CANCELLED! Click to Feast: A Linguistic Exploration of Carnivalesque Food Performances in the Digital Age

Prof. Dr Sofia Rüdiger (Freie Universität Berlin)

DUE TO ILLNESS THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Food-related content is abundant in the digital sphere, ranging from restaurant reviews and culinary forums to recipes and pictures in social media posts. Online, food has truly transcended its role as nourishment and become a source of entertainment across platforms. While some formats focus on competitive cooking or instructional value, a distinct subset centers on excessive consumption – what can be termed ‘feasts of spectacle’. These include eating shows (mukbang), cheat day vlogs, food challenges, and excessive cooking shows.

This talk explores the discursive dimensions of English-language food videos that celebrate overindulgence. Drawing on corpus-based discourse analysis and digital linguistic ethnography, my on-going study examines how ‘carnivalesque food videos’ construct eating as entertainment and food as a spectacle. In this presentation, I highlight how language and visuals are deployed to create narratives of indulgence, negotiate identities, and foster online communities. I focus on findings from the study’s eating show and excessive cooking show components, with a particular emphasis on identity construction, food portrayal, and community building. Finally, I reflect on how these insights deepen our understanding of food performances in computer-mediated interaction and digitally mediated publics and intimacy.

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