ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the body is increasingly being addressed directly through a variety of sensory stimuli, and how the body is – in the case of food consumption, literally – a site or nexus of consumption, shaped, moulded, and decorated by everyday consumption practices. It is organized around three related aspects of embodied production and consumption: the multisensory consumer; consumption as embodied experience; and commodifying sensation. In the chapter, one will find, to varying degrees, a dialectic of discipline and transgression, of asceticism and excess, of tension and release. This dialectic runs throughout discourses of consumption in general, and especially in terms of food and other bodily pleasures. The chapter finally shows how consuming bodies enter into more complex social arrangements with other bodies through consumption and display, through experiences and metaphors of physical labour and economic production, and its role in the maintenance of the social order.
