903435

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ICS0010.1177/1367877920903435International Journal of Cultural StudiesKim

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2021, Vol. 24(1) 107­–122
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877920903435
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920903435
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Special Issue: Transgression in contemporary media culture

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

Yeran Kim
Kwangwoon University, Republic of Korea

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.

Keywords
affect, biolabour, carnal videos, mukbang, sense, transgression

It has become a familiar daily phenomenon on the internet for people to share their
intimate emotions and thoughts through mediation by more or less influential perso-
nae, who are often called ‘micro-celebrities’. Given that their popularity is based not
on who they are but what they do, the nature of micro-celebrities’ attraction lies in their

Corresponding author:
Yeran Kim, Kwangwoon University, 725 Hanwool Building, Seoul, 01897, Korea, Republic of.
Email: yeran@kw.ac.kr
108 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

performative articulation of ambiguity, such as the frivolous and subversive, strange

and familiar, spectacular and vulnerable, and authentic and strategic. Each perfor-
mance may be variously characterized in specific subcultural contexts, from doing
daily chores like unboxing and decluttering, to the practice of (trans)-genderism and
sexuality. What is significant is that micro-celebrities (as a collective) actively explore
and exert their sense and affect to build up and strengthen their fame (Abidin, 2018;
Marwick, 2013; Raun, 2018; Senft, 2013).
One of the most popular genres of micro-celebrities in Korea (especially among
young people) involves mukbang, which in Korean means ‘eating shows’. Mukbang is
usually produced in a simple format, in which a man or woman (with some exceptions of
couples appearing together) is seen having a meal and talking. The point I am interested
in making about mukbang, particularly with respect to the excessive food consumption
of mukbang on the internet, is concerned with its transgressive nature. Two contesta-
tional aspects of transgression are underlined: (1) the cultural practices of transgression
over the normative boundary drawn between the normal and abnormal, the banal and the
novel, and the docile and the defiant; and (2) the post-capitalist force of capturing the
popular practices of transgression on a networked platform.
In tackling questions about the cultural expression of sense and affect, I propose the
concept of ‘carnal videos’, with mukbang being one example of its particular forms. I
will first identify the ambivalence, excessiveness, and complexity embedded within
mukbang operating on social networking platforms. This is followed, respectively, by a
cultural account of the social affect inherent in mukbang and a political-economic
account of the capitalist forces controlling mukbang practices. As discussed in more
detail later, for a critical reading of mukbang culture, I adopt affect theories, focusing on
the question of which affective flows are generated and circulated in mukbang. This is
because I suggest that the peculiar popularity of mukbang implies social affect in the
current neoliberal society of Korea, in which ‘weak’ emotions such as anxiety and pre-
cariousness are transvalued to the ‘powerful’ affect of disgust (Ngai, 2005).
Based on an analysis of mukbang in terms of its cultural, political, and economic
aspects, I will finally account for a conflicting and contestational reality of carnal videos,
in which abnormality is encouraged through transgressing social norms that define what
a ‘good’ citizen is, and simultaneously where actors’ transgressive actions are captured
and subsumed as elements of biolabour in ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2010,
2015). For an empirical analysis, I have conducted a multimodal analysis of the two most
prominent male mukbang channels, performed by Benz and Chulgu. In addition, I have
also analysed academic and media discourses on mukbang, attempting to locate or dislo-
cate mukbang in relation to the specific politico-cultural norms and practices of the dig-
ital-mediated body in Korean society. Before going deep into the mukbang landscape,
the term ‘carnal videos’ will be elaborated in the following section.

Carnal videos and mukbang

Even at a single glance, carnal videos are obviously distinct from the common-sense
perspective of self-expressive culture that is widespread within the range of user-gener-
ated contents on the web. The latter is usually described as people on the internet wanting
Kim 109

to present themselves in a narcissistic form as a part of ‘self-branding’ within the social

