Article Abstract
Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined persona to an accomplished body to embody pride. Six novel stigma resistance strategies emerged—experimenting, guarding, risk-taking, spatial reconfiguring, self-affirming, and integrating. Body-in-practice thus explains how shame weakens, pride strengthens, emotions stabilize, and self-confidence grows. This research contributes by explaining the hard work of identity repair, exploring stigma resistance across safe and hostile social spaces, and highlighting the emancipatory potential of embodied mastery.
Journal of Consumer Research, February 2024
About the researcher
Julie L. Ozanne is the Professor of Marketing at the University of Melbourne. Julie is a transformative consumer researcher who specializes in alternative methodologies for the study of social problems, such as interpretive, critical, participatory, and community action research methods.
She also examines the problems of the poor and the low literate, as well as new forms of sustainable exchange based on sharing. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Business Research, and European Journal of Marketing, among other outlets. She was the chair of the TCR advisory committee (2013-15), co-edited the book--Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well-Being (2012), and co-chaired the 2009, 2015, and 2017 TCR conferences and 2022 TCR-AMA Impact Festival. She regularly presents at the ACR doctoral consortium and has received over a dozen teaching awards. She received the 2022 Marketing and Society Special Interest Group Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2024 Association for Consumer Research Distinguished Service Award.
About the researcher
Erica Coslor is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia. With a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, her research examines valuation methods, objects and new market creation, including the role of the epistemic knowledge community around art as a financial investment (Coslor & Spaenjers, 2016), valuation methods for artwork (Coslor, 2016) and social construction of audiences through gatekeeping (Coslor et al. 2020). This also informs research on market creation and innovation (Kertcher et al. 2020). In addition to teaching in the areas of organizational change and strategy, she has the pleasure of supervising both marketing and management PhD students.