In an era marked by intensified technological mediation, ecological strain, and precarious care, acts of eating, feeding, sustaining, and reproducing life reveal their shadowed underbelly. Through an aesthetic of spectacle culture and forms of intimacy mediated by screens, algorithms, platforms, and metrics, even the most private rituals of feeding and care labor expose the hierarchies and systemic injuries that shape individual bodyminds, communities, and environments, revealing how value or capital is unevenly distributed across social and biopolitical life. This seminar invites papers that interrogate the obscured violences, contradictions, and power dynamics embedded in these pervasive practices across contemporary Chinese cultural production, echoing what Nancy Fraser calls “larger feeding frenzy” of global and neoliberal capitalism. We aim to expose what is systematically hidden or naturalized: the structural harms underlying everyday feeding and care; the gendered, racialized, and classed labors of social reproduction; the grotesque oscillations between hunger and excess; the metabolic rifts wrought by globalized extraction and consumption; and the biopoliticization of debility and disability within the ableist, extractive, and essentially cannibalistic forms of capitalization.

Grounded in literary, cultural and media studies, and drawing especially on feminist and labor theory, ecological criticism, affect theory, cripstemology, food studies, and care studies, the seminar investigates how and why representations and performances of eating, feeding, laboring and reproducing serve as contested sites in which desire, coercion, and systemic violence are orchestrated under the imperatives of capitalist extraction and consumption. Grotesque, excessive, absent, or ritualized forms of feeding, whether through vivid food imagery, eating livestreams (mukbang), narratives of caregiving, or depictions of deprivation, reveal the crisis of sustaining life itself in our increasingly hypermediated world.

We invite contributions that center contemporary China through transnational or comparative lenses. Although our focus is on the rich contemporary media culture of the People’s Republic of China, we welcome Sinophone and transnational projects that expand the textual and contextual scope of the inquiry and critique the power relations imbricated in global China. Topics include, but not limited to: Representations of food, labor, care, and reproduction in literature, film, and media culture; emergent aesthetic and formal features of new media culture organized around acts of feeding and eating; cultural memories of hunger, famine, deprivation, and overabundance; ecological narratives of extraction, metabolic rifts, and unsustainable sustenance; media representations of food safety, contamination, and poisoning; digital food cultures and their entanglements with nutrition politics, soft power, and cultural hegemony; disability and crip ethics of care.