atmosphere of exhibitionism (Senft, 2013). In contrast, carnal videos, including exces-
sive eating in mukbang, tend to actively and aggressively manifest themselves in forms
that could be described as lowbrow, inappropriate, and even vulgar if evaluated from the
perspective of social conventions.
In elaborating the term ‘carnal video’, Sobchack’s (2004) notion of the ‘carnal’ may
be pertinent. She emphasizes the experience and implications of the ‘lived body’, as this
enables embodied meanings of ourselves and others to be ‘fleshed out’ as a ‘sentient,
sensual and sensible ensemble of materialized capabilities and agency’ (Sobchack, 2004:
1, 2). Such ‘materialistic’ ways of experience and expression are both aesthetic and ethi-
cal in the sense that they embody, accompany, and animate our ‘sensibility and responsi-
bility’ in relation to ourselves, others, and the world (Sobchack, 2004).
One may more deeply understand the aesthetic and ethical potentials of the carnal in
terms of affect and its expression in art. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 164),
art is a ‘bloc of sensations’ in that sensations are a ‘compound of percepts and affects’.
Affects involve one’s desire, will, and power to ‘be affected and affect’; hence, it is
already and will always be collective and social (Deleuze, 1988). The effect of affect is
to create differences (Deleuze, 1983) and is in an incessant and immanent process of dif-
ferentiating; thus, one is not a being but a becoming. The becoming self is a creator who
is able to generate, transform, and diversify his/her own life (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:
171) by means of producing different ways of experiencing and expressing one’s affect.
Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 178) notion of ‘Fleshism’, which refers
to the ‘pious and sensual’ expression of excess, dynamics, and rupturing of the flesh as a
bloc of sensations in the arts, carnal videos are a prominent example of Fleshism in the
contemporary digital media ecology. This is because human emotion, affect, cognition,
knowledge, corporeality, and virtually every part of human subjectivity is inexorably
performed, connected, and expressed within the virtual space of digital networks.
Significantly, however, carnal videos today hardly operate freely; rather, they are cap-
tured thoroughly by the algorithmic power of digital platforms. Moreover, these videos
are widely and deeply intertwined with numerous networks consisting of grand scales of
surveillance operated among anonymous people (Scholz, 2012; Zuboff, 2019). Hence,
carnal videos are at the core of the ‘society of control’, in which a seemingly free, auton-
omous, and mobile subject is ‘modulated’ by ‘corporate’ powers (Deleuze, 1997).
Deleuze (1997) highlights that controls are not disciplinary or repressive, but instead a
‘spirit’ encouraging the subject to actively become engaged and pursue the maximization
of profits in the post-capitalist society. Carnal videos are a constitutive part of the society
of control in the digital environment. Through the operation of multisensorial significa-
tions in carnal videos, human networked affect is excessively expressed and experienced
along with its politico-ethical potentials of perseverance and differentiation. By exploit-
ing and colonizing such potentials, however, human networked affect contributes to the
platform companies’ ever growing capitalist drives towards the maximization of eco-
nomic values.
In characterizing mukbang from the perspective of carnal videos, the universal activ-
ity of eating for a living creature to survive is transformed into the digital mediation of
the carnal. The reason why eating is so exceptionally popular among diverse sorts of
110 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

carnal video genres may be that eating is a generalized topic, which almost all kinds of
people can easily access and watch in everyday life, regardless of their age or gender.
People can watch such videos without infringing on the social or cultural norms respon-
sible for that permit or prohibit the consumption of cultural materials.
For example, given that most prominent human drives are related to the realms of
sexuality and food (Probyn, 1999), another main genre of carnal videos involves sexual
subjects particularly focused on the ‘absolute disgusting’ in the ‘resonant’ experience of
the carnal (Paasonen, 2011). However, pornography is legally prohibited, and sexual
materials are strictly regulated in Korea; in addition, all kinds of explicitly sexual videos
are generally considered illegal, or at least illegitimate (see Laws and Regulations of
Korea Communications Standards Commission).1 This has resulted in the ‘secret’ use of
sexual contents, limited to ‘dark space’, while enabling mukbang to develop on the most
expansive scale in the carnal video market, where most people freely access and use such
videos for both economic and cultural reasons. Besides, stimulating extreme thrills and
fears is another genre of carnal videos that attract popular attention nowadays. These
materials, referred to as ‘Kwan-sim-jong-ja’ in the vernacular neologism (meaning atten-
tion-seeking species) and also produced and consumed mainly by men, show performers
engaging in abnormal activities, such as eating a live mouse or putting their own body
beneath a car to test their survival skills. Compared with the illegitimate and abnormal
types of subject matter comprising a broad scope of carnal videos, mukbang is relatively
free from legal or cultural constraints. Because eating is regarded as a purely natural,
habitual, and universal activity of all human beings, mukbang has easily become the
most generalized and popular cultural form, to the extent that it is referred to as the
‘whole-nation people’s content’ (Lee, 2015).

The multisensorial virtualization of eating

Eating is a social and political phenomenon, as well as natural one, as Pierre Bourdieu
includes dietary culture in the varied realms of cultural practices, conceptualizing it as
the ‘politics of taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984). Moreover, in contemporary capitalist society,
where the forces of economic crises resulting in austerity and the expansion of consumer
power are drastically intermingled and contradictory, the ‘foodscape’ is seen to have
been reformulated as a problem: this problem is inextricably related to other diverse
aspects of human life, such as work and leisure, and production and consumption, entan-
gled within the hierarchical classification system of economic, cultural, and social capi-
tals (Potter and Westall, 2016).
Mukbang may be understood as a cultural form dealing with the subject of eating by
means of producing, circulating, and consuming ‘multimodal’ (Jewitt, 2016) images of
eating in digital networks, composed of visual, sonic, gustatory, and linguistic signs and
sources. Mukbang is known to have started in Japan a few decades ago and remained a
meagre subcultural practice in Korea under Japanese influence, until 2009 when muk-
bang (in which one person performs eating) emerged on the internet and began to shape
a significant popular cultural scene in Korean society. To begin with, mukbang grew
through the experience of watching certain scenes in TV dramas and films, in which
some actors and actresses passionately ate and stimulated others’ appetites, so that
Kim 111

