The Politics of Consumer Identity Work

From a conventional standpoint, work is a domain of labor and economic production whereas consumption is a sphere of leisure and expenditure. The cultural turn in consumer research, however, has shown that practices of consumption are indeed productive ones. Through these practices, consumers deploy a gamut of marketplace resources to construct personal and collective identities that, in many cases, challenge social stigmas and limitations that emanate from ascribed categories of gender, class, ethnicity, religiosity, and nationality. And at this point, consumer identity work becomes a mode of identity politics. The term “identity politics” is most closely associated with the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and its clarion call of the personal is the political, an aphorism which asserted that genderbased inequities of political power and socioeconomic opportunity were routinely manifested in conventional social roles, norms, mores, and status quo expectations (Bristor and Fischer 1993). Thus, challenges to and subversions of the conventional gender order were seen as a means of disrupting broader power structures. Long before the social tumult of the 1960s feminist movement, however, consumers who had little recourse through conventional political channels used consumption (and marketplace resources) as tools for socioeconomic mobilization, such as African Americans “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycotts of segregated stores and restaurants or the multi-ethnic coalition of working-class women who agitated for price controls on staple items during World War II (Cohen 2003). In all these cases, the construction of a collectively shared identity provides an ideological vehicle for organized political action. Within the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, the politics of identity has emerged as a significant sphere of inquiry, as a plethora of articles and books have traced out how specific subaltern and socioeconomically marginalized groups seek to combat forces of stigmatization, discrimination, and disempowerment through the production of a collective identity (Kellner 2003). As McNay (2010) discusses, analyses of identity politics have tended to emphasize goals oriented toward recognition or redistribution. In the former case, consumers place their societally defining differences at the symbolic center of a collective identity—often enacted through fashion, music, art—and pursue social recognition and/or political legitimization from the broader society (Hebdige 1979; Kates 2004; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006; Ustuner and Holt 2007). The second analytic path—redistribution—emphasizes marginalized groups’ struggles for more equitable distributions of cultural and economic resources and access to opportunities foreclosed by discriminatory constraints and institutional barriers (Adkins and Ozanne 2005; Dolan and Scott 2009; Penaloza 1994; Ustuner and Thompson 2012). In the cultural studies field, this analytic distinction between the identity politics of recognition and that of redistribution has also lent itself to a theoretical polemic, as theorists debate the respective realpolitik consequences and limitations of each orientation (Fraser 1998). In contrast, the consumer culture theory tradition of consumer research has shown that the goals of recognition and redistribution are often dialectically linked, most particularly when consumers’ identity work is directed toward transforming marketplace structures in ways that serve their collective interests (Barnhart and Penaloza 2013; Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013; Crockett and Wallendorf 2004; Giesler 2008; Holt 2002; Kozinets and Handelmann 2004; Varman and Belk 2009). This research curation profiles five JCR articles of recent vintage that advance this research stream on the intersections among consumer identity work, identity politics, and marketplace structures. These