We conduct an ethnographic case study of poor migrant women living in a Turkish squatter to explore how consumer acculturation operates in this important context. Poor migrants have no choice but to engage Turkish consumer culture because it is hegemonic and it conflicts ideologically with their village culture, and they do so with few resources. Our dominated consumer acculturation model specifies three modes of acculturation structured by this context: migrants reconstitute their village culture in the city, shutting out the dominant ideology; or they collectively pursue the dominant ideology as a myth through ritualized consumption; or they give up on both pursuits, resulting in a shattered identity project. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)-those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bourdieu's status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu's most important concepts-cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field-to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant textbook-like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy.

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.

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