people began to realize that the experience of simply watching someone eat can be highly
entertaining.
In comparison, it was on the internet and SNS (social networking services) that ordi-
nary anonymous people ventured to voluntarily produce and present their own mukbang.
Video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Afreeca (a Korean video platform) have
become popular sites where internet users freely enjoy generating and consuming ver-
nacular styles of mukbang (An and Choi, 2016). It was not long before the vernacular
styles of mukbang on the internet began to gain great popularity, especially among young
people. This is partly because they (in contrast to famous and glamorous stars) fully and
freely explored the excessive aesthetics of frugality. In addition, another attraction of
mukbang for young audiences may be its deviant mood, nuanced against the middle-
class style of dietary culture made up of nuclear families with affluent, sophisticated
dishes and table settings, along with elegant eating mannerisms. Thus, mukbang on the
internet – the focal subject of this article – has a certain uniqueness in comparison with
the mukbang produced by established media organizations.
To begin with, in terms of the subject of production and performance of mukbang,
Broadcasting Jockeys (hereafter BJs) are ordinary individuals, at least at the initial
stage, although some of them may become micro-celebrities after gaining fame through
their mukbang success on the internet. They not only continuously eat, but also rest-
lessly chat with their audiences about the tastes of food, as well as about trivial life
stories and current affairs. As a result of their hard work in their performances of eagerly
eating and talking, certain forms of ‘virtual communities’ (An and Choi, 2016;
Rheingold, 1993) are formed on the ‘intimate screen’ (Creeber, 2011), based on a par-
ticular kind of mediated intimacy centred on each characteristic of mukbang BJs.
Indeed, internet mukbang has gradually shaped a new ‘trend’ of ‘social eating’ in Korea,
as reported on CNN (Cha, 2014).
In this digitally networked scene of social eating, a number of agents assemble, obvi-
ously including the BJs who perform mukbang. Restaurant owners who are engaged in
mukbang have the expectation of profits by sponsoring BJs and advertising their prod-
ucts in mukbang. Moreover, anonymous fans are willing to pay cyber-money in the form
of Star Balloons, called Byulpoongsun (which can be converted to real money) as well as
contribute to the increase in the number of viewers, recommendations and subscriptions,
and potential growth of the BJs’ advertisement profits simply by their act of watching
(Andrejevic, 2004). Diverse sorts of sponsorships, advertisements, and fan participation
are incorporated into the internet broadcasts of mukbang, leading such performances to
become a part of the ‘social network market’ (Banks and Humphreys, 2008).
Unsurprisingly, mukbang has exerted considerable cultural influence in animating gas-
tronomic consumerism, as BJs are always expected to play the role of giving audiences
fresh and rich information about restaurants and culinary trends.
The generic aesthetics of internet mukbang are also obviously differentiated from the
established mukbang with famous stars. The neologism of ‘foodporn’ (Maddison, 2015)
may be applied to mukbang on the internet, which is characterized by excessive and
immediate sensations around the act of eating. Both genres reveal the popular creation of
an alternative sense of sensual desire, thereby potentially challenging the social norms
that define the code governing the public expression of human senses and affects.
112 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

