Global Perspectives on Religion and Food

In multi-level marketing companies (MLMs), agents sell products and assemble sales teams, ‘downlines’, from whose sales they receive a commission. MLMs are popular but controversial due to pyramid distribution models that favour few agents who join early and their reliance on sales to friends/families. MLMs appeal to women by emphasizing flexibility, family, domesticity, positivity, and empowerment; however, this may not account for the unpaid, invisible, and emotional labour endured by MLM agents. MLMs recruit members of religious groups that may endorse certain gender roles and body expectations. Many MLMs sell weight-loss products, which draw from harmful body, gendered faith, and corporatized empowerment messages. This paper will report on the preliminary development of a ‘pyramidal prejudices’ framework based on a literature review and multi-modal critical discourse analysis of MLMs’ social media posts that considers the fatphobic, faith, and post-feminist aspirational labour discourses of MLMs, which help shape their influence.