Abstract

The Western adaptation of mukbang – a Korean media form defined by the excessive
consumption of food on camera – has produced a TikTok sub-genre of content referred to, in this
project, as ‘park and scarf.’ These videos feature young women eating fast or packaged foods in
parked cars and place a sensory emphasis on the process of consumption. This project situates
‘park and scarf’ content within feminist discourses on the female grotesque and Kristevian
abjection, arguing that these performances foreground the unruly body by staging appetite as
both excessive and pleasurable, destabilizing cultural prescriptions of feminine restraint.
The methodology combines feminist performance studies with textual analysis, using a
comparative framework that pairs individual works of performance art with ‘park and scarf’
TikToks. This structure emphasizes how eating, whether staged in an artistic context or
disseminated through social media, mobilizes excess and sensory immediacy and can be used as
a vehicle to interrogate gendered embodiment. By analyzing savoury and sweet consumption
across both artistic and digital performances, the project demonstrates how abjection coupled
with conventional beauty functions as an aesthetic and affective strategy. Excessive female
consumption emerges as a subversive mode that reclaims appetite as a site used to interrogate
and question hegemonic aesthetics of suppression.