Regarding the Mains of Others.

Abstract

The platformed logics of social media favor unique and spectacular content and thus encourage the production and display of unique and spectacular bodies. In the realm of social media, attractive and unattainable bodies have emerged as the norm rather than the exception. This article, however, sets out to investigate how a specific type of spectacular body comes into being by turning to the phenomenon of mukbangs. We explore how excessive food consumption, audiovisual aesthetics, media technologies, and platform logics all become constituents of the spectacular body’s performance. Our analysis will focus on two tendencies: First, the platformed body is distributed and comes into being through its entanglement with nonhuman agents, such as the microphone enhancing eating sounds, the camera and image composition displaying the food’s excessive quantity, and the food’s entanglement with the body through a spectacle of excess. Second, mukbang videos cater to a spectating body ready to be affected by the exceptional body capable of extreme eating and how this bodily performance transcends the medium, and the videos produce disgust or cravings.