The generic aesthetics of mukbang in a vernacular form are encapsulated as the inten-
tional exploration and exploitation of vulgarity, multi-sensuality, and excess. The nature
of vulgarity in mukbang may be described as being wasteful, instinctual, rough, and soli-
tary, in contrast to being sophisticated, rare, moderate, elegant, and social in highbrow
culinary culture (Bourdieu, 1984). A few examples of the most popular menus for muk-
bang are hot chicken or baked chitterlings, all of which are cooked with highly spicy and
oily ingredients, to the extent that some people may have to go the hospital after eating
as a result of acute stomach cramps.
It is not in a single, but rather a multimodal expression of sensations that the vernacu-
lar aesthetics of mukbang are fully deployed. One feature of multisensorial mukbang is
expressed in the BJs’ performances. A BJ is supposed to chat endlessly with his or her
imagined audiences, who appear as constant instant text messages written with cyber-
nicknames and are shown live during the broadcasts of mukbang. Fans’ written messages
on the screen and the BJ’s voice chatting are intertextualized to form a virtual sphere of
communication. In addition, eating sounds are another essential element to successful
mukbang performances as multimodal content, given that an appropriate volume and
tone of eating sounds is regarded as important in making a certain BJ favoured by audi-
ences. The BJ’s gestures and voice are also exaggerated to draw attention. Thus, it is
often the case that the more hilarious, exceptional, and even abnormal the BJ’s perfor-
mance is, the more popular he/she becomes, and the greater the reward of cyber-money
from fans. Taste, sound, motility, and spoken and written language are exuberantly uti-
lized, making mukbang an orgy of multisensorial excessiveness.
Moreover, a loop of transmutation between desire and deficiency, and pleasure and
pain is inexorably pursued and fails in mukbang. This is partly so because the hilarious
mukbang party cannot continue forever. It is hardly surprisingly, from a certain moment,
that eating becomes painful for a BJ, who has already become stuffed with extremely
spicy and heavy foods. As time goes on, the pleasure of eating, which is obviously pre-
sent at the beginning of the show, turns into the masochistic pain of eating. This moment
creates a crisis for BJs, who must overcome these difficulties and hardships that are
voluntarily taken on and imposed upon the self in order to be finally approved as a muk-
bang champion.
Looking at the social and cultural aspects of interactions between BJs and audiences,
both the familiar and novel features of mukbang have attracted a great deal of attention
and debate from diverse perspectives. It is not surprising that the extraordinary degrees
of excess, hedonism, and perhaps repugnance that mukbang reveals are likely to infringe,
both, implicitly and explicitly, upon certain social, cultural, and political codes that
define and impose on society what is ‘proper’ in terms of bodily practices.2 For example,
the subgenres of mukbang vary, according to the BJ’s gender, mode of stylization regard-
ing dietary practices, types of food, and so on. In acknowledging the necessity to identify
the specificities of each genre, the current research focuses on male BJ mukbang shows.
This is because, as described below in the two prominent examples of male mukbang BJs
(Benz and Chulgu), the genre of male BJ mukbang is particularly popular in terms of
excessive food consumption, hyperbolic expressions of masculinity, and consequently,
huge success in economic profits, which consist of the very subject matter of the current
discussion.3
Kim 113

BJ Benz is quite famous among internet users, to the extent that he has appeared on a
BBC broadcasting programme as an ‘extreme eating Korean mukbang star’.4 While most
male mukbang BJs are featured with bulky bodies and tough gestures, BJ Benz is distinc-
tive for his handsome, slim, and strong appearance, along with his gentle and sophisti-
cated manner of speaking and behaving. However, despite his soft appearance, his
appetite is beyond the common imagination to the extent that in one episode he ate ten
hamburgers and had over 8 million hits recorded on YouTube.
BJ Benz’s fans perceive him as great because he manages to maintain his health while
eating huge amounts of food. For instance, one blogger, whose online pseudonym is
Peter,5 admires BJ Benz for his greatness in every capability as a mukbang BJ, such as
his appetite, manners, and bodily appearance. In fact, it is not uncommon for internet
users to exchange questions and answers about the secret methods that BJ Benz uses to
train and keep his body in shape. Not only his appearance, but also his social manners,
often described as soft, kind, and ‘so cool’, serve to help him attain great popularity and
therefore maintain his superiority. Thus, the beneficial merits enabling BJ Benz to attract
a greater level of respect from mukbang audiences, compared to many other mukbang
BJs, are closely related to his physical, mental, and social superiority. Here is an interest-
ing ambivalence found in the impression BJ Benz makes: on the one hand, he is able to
eat enormous amounts of food quickly and meticulously, like a carnivorous animal; on
the other hand, he has the superb ability to keep his body strong and handsome through
his firm will, as well as his capacity to manage and control himself like a highly soft and
sophisticated gentleman.
In opposition to BJ Benz is BJ Chulgu, who is (in)famous for his debauched, prodigal,
and vile image. He is often called the ‘president of Afreeca’, as he is very well known,
particularly among the younger generation of internet users. In contrast to BJ Benz, who
is characterized as being handsome and nice, BJ Chulgu has continuously generated seri-
ous debate and displeasure. This controversy over BJ Chulgu has been caused not only
among internet users but also the entire Korean society, to the extent that the government
has become involved in Chulgu’s behaviours with respect to ethics on the internet. This
is because BJ Chulgu’s mukbang is extraordinary, not merely in terms of the volume and
speed of his food consumption, but, more significantly, the abnormality, grotesqueness,
and violence shown in his performance. BJ Chulgu once ate one thousand live bugs in
one dish within three minutes; at another time, he poured strong soy sauce all over him-
self and all around his room, calling this event a ‘soy sauce shower’.
What has made BJ Chulgu a subject of more serious discussion concerns his aggres-
sive speech, which deviates from social and cultural norms. He has sometimes commit-
ted hate speech against women, social minorities, and political victims. It is not surprising
that his utterance, ‘Yeh-Sam-Il-Han’ (an acronym of “Women must be beaten once every
three days”), has raised a huge outcry of public criticism. He was even sanctioned nine
times by the Korea Communications Standards Commission for his hate speech; conse-
quently, he was prohibited from being broadcast on the internet for a certain period of
time. Nevertheless, his aggressive ambition to draw more and more attention by per-
forming abnormal behaviours has hardly attenuated.6
Due to his action of breaking social norms and the ensuing strong public criticism and
legal sanctions against him, the more eccentric and extreme mukbang he performs, the
114 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

