{"title":"Performing drag in a pandemic: affect in theory, practice and (potential) political mobilization","authors":"N. Brennan","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1974010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1974010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article first traces how affect theory has reconfigured critical theory by challenging its epistemologies and by seeking out cross-disciplinary possibilities in conceptualizing happiness. The article then looks at how affect is both expressed and curtailed by drag performance in the reality/competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race, particularly for the series’ transgender competitors. It then examines how Drag Race’s transgender queens currently perform in social media space to reveal how their transgender self-identification and physical isolation have reconfigured queer politics espoused in the series. This study reveals several dimensions of affectively performing identity for drag queens negotiating cisgender, homonormative codes while sustaining careers in the confines of a pandemic. It argues that while transgender identity can be affectively expressed through alignment with political issues, consuming the body can become a site of political action. Moreover, Drag Race reveals limits over the potential for political action by transgender performers, even if social media further complicates realizing the affect of happiness through political mobilization.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74860175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prophets making gendered interventions: a feminist discourse analysis of gendered online miracles, advice, advertisements, and testimonies","authors":"K. Vanyoro","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1974009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1974009","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The global Pentecostal-charismatic movement is pervaded by freestanding, entrepreneurial, initiatives set up by individuals of diverse credentials and convictions who peddle miracles and advice as “goods”. Many also use self-promoting or income-generating efforts that in some cases can be crassly exploitative. This article examines 40 posts on two websites set up by self-styled “prophets” in the “prosperity”, healing, and deliverance segment of the movement. The prophets proffer healing remedies and advises for a variety of ailments or physical needs mainly related to family, marriage, and infertility. The two websites under study offer readers solutions to marriages, sexual inadequacy, and infertility. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), the article unpacks how the advice offered on their advertisements reinforce dominant beliefs around “normal” womanhood. The content of the adverts, testimonials and advice contain purvey gendered norms that reinforce patriarchy, emphasize heterosexuality, reify virginity, and endorse procreation in ways that regulate female bodies.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89230069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Your boy is a boiii”: capturing the consumption of trans joy in the form of synthetic testosterone","authors":"B. Camminga, Noam Lubinsky","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1953488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1953488","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Synthetic testosterone, is an object born of heteronormative sexual anxiety, invented for use by cisgender men. Today, synthetic testosterone functions, as an element of gender-affirming healthcare for specific segments of the trans population. We approach testosterone, throughout this paper, as a technical object and as such a raw material of gender in South Africa. Providing a close reading of South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), we trace the emergence, production, and linguistic life of this technical object as a site of heteronormative anxiety and consider the absent-presence of trans masculinity and trans men in relation to this. Drawing on images created by three South African trans men on Instagram, we explore the technical object’s representations/absences as a material of gendered joy in South Africa. We suggest that the self-representation of the technical object by trans men on Instagram makes it a happy object, one whose consumption is deeply intertwined with joy.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84243964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What’s the story, allegory?","authors":"Stephen Brown, Lorna Stevens, Pauline Maclaran","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1948840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1948840","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If ever a literary genre were made for consumer research, that literary genre is allegory. The word comes from the Ancient Greek allegoreo, meaning to speak of the other in the marketplace. Building on the pioneering research of Barbara B. Stern, this article considers the character and characteristics of allegorical storytelling. It does so by means of an empirical study of a richly storied apparel brand, Hollister (HCo), whose sudden rise and rapid fall contains allegorical lessons for retailers and researchers alike. Part of a project to promote literary criticism, it identifies three key themes that typify allegories – Life, Location and Language – all of which figure prominently in a sizeable introspective study of HCo consumers.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81343921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Detaching from plastic packaging: reconfiguring material responsibilities","authors":"Gay Hawkins","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2020.1803069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2020.1803069","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper considers two cases from the “unpackaged movement” as examples of market detachment: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s campaign to develop “a new plastics economy” and Source, a chain of zero waste bulk stores in Australia. Despite their differences, both these cases depend on tacit beliefs about material responsibilities, that is: assumptions about what single use plastic packaging is responsible for, who or what is affected by it, and how to redistribute its functions through different forms of detachment. In seeking to develop an analysis of detachment as a significant market dynamic, how the disposable plastic package changes from a mundane market device into a detachment problem is a key concern. Equally significant are questions of care. When plastic packaging shifts from mundane to troubling who is invited to care about this? A key finding of the paper is that the redistribution of material responsibilities occurs in very different ways.