Intersectional Structuring of Consumption (Spring 2018)
Curator: Güliz Ger
Contemporary inequality is so dramatic that it has been a priority for organizations ranging from the United Nations to the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Notably, we see a rise of citizen-led social justice movements, from #Indebted in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis to the more recent #BlackLivesMatter challenging systemic racism and #MeToo calling out systemic sexism. In addition to increasing wealth polarization, we face a postcolonial globe of increasing numbers of refugees and persistent race, ethnic, national, religious, social class, and gender inequalities—a world of failed ideals of multiculturalism, diversity, and equal rights. In such a situation, more than ever since the launch of the Journal of Consumer Research in 1974—a perhaps more seemingly progressive time than today, consumer researchers need to do research that matters and attend to the implications of their choice of topics and body of work. “To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it” (Burawoy 2015). Inequalities—racial, ethnic, disability based, national (or postcolonial), social class, gender, etc.—abound in the everyday interactions of consumers and networks of relationships in the marketplace. This curation highlights studies that attended to the dynamics of inequality, and in particular, those that employed or considered or were allied in some way with intersectionality.
Intersectionality is an approach to studying power differentials by examining the relationships among subjectivity, knowledge, power, resistance, and social structures. It began its life in law, focused on equal rights for black women, as a prism used to highlight problems and dynamics that are generally ignored or quieted (e.g., Crenshaw 1991). Intersectionality is a matrix orientation aimed at uncovering the relational nature of privilege and oppression and the covert forms of complicity between them (e.g., May 2015; Yuval-Davis 2007). It entails the notion that social positions are entangled with the dynamic interaction of multidimensional structures of domination. With a “both/and” thinking, it aims to connect the structural and the experiential/personal as well as the material and the discursive. “Intersectionality approaches lived identities and systemic patterns of asymmetrical life opportunities and harms, from their interstices, from the nodal points where they hinge or touch” (May 2015, 3). For example, it examines capitalist patriarchy rather than capitalism and patriarchy, or black women, rather than race and gender. Thus, it takes the scholar beyond thick description and contextualization, and it is “germane for analyzing and contesting systemic inequality and for reimagining how we think about agency, resistance, and subjectivity” (May 2015, 1).
Intersectionality is an epistemological practice, an ontological project, and a political orientation—contesting hegemonic logic and asking for social change (May 2015). Epistemologically, it attends to the knower’s social position; considers the colonial, patriarchal, capitalist and modern histories of identities and structures under study, tracing genealogically the institutions and the power relations that create the processes of inequality under study; and aims to identify and diagnose the workings of dominance. It analyzes the interconnections of facets of identity and forms of domination—the matrix of relations. The researcher needs to be committed to the intersectional orientation from initial idea generation to the data collection, analysis, and concluding phases of a study as well as to multilevel “macropolitical and micropolitical analysis” (May 2015, 181). Intersectionality also invites us to notice the “gaps, inconsistencies, opacities, and discontinuities and insists that such omissions or silences be treated as (potentially) meaningful and significant, not just as obstacles to work around or anomalies to set aside” (May 2015, 227).
Paths to Respectability: Consumption and Stigma Management in the Contemporary Black Middle Class
David Crockett
When confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) “discern and avoid,” which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) “destigmatize,” using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.
Women Skating on the Edge: Marketplace Performances as Ideological Edgework
Craig J. Thompson
Tuba Üstüner
This study analyzes the marketplace performances that are enacted in the field of women’s flat track roller derby using the theoretical lens of gender performativity. Rather than treating the roller derby field as an autonomous enclave of gender resistance, this study focuses on the interrelationships between derby grrrls’ resignifying performances of femininity and the gender constraints that have been naturalized in their everyday lives. The market-mediated nature of derby grrrls’ ideological edgework enables them to challenge orthodox gender boundaries, without losing sociocultural legitimacy. This analysis casts new theoretical light on the gendered habitus and reveals key differences to the outcomes that would follow from Bourdieusian assumptions about the deployment of cultural capital in zero-sum status competitions. The concept of ideological edgework also presents a theoretical alternative to critical arguments, such as the commodity feminism thesis, that assume an inherently paradoxical and, ultimately co-opting, relationship exists between practices of countercultural resistance and marketplace performances. We further argue that ideological edgework redresses some of the conceptual ambiguities that can lead gender researchers to conflate gender performativity with social performances.
Indigenes’ Responses to Immigrants’ Consumer Acculturation: A Relational Configuration Analysis
Marius K. Luedicke
Consumer research commonly conceptualizes consumer acculturation as a project that immigrants pursue when adjusting their consumer identities and practices to unfamiliar sociocultural environments. This article broadens this prevailing view by conceptualizing consumer acculturation as a relational, interactive adaptation process that involves not only immigrant consumption practices but also indigenes who interpret and adjust to these practices, thereby shaping the paths of possibility for mutual adaptation. Based on a Fiskenian relational configuration analysis, the study shows how indigenes in a rural European town interpret certain immigrant consumption practices as manifestations of a gradual sell-out of the indigenous community, a crumbling of their authority, a violation of equality rules, and of indigenes being torn between contradictory micro- and macro-social morals. The article contributes a broader conceptualization of consumer acculturation, highlights four sources of ethnic group conflict in a consumer acculturation context, and demonstrates the epistemic value of Fiskenian relational configuration analysis for consumer culture theory.
Nationalism and Ideology in an Anticonsumption Movement
Rohit Varman
Russell W. Belk
In this research we examine the role of the nationalist ideology of swadeshi in a contemporary anticonsumption movement and show that its deployment is linked to the experiences of colonialism, modernity, and globalization in India. Specifically, we offer a postcolonial understanding of reflexivity and nationalism in an anticonsumption movement opposing Coca-Cola in India. This helps us offer an interpretation of this consumer movement involving spatial politics, temporal heterogeneity, appropriation of existing ideology, the use of consumption in ideology, and attempts to bring together a disparate set of actors in the movement.
Living US Capitalism: The Normalization of Credit/Debt
Lisa Peñaloza
Michelle Barnhart
This research develops a theoretical account of cultural meanings as integral mechanisms in the normalization of credit/debt. Analysis derives these meanings from the credit/debt discourses and practices of 27 white middle-class consumers in the United States and tracks their negotiation in patterns and trajectories in social and market domains. Discussion elaborates the ways informants normalize credit/debt in transposing their categories, in improvising meaning combinations, and in suturing the meaning patterns to particular subject positions in constituting themselves as consumers. Theoretical contributions (1) distinguish consumers’ collaborative production of cultural meanings with friends, family, and others in the social domain and with financial agents and institutions in the market domain and (2) document the productive capacities of these meanings in patterns and trajectories in configuring people as consuming subjects. Implications situate such cultural reproduction processes in the United States in discussing how the national legacy of abundance informs the normalization of credit/debt.
