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

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.