more popular and adored BJ Chulgu becomes among his fans, and the more infamous he
becomes among his critics. He was selected as the most famous man on Afreeca, with a
series of impressive records, such as 1.2 million subscribers, 110,000 fans, 15,000 sup-
porters, 13,000 hours of broadcasting and an accumulated 4.4 billion page views in May
2016.7 His economic success is also exceptional; he once disclosed that he earns over
$200,000 per year. The descriptions of generic mukbang features imply certain charac-
teristics, not only of mukbang but also of carnal videos more broadly. At first glance, the
novelty of mukbang BJs lies in the potential disruption of normative images of a ‘good
citizen’, who is generally supposed to exhibit moderate and rational comportment under
the dominant social and cultural order defining what a desirable human being is.
However, and second, the subversive identification of BJs is also found to be subject to
the hegemonic conceptualization of being nice, cool, and desirable, which is explicitly
evidenced by fans admiring particular BJs for their superior ability in self-management,
competition, and heroic achievement. The meritocratic, or even bellicose celebration of
an excellent winner – whether in terms of the capability to eat voraciously or exceptional
techniques in maintaining a slim body – is a reflection of the ‘neoliberal culture’ (Gilbert,
2015). As Gilbert acutely points out, this neoliberal culture is pervasive in contemporary
citizens’ individualistic enthusiasm and their desire for competition, victory, and success.
The ambivalent nature of mukbang features cultural deviance and resistance on the one
hand; simultaneously, it features, docile adaption to the neoliberal ideology of individu-
alism, competition, and the obsession with self-management and success on the other.
These features of ambivalence are seen as consistently underlying the practice of muk-
bang in diverse aspects, as detailed later in this article.
Eventually, the articulation of a BJ’s desire and will to consume food and achieve
fame and money, along with fans’ desires and will to consume the BJ’s desires and will,
realize the logic of the ‘attention economy’ (Goldhaber, 1997) regarding mukbang, which
operates through audiences’ labour of ‘watching’ in the ‘platform society’ (Andrejevic,
2004; Fuchs, 2015; van Dijck et al., 2018). In other words, following Dean, the excessive
and endless circulation and expansion of these corporeal, affective, and social desires
(along with the will to eat) are interwoven to form a ‘circuit of drive’ of the carnal in
‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2010, 2015).

The affective vortex of disgust in mukbang

Mukbang may be interpreted less as a temporary, fleeting trend than as a social phenom-
enon, insofar as human relations and activities are formed and actualized in the social
practices of mukbang. Considerable amounts of diagnostic discourse have recently been
developed on the subject of mukbang in Korea, particularly with the aim of explaining
the public psychology of those who indulge in mukbang, with respect to both producing
and watching it. Most accounts are made from the perspective of supplemental reactions
and alternative forms of satisfaction toward the existential and social problems that
Korean people (particularly those in the younger generations) are currently experiencing,
along with the troubles they are facing in contemporary social conditions, manifested in
several ways. For example, it is suggested that young girls in particular like to watch
mukbang as a kind of unconscious resistance against the social pressure of body
Kim 115

management and materialistically stylized beauty. Korean society is highly obsessed