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73842329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consuming Africa: safari aesthetics in the Johannesburg beauty industry","authors":"Nicky Falkof","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1935901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1935901","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers the way in which high-end beauty services in Johannesburg use a particular notion of “Africa” to brand themselves. Globally, the beauty industry is designed around an idea of indulgence, with pampering posited as a means of self-care, survival and joy. Marketing for beauty destinations often draws on an Orientalist idea of the “mysterious east,” invoking the stereotyped serenity of locations like Bali to offer bite-sized consumable contentment to clients. While it retains this focus on self-care as a practice of happiness, the burgeoning luxury industry in South Africa has seen the development of a new local aesthetic that treats the continent as an exotic landscape filled with healing plants and local wisdom. The article analyses the websites and physical salons of three high-end Johannesburg spas order to discuss their visual and textual representations of a mythic Africa as a site for luxury, indulgence and post-feminist self-care.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89851038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From “aesthetic” to aestheticization: a multi-layered cultural approach","authors":"Ileyha Dagalp, B. Hartmann","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1935900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1935900","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article synthesizes previous literature on consumption, surrounding matters of aesthetic deliberation to offer a conceptual discussion of consumer-cultural aestheticization processes. Our main argument is twofold. First, we seek to re-orient the discussion of “the aesthetic” (i.e. something that is aesthetic) toward the processes that render something aesthetic (i.e. how something is made aesthetic). Second, on this basis, we conceptualize three groups of interrelated processes that cut across past research on aesthetics and elucidate how aestheticization permeates consumption, brand, and market processes. We discuss theoretical and empirical implications of this conceptualization in terms of (re-) enchantment, mythmaking, and aesthetics for future work on the nexus of consumption, brands, and markets.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80849782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letting go: economies of detachment","authors":"H. Brembeck, Franck Cochoy, Gay Hawkins","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2020.1840760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2020.1840760","url":null,"abstract":"Recent scholarship in STS and cultural studies has shown that understanding attachment as an inherently positive social process and detachment as an inherently negative market process is highly deb...","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87374065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Facemask: from pandemic to marketplace iconicity","authors":"Ksenia Silchenko, L. M. Visconti","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1909004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1909004","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As a result of Covid-19 outbreak, surgical facemasks first emerged as a pandemic icon to then expand into a marketplace icon, with substantial transformations in their meanings, uses, and commercial expressions. This essay contends that facemasks have become a (post-)pandemic marketplace icon by articulating tensions in the socio-cultural, the public media, and the economic sphere. Relying upon secondary-data retrieved from mass media and scientific articles boomed during the pandemic, we propose a theoretically eclectic appraisal of (1) facemasks’ iconisation, (2) the distinct systems raising masks to that iconic status, and (3) the “Marketplace Icons” series more broadly.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77585136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liquid, solid and in-between: service relationships in global mobility","authors":"A. Minina, J. Holmqvist","doi":"10.1080/10253866.2021.1897580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2021.1897580","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study adds to the growing body of research on consumption in global mobility, illustrating how mobile consumers navigate their economic reality by managing relationships with banks in different countries. Previous research argues that global mobility enables the liquid consumption logic that is access based, ephemeral and dematerialised. Drawing upon insights from 31 in-depth interviews with globally mobile professionals, we discuss how the flexibility of globally mobile consumption combined with the rigid and regulated nature of the financial services industry enable liquid, solid, and hybrid consumption logics. We argue that multiple relationship logics manifesting in global mobility represent a case of solidification of liquid consumption, showing that managing the flows of economic capital across multiple countries requires not only extreme flexibility but also structure. This allows mobile consumers to manage the uncertainties of liquid modernity by combining their flexible mobile existence with solid anchoring points in chosen localities.","PeriodicalId":47423,"journal":{"name":"Consumption Markets & Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89005589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}