Fashionably voluptuous: normative femininity and resistant performative tactics in fatshion blogs

Abstract

While research on consumer identity projects has begun to include marginalized consumers, we nevertheless lack insight of the ways in which socio-historical understandings of gendered identity are (re)constructed in the context of consumer resistance and in relation to the market. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw on Butler's notion of performative identity formation and combine this with Bourdieu's notion of capital as identity resource, first to explore performative identity construction of fatshion bloggers embedded in the normative understandings of gendered identity, of adopting and negotiating the dominant cultural discourses of fashion, and second, to consider the subversion of such discourses and resistant acts as these are enabled by normativity. We establish two performative identity tactics that highlight normativity as a resource for resistance.

Consumer Response toward Plus‐Size Models Featured in the Mainstream Media

“…This subtheme includes language about the shame and disgust associated with being plus‐size or overweight and is consistent with the stigma that has largely been associated with being fat or obese (Goffman ). This is consistent with the notion that the stigma of overweight individuals is often associated with the assumption that these individuals do not exercise self‐control to avoid such a condition (Fallon ; Harju and Huovinen ).…”

Theorizing Reactive Reflexivity: Lifestyle Displacement and Discordant Performances of Taste

“…In all these cases, critically reflexive consumers have become sensitized to the normative limitations and While acknowledging that resistant gender performances can precipitate social stresses, stigmatization, and interpersonal tensions, these aforementioned studies portray critical reflexive awareness as a revelatory state that ultimately empowers consumers to assert a self-directed agency against forces of social determination and to reconfigure their identities in ways that offer an enhanced sense of empowerment (Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013;Moisio, Arnould, and Gentry 2013;Sandicki and Ger 2010;Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). Accordingly, these analyses also tend to highlight the ways in which marketplace resources are reflexively leveraged (and in some cases co-created) to facilitate and legitimate alternative performances of gender identity and to modify embodied predispositions that would otherwise anchor consumers to conventional gender ideologies (Chytkova 2011;Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2012;Goulding and Saren 2009;Gurrieri and Cherrier 2013;Harju and Huovinen 2015;Hein and O'Donohoe 2014;Kates 2002;Martin et al 2006;Moisio et al 2013;Scaraboto and Fischer 2013;Thompson and Üstüner 2015).…”

“…This ontological framing sensitizes consumer researchers to situations in which consumers' reflexive goal is to resist these constraining structures by agentically reconfiguring their habitus in relation to a new array of oppositional meanings and practices (Firat and Venkatesh 2015;Harju and Huovinen 2015;Izberk-Bilgin 2010;Kozinets 2002;Martin et al 2006;Thompson and Üstüner 2015). This critical-reflexive lens, however, systematically diverts theoretical attention away from cases where consumers are displaced from a system of power relations and become reflexively aware of the favorable balance of formerly naturalized performative resources, versus constraints, it had once afforded.…”

Academic labour, journal ranking lists and the politics of knowledge production in marketing

“…As the comments received from scholars situated across multiple paradigmatic communities that are reproduced below underscore, we have been very successful in this regard, improving the content, standing, pluralism and international status of the Journal during our tenure (e.g. Fang et al, 2014;Harju & Huovinen, 2015;Joy et al, 2015;Lawlor & Prothero, 2011;Levy, 2012;Piacentini et al, 2014;Varman & Belk, 2012).…”