with bodily appearance. As a result, young Korean women, who are particularly vulner-
able to the social normalization of a slim body and who always feel compelled to abstain
from eating, derive certain vicarious satisfaction from mukbang (Cha, 2014; Yang, 2018).
Another factor regarding the popularity of mukbang has to do with the ‘castration’ of the
middle-class dream in a neoliberal era (Chung, 2015; Jang and Kim, 2016). This means
that, as most millennials’ lives seem to be more and more precarious and economically
polarized to the point where they hardly see a bright side to their future, they seek a
buffer of abnormal excessive foods to protect them from the psychological shock of
depression and frustration in their own lives.
It thus seems natural that mukbang, with its aesthetics of excessiveness and deviance
against the status quo of the current society, has attracted many desolate and lonely
young people. The popular fascination with mukbang is primarily interpreted as an effort
to find a solution to ‘emotional famine’ and feelings of desperation, loneliness, isolation,
and loss. It is said that these young people try to satisfy their nostalgia for a community
through the digital-mediated experiences of social eating (i.e. mukbang) within an indi-
vidualistic society, in which a sense of belonging is no longer a part of their lived reality
in the neoliberal era (Joo, 2013).
In line with the socio-psychological perspective of the interpretation above, however,
my particular interest in mukbang is concerned with the affect and senses generated
through the practice of mukbang rather than mukbang being merely reflective of the
given social reality. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1987), affect is an active force
that is in a constant process of ‘becoming’ through the generation, fission, transforma-
tion, and multiplication of one’s experiences and expressions of life. For this point, a
particular form of ‘networked affect’ (Hillis et al., 2015) is generated in the creation and
consumption of internet mukbang. In other words, mukbang is a kind of network that
generates, facilitates, and expresses certain types of social affect with its full ‘intensity,
sensation, [and value]’ (Hillis et al., 2015) through interconnections and interactions
among materials (food), human beings (BJs and viewers), machines (digital technolo-
gies), language (multimodal signs and images), and economic and social structures. In
appropriating mukbang as a kind of a ‘terrain’ (Bertelsen and Murphie, 2010), Korean
young people enjoy generating and sharing their own instincts, drives, needs, and desires,
which are entangled in the performance of eating. This notion implies that by interpret-
ing the types of networked affect formed within the self from mukbang, we can possibly
understand a certain aspect of Korean society.
To this point, I suggest that critical flows of affect, which are constitutive of the inten-
sity and excessiveness of mukbang, are interrelated elements of ‘survivalism’ (Kim H,
2015) and ‘anxiety’ (Kim Y, 2014). According to Hong Joong Kim (2015), survivalism
is a ‘regime of [the] heart’, which is built among young people in their 20s and 30s in
Korean society. These young people have been cruelly exposed to the inexorable life
condition of unlimited competition and precarization (Butler, 2006) in the age of neolib-
eralism. Thus, he argues that young people simultaneously seek and suffer from the
contradictory affects of overwhelming anxiety and an overheated desire for survival. The
BJs in mukbang, who also belong to the younger generation, express dual emotions and
attitudes while literally eating, in both the sense of eating to live and living to eat for
116 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

survival, and further, for success if they are exceptionally lucky. On the one hand, they
can overcome anxieties about life, even if only temporarily, by the successful act of eat-
ing. They continue their self-imposed mission of eating more and more, with the ambi-
tion to triumph in competition with others. Their ultimate aims involve pushing beyond
their physical and psychological limitations and attaining economic and social rewards
for their struggles and achievements. Furthermore, the mode of expressing and overcom-
ing survivalists’ anxiety is peculiar, since the BJs do so by eliciting a strong sense of
disgust, which may transgress the social norms that define the dignity and decency of
human beings. The BJs seem to challenge and enjoy crossing the boundaries of cultural
regulations related to social manners (as seen in Chulgu’s case), which are taken for
granted by citizens in the public context. The BJs aspire to look as perverse and as abnor-
mal as they can while, at the same time, indulging in the pleasure of achieving and going
beyond the maximum degree of pathological affects (Bollmer, 2014).
Accordingly, the BJs in mukbang initially appear to be prodigal, voracious, and dis-
gusting. These elements are gradually transvalued as those of confidence, pride, and
pleasure in the course of performing mukbang. The BJs present an audacious splendour
in a way such that they spontaneously set up the condition of insulting themselves by
putting their own bodies in extremely extraordinary situations and imposing full shame
upon themselves, and they move toward the achievement of completing their tasks, such
as eating. The entire process of self-insulting and shame, and overcoming these feelings,
finally enables them to be affirmed as heroes/heroines (Campos, 2012) by their audi-
ences. The strenuous affect generated and appreciated by the BJs, as well as the fans,
creates a certain pleasure that comes only from defeating the self-imposed hurdles of
shame and insults. Therefore, for mukbang BJs, shame and insults are identified as a type
of resource that potentially brings them great fame and popularity.
Consequently, the BJs in mukbang appear ambiguous, given that they experience fric-
tion between disgust and pleasure at the same time. Furthermore, this sense of ambiguity
may be expanded to a social dimension. This is because the BJs’ experiences of fighting
with, defeating, and enjoying their self-generated disgust can be amplified to have an
effect of mocking and criticizing social reality, in which people in physical and psycho-
logical poverty and hunger seek to eat for survival, and are forced to feel ashamed and
insulted as the ‘classified other’ (Hirdman, 2016). The affect of disgust, or the ‘disgust of
surfeiting desire’ (Ngai, 2005: 352–4), which is generated, performed, and shared among
the BJs and fans in mukbang is, with its intense negativity, capable of debunking and
satirizing the unbearable avarice of consumer society. Otherwise, it can also function as
pleasure, albeit a ‘melancholic pleasure’ pervasive among a wide range of the younger
generation, which, according to Maddison (2015), is a sort of pleasure saturated with
social depression and frustration.
To recap, carnal videos, including mukbang, are a socio-historical product of disgust
that is created, circulated, and consumed in the networked affects of anxiety and depres-
sion, as well as joy, in the neoliberal condition of precarization. The affective power of
disgust is ruptured in order to challenge and criticize the injustice of the neoliberal order
forcing indignities and pains on marginalized citizens as ‘others’. Subsequently, it may be
argued that a strong affective force that makes carnal videos so popular is a transgressive
Kim 117

ambiguity of disgust, which is mixed with shame and pride, pain and joy, and is eventually
transvalued to the vortex of ‘pleasure and resistance’ (Barthes, 1975).

