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<p>Mukbang, a digital practice that originated in South Korea and has since become a global phenomenon, features individuals consuming large quantities of food on camera while engaging with online audiences. While existing studies have approached Mukbang through sociological, nutritional, and media-theoretical lenses, its unconscious appeal remains largely unexamined. This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of Mukbang as a mediated space where unconscious processes of desire, lack, and embodiment are activated. Drawing on five in-depth qualitative interviews with regular viewers, we explore how visual consumption engages psychic dynamics such as scopic jouissance, incorporation, and identification, often marked by ambivalence—between fascination and disgust, control and surrender, satisfaction and frustration. By integrating clinical psychoanalytic theory with cultural analysis, we argue that Mukbang functions as a contemporary dispositif for psychic regulation, allowing viewers to negotiate tensions around food, the body, and symbolic loss within a digital framework. This study contributes to broader interdisciplinary conversations on media, affect, and the cultural shaping of subjectivity.</p>

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Between Scopic Jouissance and Incorporation: Mukbang as a Digital Site of Psychic Tension

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月19日

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  • Elie Solal,
  • Anna Cognet-Kayem

摘要

Mukbang, a digital practice that originated in South Korea and has since become a global phenomenon, features individuals consuming large quantities of food on camera while engaging with online audiences. While existing studies have approached Mukbang through sociological, nutritional, and media-theoretical lenses, its unconscious appeal remains largely unexamined. This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of Mukbang as a mediated space where unconscious processes of desire, lack, and embodiment are activated. Drawing on five in-depth qualitative interviews with regular viewers, we explore how visual consumption engages psychic dynamics such as scopic jouissance, incorporation, and identification, often marked by ambivalence—between fascination and disgust, control and surrender, satisfaction and frustration. By integrating clinical psychoanalytic theory with cultural analysis, we argue that Mukbang functions as a contemporary dispositif for psychic regulation, allowing viewers to negotiate tensions around food, the body, and symbolic loss within a digital framework. This study contributes to broader interdisciplinary conversations on media, affect, and the cultural shaping of subjectivity.