ABSTRACT

The portrayal of female–food relationships in Korean television dramas departs from the traditional model of reserved, self-sacrificing women to make way for portrayals of ravenous females who take immense pleasure in consuming delicious food, suggesting that the dramatisation of the female’s boundless appetite succeeded in appealing to Asian women who were starved of representation and confined to socially restrictive roles. The subsequent celebration and normalisation of the female glutton in Korean dramas has since led to the Meokbang phenomenon, in which the televisual dining experience has become a substitute for social dining, resulting in the creation of yet another unrealistic and unsustainable social paradigm of an ideal woman, highlighting the urgency of re-evaluating the perpetuation of this female–food imagery in Korean dramas and other televisual platforms.