It's not what you eat but how and that you eat: Social media, counter-discourses and disciplined ingestion among amateur competitive eaters

This article interrogates how social media can provide a platform for contesting dominant discourses. It does so through the lens of competitive eating, demonstrating that amateur competitive eaters use social media sites to challenge and subvert mass media representations of their sport while concomitantly upholding normative notions of healthy eating and bodies. Competitors consider themselves to be skilful athletes that discipline and train their bodies to eat. They regard their eating practices, which are often depicted in the mass media as uncontrolled and gluttonous, as controlled ingestion, and present an alternative perspective of their 'sport' - a perspective that stresses health, physical expertise and a fit, trained body over voracity and insatiability. Social media acts as a 'precipitating agency' for the creation of these alternative definitions of disciplined eating, as well as the construction of new digital eating identities. Instead of focusing on the food being ingested and the 'Carnivalesque' practice of competitive eating, we draw attention to the performers' voices and the ways they attend to the mechanics of gurgitation, including methods of chewing, swallowing and stomach stretching, and their ability to manage, regulate and operate ingestivity. As hegemonic discourses align the notion of 'good eating' to discipline, order and restraint, competitive eating is thus revealed to be a practice that mirrors and appropriates, yet also ultimately reproduces, conventional narratives. Social media is, in turn, shown to be a political tool for counter-discursive practices that are produced in dialogue with, and concomitantly uphold and contest, normative discourses of mass media.