Carnivore Women of TikTok: Healing from Modernity

This paper examines the online content of Isabella Ma, known as Steakandbuttergal on TikTok. This paper brings analysis of far-right wellness rhetoric into conversation with Catherine Albanese’s concept of the “enlightened body-self,” the tradition within American metaphysical religion that values “the physical as a route to the transcendent.” Like the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and other carnivores examined by Marek, Rooney, and Cerja in “Long Live the Liver King,” Ma invokes a mythologized, primal, past where men and women lived true to their nature. And like the women in Catherine Tebaldi’s “Granola Nazis and the Great Reset,” Ma’s embodiment of normative feminine beauty is her source of authority on healing and salvation. But Ma also reveals the contested nature of far-right gender traditionalism, placing her feminine beauty in juxtaposition to her masculine-coded meals, contesting traditional gender expectations, and laying her own claim to the head of the table.