Capturing and controlling around mukbang

Mukbang is not simply a free site of transgression, but rather is embedded within the
dominant political and economic conditions of capitalist society. This is because, in the
practice of mukbang, the act of eating, which should be natural to any living creature, is
transmuted into a particular mode of labour. The BJs not only eat food as a habitual
activity in everyday life, but also produce and distribute video contents, which are sub-
sequently circulated and consumed as a commercial product of ‘digital labour’ (Scholz,
2012). The BJs spontaneously play the role of ‘free labour’, initiated by spontaneous fun,
voluntarism, and a cultural desire and aspiration for creativity. Yet they contribute to the
growth of for-profit IT (information and technology) corporations (Terranova, 2004).
Moreover, it is not only the BJs, but also their fans who join in the voluntary act of free
labour. Their diverse interactions, such as chatting during mukbang, copying video clips,
paying cyber-money, and even the simple action of clicking and leaving their digital
footprints, contribute to increased data, which are immediately converted to profits for
SNS platform corporations, as well as for the BJs. Their fans, while enjoying mukbang
and actively ‘reacting’ to BJs, also play the role of ‘prosumer labour’ (Fuchs, 2015; Kim
Y, 2015).
Along with the political-economic critique of digital labour (and integrating the anal-
ysis of networked affect discussed earlier), the mukbang BJs’ labour of eating has a sig-
nificant implication in thinking about the subjectivity performed in the realm of carnal
videos within a broader sense. Considering the assemblage intertwined in mukbang with
respect to the body, affect, sense, symbol and sign, and data and network, it is ‘life’ itself
that is aggressively utilized and exploited in mukbang. In this regard, mukbang is placed
at the cutting edge of what Morini and Fumagalli call ‘biolabour’ (Morini and Fumagalli,
2010). Morini and Fumagalli (2010) assert that ‘Life is put to work’ in the condition of
‘biocapitalism’, as this describes the literal meaning of biolabour. They argue that almost
all of the psychic and physical faculties of human beings are entirely and inexorably
motivated, exploited, and monetized in the process of biolabour. It may be a logical, and
yet tragic consequence that in the practice of biolabour, life is reduced to an object of
economic management and investment. At the same time, human beings are reduced to
‘human resources’ that serve to effectively maximize corporate profits. What is exchanged
in the labour market is ultimately one’s subjectivity itself, encompassing the experiential,
relational, and creative dimensions of life. In short, biolabour is a typical form of labour
in the regime of biopower, in which, as Foucault (2008) argues, life becomes the object
of governmentality exercised over ‘free’ citizens, and by ‘free’ citizens over themselves
in accordance with societal norms.
Mukbang, which enables eating (as a vital activity essential to any living creature) to
be converted to digital resources of data, is also a particular mode of biolabour.8
Corresponding to the four modes of biolabour that Morini and Fumagalli (2010) propose,
the performance of mukbang consists of ‘relational labour’ operating among BJs, fans
118 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

and sponsors; ‘linguistic and cognitive labour’ by the BJs, who endlessly divulge a great
deal of information and ideas about consumer culture; ‘symbolic labour’ developed in
the process of interactions and meaning-making exchanges among the BJs and their fans;
and ‘physical labour’, which is apparent in the act of eating while using the multi-senses
of the BJs’ bodies. To this point, Morini and Fumagalli (2010) define biolabour as an
assembly of ‘vitality-brain-corporeality’. Although it is an instinctual behaviour in the
natural world, once mediated in the digital network, the act of eating is converted into
biolabour, including both consumption (food) and production (data). The process of con-
version implies the ‘surveillance’ capitalist drive (Zuboff, 2019) to fuse the traditionally
oppositional elements of duets, such as labour and play, pain and pleasure, and coercion
and freedom into an algorithmic system of competition over anonymous popular atten-
tion, and accelerates the colonization of human life by data (Couldry and Mejias, 2019).
Mukbang, in other words, is a novel transformation of Fleshism, in which a human’s
diverse faculties are condensed to the typical act of eating, and is again reduced to a ‘data
commodity’ (Economist, 2017) in the regime of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ (Stiegler,
2017).
Accordingly, carnal videos, including mukbang, have an effect in which vital activi-
ties such as eating are converted to varied novel forms of biolabour and digital commodi-
fication. The dual process of accelerating and capturing human vitality explicitly signifies
the reality of a ‘control society’ (Deleuze, 1997), in which human life is, in the very form
of exercising freedom and spontaneous capability, exploited and monetized. The area of
carnal videos is the very site in which the categories, which have been historically struc-
tured to divide the domains constitutive of human life, such as divisions between produc-
tion (digital data and content) and consumption (food), labour (digital-mediated eating)
and leisure (natural eating), and life (human) and work (BJ), are collapsed and modulated
in motivating the utmost aim of creating surplus values.

