‘Food porn’ or intimate sociality: committed celebrity and cultural performances of overeating in meokbang

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fetishised male voyeurism is encouraged in part, for example, because Korean men are still less likely to visit fast food restaurants, gendered spaces associated with women, children and youth (Bak 1997, p. 146).

2. The phenomenon has become transnational in recent years, including the growth of international BJs and spread of broadcast food-eating trends, including in China (where the male, sexualised gaze dominates).

3. Even this, as Cwiertka (p. 337) observes, is a cultural sign of recent economic affluence with only one side dish historically available to Korea’s predominantly impoverished citizenry.

4. Coveney (2000, p. viii, cited in Brady, Gingras and Power 2012, p.124) outlines the contemporary moral imperative confronting women, with good food and eating focused less on the physical pleasure of eating and more on good health.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Travel grant from the Ian Potter Foundation, Australia, [grant number 20162216] to attend the Celebrity Studies Journal 2016 conference [grant number 20162216].

Notes on contributors

Glen Donnar

Glen Donnar is a lecturer in Asian Media & Culture and Approaches to Popular Culture in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published diversely on stardom and popular cultural representations of masculinities, monstrosity and disaster in film and television, the mediation of terror in news media, and the ethics of news viewership.