Food porn, pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace

Abstract

a b s t r a c tBy engaging with 'pro-anorexia' and 'food porn' on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating 'triggers' and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and 'matter(ing)' of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food.

Mukbang and Disordered Eating: A Netnographic Analysis of Online Eating Broadcasts

“…This very quality may contribute to the fascination with food porn, cook books, and recipes that individuals with anorexia nervosa often display as a way of constantly engaging with food without actually eating it (in the everyday meaning of the word). Just as food porn shared on blogs or social media may come to function primarily as a social relationship between people rather than as simply a collection of alluring images (Lavis 2015 ), it should be clear from the findings of the present study that the mukbang phenomenon is more than just a display of someone eating large amounts of food. Indeed, for some viewers with disordered eating, mukbang appears to fill the very same (para)social function of ‘ingestion without incorporation’ as do food porn.…”

“…A more accurate comparison, then, may be so-called food porn ; i.e., carefully staged images of appealing dishes that are consumed visually on blogs or in glossy magazines rather than viscerally at the dining table. The consumption of food porn has been described as “ingestion without incorporation” (Lavis 2015 , p. 201)—an elusive confusion of virtual and actual eating. This very quality may contribute to the fascination with food porn, cook books, and recipes that individuals with anorexia nervosa often display as a way of constantly engaging with food without actually eating it (in the everyday meaning of the word).…”

Role of Food Porn: Luxury Food Desire among Adolescents

“…Many articles represent food porn as an essential factor in today's luxury food consumption as it makes the consumer believe that food means touching, enjoying and feeling the food as part of an emotional state of the body (Probyn, 2000). The high-res images of food depict and influence consumers to look at the pictures again and click and like them and share further and try the luxury food that entices them (Lavis, 2017). The food porn concept may influence even an average consumer to go for luxury food desire because of its image quality and photography style as pornography.…”

Medicated bodies: Mental distress, social media and affect

“…This is a collective process in which people co-construct bodies in order to produce a sense of community (Brotsky and Giles, 2007). Lavis (2015) goes further in arguing that eating comes to reconfigure relationships between offline and online worlds, as acts of eating in cyberspace come to shape biological materialities of bodies. A theoretical binary between offline and online does not capture the complexities of ‘eating’ in relation to anorexia, which takes place in both spheres, often simultaneously.…”