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

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.