Download This PaperConsuming the Limit: Furious Pete and the Re-Evaluation of All Values
Rossolatos, George (2018). Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 194-218.
25 Pages Posted: 29 Jun 2020
Date Written: April 1, 2018
Abstract
Micro-celebrities have been proliferating alongside the increasing importance of social media as avenues for self- branding in a participatory cultural predicament. This chapter adopts a storytelling approach for canvassing how the brand identity of Furious Pete, a competitive speedeating icon, is shaped coherently through the micro-narratives that populate his vlogs. By drawing on the social positioning perspective on storytelling that emphasizes how a persona, others and culture at large are discursively produced through situated positionings, enhanced by psychoanalytic insights, it is shown how this micro-celebrity may constitute a game-changer with regard to entrenched consumptive mores. This is achieved by adopting a narrative strategy of re-evaluation of all cultural values according to the ethos of speed-eating or, as tagged here, ‘limeating’ as ‘consuming (to) the limit’, and by delivering consumptive desire to an unbound orality whereby differentially valorized gastronomic offerings are annihilated in the face of cannibalistic drives.
Keywords: speed eating, limeating, orality, new media, micro-celebrity, social positioning
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