Eating as a transgression: Multisensorial performativity in the carnal videos of mukbang (eating shows)

Abstract

In analysing the issues of body and affect involved in the contemporary online culture including mukbang (eating shows), I propose the term ‘carnal videos’. Carnal videos are a constitutive part of the society of control in the digital environment. Through the operation of multisensorial significations in carnal videos, human networked affect is excessively expressed and experienced, along with its politico-ethical potentials of perseverance and differentiation. By exploiting and colonizing such potentials, however, human networked affect contributes to the platform companies’ ever growing capitalist drives towards the maximization of economic values. Several conflicting layers of transgression operate within mukbang. One layer involves transgression as an affective force of resistance and pleasure, the other layer involves transgression, or the control of transgression, in terms of accelerating and capturing human faculties as biolabour. These two contrasting aspects of transgression are characterized by the ambiguity, complexity, and dynamics embedded in the practice of carnal videos.