Zettelwirtschaft Consumer Citizenship, Europäisierung und Krisenpolitik in Griechenland

2014 ◽  
pp. 305-330
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Citizenship

The Experience of Labor in the Age of Reform

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Huf
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Consumer Citizenship ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Insight Into

Over the past two decades, labor historians in America and Australia have deployed a range of new analytic tools to challenge older, essentialist interpretations of working-class politics in each country (rendering them anomalous compared to their European forebears) and better evaluate workers’ thoughts and actions on their “own terms.” This chapter continues this process of revision. It compares workers’ responses to major pieces of welfare reform in each country during the Depression era, not to assess them as agents of social change but for insight into their self-understanding as political subjects. Specifically, reactions to the contributory principle that underpinned both the Social Security Act in the United States and the National Insurance Act in Australia highlights the ways in which workers’ negotiation of institutional change might affirm or alter political self-understandings. American workers’ acceptance of the contributory principle accompanied the construction of a newfound “self-governance” and “consumer citizenship” among white, working men, whereas Australian workers’ hostility to the principle was couched in a pre-existing sense of “independence” and “self-reliance” undergirded by existing social and wage policies. A comparative approach thus stresses the historicity and contingency of working-class subjectivities even in two countries much alike for their “liberal hegemony” and helps open up the possibility of rethinking institutional forms and their relations with constituting new subjectivities in late-capitalist societies.

Mapping queer ‘celebratory moment’ in India: necropolitics or substantive democracy?

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Pushpesh Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Consumer Citizenship ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Media Texts

Abstract Using the theoretical framework of queer necropolitics indicating the negation of subjecthood to trans-queer of colour while assimilating white privileged gays through homonormative gestures like marriage and domesticity in the USA, the paper compares the diverse reactions of the Indian ‘urban corporate gay’ constituency and the marginalized transgender communities following the legalization of ‘homosexuality’ in India recently. Through an analysis of social media texts from the former and reflections of the latter, I propose a ‘critical intersectionality’ to politicize the idea of queer community mobilizations in India. While critically reflecting on the limits of ‘consumer citizenship’ of the privileged gay, the paper attempts to foreground the voices of transgender ‘counterpublics’ to draw attention to and problematize the idea of ‘community’ (re)iterated through popular and legal discourses.

Luxury consumption as identity markers in Tallinn: A study of Russian and Estonian everyday identity construction through consumer citizenship

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-215
Author(s):  
Abel Polese ◽  
Oleksandra Seliverstova
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Consumer Behaviour ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
High Status ◽  
Majority Group ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Consumer Citizenship ◽  
Shed Light

While the importance of consumption of luxury goods as a mechanism accompanying upwards movement in a social hierarchy has been well acknowledged, attention to the role and perceptions of luxury in multicultural societies has been scarce so far. It is nonetheless intriguing that ethnic groups inhabiting the same territory, and exposed to a same culture, might develop substantially different notions of luxury, which may end up affecting the integration, or isolation, of one of the groups. Our article addresses this deficiency in the literature by exploring the case of Estonia, a multi-ethnic society where Russians make up almost one-fourth of the population. Much has been written about the integration, and lack thereof, of ethnic Russians into Estonian society. We contrast these views by looking at inter-ethnic relations in the country from a different angle and by a) looking at consumption of luxury in the country through the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption'; b) endorsing Foster's concept of consumer citizenship. This allows us to shed light on an under-explored tendency and maintain here that, in a significant number of cases, ordinary citizens challenge official identity narratives by the state through counter-narratives centred around consumption of luxury at the everyday level. The identified counter-narratives end up translating into (consumer behaviour) instructions for those Russians willing to assert their Estonianness thus allowing them to seek integration into the majority group by simply consuming luxury items that they perceive as appreciated among Estonians, or associated with Estonian high status. By doing this, we make a case for expanding the parameters for academic scrutiny of social integration to include more ‘banal' forms of consumer practices through which top- down narratives and macro studies may be challenged.

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