desires of eating

keeps people immobile. Although there is clear strife that people face when met with

expectations of thinness in this culture, there is also a danger of using Mukbang shows to

deal with it. Mukbang is escapist; it posits some women as exceptions that can be

attained, a way out while maintaining the status quo. That is, people use these shows to

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fulfill fantasies of eating without any consequences, perpetuating a situation where

nothing has to change and harmful narratives of thinness can continue to be reinforced.

Additionally, my research also examined why magical eating works more easily

with thin actors. That is because the audience’s fantasy is not only about overindulging

with food but also about escaping the perceived consequences of eating. I believe that fat-

phobia is instilled in this logic. Much of my research exposed the ways audiences

demonstrated disdain for the nonconforming bodies in these texts.

Specifically, this can be seen in how Paytas and Candy were treated in

comparison to the other stars. In both instances with eating norms and corporeality, my

work demonstrated clear double-standards in how the thin-bodied stars were praised for

their eating habits or their body presentation, while Candy, and at times Paytas, were

disciplined or criticized. There were two cases that I see capturing my argument. The first

is when Wang was told to not worry about her breathing during filming, and Candy was

repetitively ridiculed for her breathing during her videos. The second is how audiences

categorized Candy’s binge eating as basically criminal despite her YouTube channel

being specifically for Mukbang, and then how none of the Mukbang stars are chastised

for their binge eating. This accusation is undoubtedly only directly at Candy due to the

presentation of her body.

Another alarming observation I made is the disparity in the language that is used

toward the thin-bodied stars as opposed to the stars with larger bodies. I argue, in Chapter

4, that ideologies of thinness culture allow people to feel a deep sense of justification

when erasing fatness through disciplining language. Most comments made toward Candy

were targeted at how urgently she needs to change, or rather disappear, her body. There

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was very little capacity for people to see past this type of defiance, and more pointedly

bodily defiance caused outrage. On the other hand, other forms of rebellion, such as thin-

body stars engaging in transgressive eating, excited audiences.

However, one point of contention I found myself struggling with were the

dimensions of health in these texts. Though in this project I take a clear stance on the

danger of using rhetoric which perpetuates tropes of thin-bodies equaling healthy bodies,

and positions fat bodies as inherently both physically and mentally unhealthy, I still

struggle with that idea that health issues should not be addressed at all. For instances,

Paytas opening discusses her battle with food addiction. Is watching Paytas binge eat

implicitly participating in her self-harm? Are audiences spectacularizing her pain? Or is

this acceptable because Paytas is choosing to put herself on display, making this

interaction empowering rather than exploitive?

This same dilemma could be position for Candy, though to my knowledge she had

never disclosed having a harmful relationship with food. I am aware that making these

assumptions because of her bodily size reinscribes harmful stereotypes of fat identity.

Yet, I don’t feel comfortable ignoring the danger of abusing food.

For me, I think this spotlights one of the fundamental problems with our cultural

understanding of “health.” It has been used against the public in order to commoditize

thinness (LeBesco & Braziel, 2001), so we are unable to separate holistic health from the

bodily size. In addition, because the language of fat identity has been structured to

oppress, it feels impossible to have productive conversation about fat bodies without

reinforcing oppressive ideologies. This issue then urges a need to rewrite the history of

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fat bodies and “to force it into a demanding resignification,” (Butler, 1997; p. 5; LeBesco,

2004; p. 5)

I do not have a definitive stance on if I believe Mukbang videos are good or bad,

if they are harmful, or if they are working to radicalize the trope of gendered eating

norms. That is because on their own, I see them as ambivalent videos that depict women

eating. It is of course our interpretations interwoven with all the historicity, all the

politics, all the connotation of what it means to watch women eat that makes these videos

problematic.

I still believe that Mukbang is radical in nature because women transgressively

eating in public inherently is a radical act—and for this I support what Mukbang does for

that narrative. Yet, while any form of media is open to numerous interpretations, that

same form of media serves as a reflection of society’s pulse.

At the same token, it deeply troubles me that a video displaying a woman eating is

something that I see as “radical.” Women eating should be banal. Women with defiant

bodies who are also transgressively eating should not be treated as if they are engaging in

criminal acts. And in a multitude of ways this narrative feels unmovable, something that

will simply continue to be just the way things are.

For me, this project is not only about exposing the insidious and dangerous

influence of hegemonic thinness culture in online spaces—though that is at the heart of

this thesis. However, during the time of my research thirteen states moved to restrict anti-

abortion laws with the purpose of having them challenged at the Supreme Court in the

hopes of overturning Roe v. Wade (Merelli & Campoy, 2019). As of 2018 there were 201

reported and documented cases of sexual harassment exposed by the #MeToo movement

112

(Carlsen, Salam, Miller, Lu, Ngu, Patel & Wichter, 2018). To me this research points to

the larger goal of aiding in the fight of women taking back their bodies. There is no more

time to wait, be patient, or be polite. It is 2019 and our bodies are still perceived as

something others may lay claim to. The dominant narrative of U.S. culture is that

women’s bodies are objects that should continue to be governed by patriarchal

ideologies. Furthermore, the dominant narrative in U.S. culture is that women should not

be allowed to have control over their bodies. This is demonstrated in my citation above

noting the recent steps by government to make abortion illegal, and this is demonstrated

in thinness culture. The salient messages in thinness culture is that women’s bodies must

adhere to strict expectations in order to maintain the patriarchal construct of femininity.

Finally, I hope this work finds young girls, teenagers, and women who avoid

mirrors, go hungry all day, eat politely in public only to return home famished and

secretly indulge in front of an open refrigerator (Geis, 1998), girls who hate their bodies,

women who hate themselves after they slip—I hope this works finds them and lets them

know the following: There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and there is everything

wrong with the culture that tells you that this is the secret to happiness.

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