Conclusion
It has been argued so far in the current article that mukbang, as a major part of carnal
videos, is full of ambiguity, complexity, and dynamics in the transgressive loop of cross-
ing and capturing. It involves the affect of crossing normative social and cultural bound-
aries, and labour, which is captured by the political and economic order of creating
surplus values in a control society. Moreover, the effect of transgression is described as
being not so much uniformly linear and pre-determined as it is multiple, contradictory,
and unpredictable (Attwood, 2002; Campos, 2012; Couldry, 2001).
Drawing upon the complicated and multiplied nature of mukbang, heterogeneous
fluxes of affect crossing and challenging social normativity are also captured and con-
trolled for the maximization of economic profit. Thus, an account of carnal videos is
necessary to avoid romanticizing the notion of transgression, but also to comprehen-
sively interrogate the contestational reality of transgression. Based on my analysis in the
earlier sections, I would like to suggest that conflicting layers of transgression operate in
mukbang, particularly in the context of the networked affect that is also in contestation
with algorithmic governmentality. One layer involves transgression as an affective force
of freedom and resistance (as seen in terms of the performance of disgust and the
Kim 119

creation of pleasure). The other layer involves transgression (or indeed, the control of
transgression) as accelerating and capturing human faculties as biolabour in the digital
networked environment. These two contrasting aspects of transgression are mostly
inseparable from each other and comprise the ambiguity, complexity, and dynamics of
carnal videos.
To this point, the paradox of transgression is noteworthy. Not only is there the active
expansion and strengthening of human affect but also, more critically, even the vivid
expression of transgressive affect is exploited as a novel form of digital commodity in
the social practice of mukbang. Moreover, human efforts to pursue and realize their free-
dom and resistance are further desperately and strenuously exerted in contestation with
the digital modulation of socio-cultural controls and of political and economic govern-
mentality. In other words, the transgressive values of freedom and resistance as the
essential values of human life are incessantly and simultaneously sought after and
exploited with the ever-pursued, and yet ever-delayed dream of happiness – ‘eating well
and living well’ (as an old Korean proverb says) – in our contemporary digital and neo-
liberal society.

Author’s Note
In the current article, I use a part of the empirical and theoretical data on mukbang that I previously
analysed and published in an earlier article written in Korean. However, the theoretical frames of
transgression and ambiguity, and the textual analysis of the mukbang contents – which are the most
important elements in the current article – are newly written for this research,.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. For Korea Communication Standards Commission see: http://www.kocsc.or.kr/PageLink.do
2. For example, in 2018 the Korean government announced a policy and plan to regulate muk-
bang with the aim of managing obesity-related problems among the population. This caused
serious debates over concerns about repressing people’s freedom regarding cultural practices.
Consequently this policy and plan has never been enacted because of strongly negative public
opinion against the idea of government regulation of mukbang (Yang, 2018).
3. I have discussed female BJ mukbang in another paper (Kim, 2016), particularly in relation to
their performance of femininity deviating from conventional norms, such as being a ‘good
and pretty girl’.
4. For more details, see: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-43670719/millions-watch-
extreme-eating-korean-mukbang-star (accessed 17 March 2019).
5. For more details, see: http://peterimage.tistory.com/10 (accessed 28 August 2017)
6. See: http://v.media.daum.net/v/20170716115402899 (accessed 28 August 2017).
7. See: http://afreecatimes.com/5 (accessed 28 August 2017).
8. It may also be possible to account for mukbang BJs’ labour as a kind of ‘immaterial labour’.
Immaterial labour is a hegemonic mode of labour in the post-capitalist society, whereby
human faculties of emotion, affect, cognition, and knowledge are effectively motivated in the
generation of surplus values, particularly in the informative and cultural domains (Hardt and
120 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1)

Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996). However, my point relates to the carnal aspect of mukbang
in association with affect, which is closely related to the physical, sensual, and thus material
aspects of human beings, as well as to immaterial ones. As a part of carnal videos, the muk-
bang BJs’ labour is not simply immaterial, but is also mixed with the material and immaterial.
This notion suggests that the concept of biolabour is more relevant than immaterial labour in
the accounts of carnal videos, including mukbang.

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Author biography
Yeran Kim is Professor in the School of Communications, Kwangwoon University, Seoul, South
Korea. She has published extensively, both papers and books, including ‘Idol Republic: Global
emergence of girl industries and commercialization of girl bodies’, and Visages of Words. Her
current research focuses on the cultural intersection of affect, communication and society in the
contemporary social media ecology.