The agentic body in immigrant maternal identity reconstruction: embodiment, consumption, acculturation

ABSTRACT

Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the agentic body, this research uses phenomenological in-depth interviews and auto-ethnographic journaling to explore South Korean immigrant women’s experiences of body changes in consumption over the course of pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood in the U.S. The findings trace women’s experiences of disembodiment as they defer and alter their consumption, detail multicultural embodiment favoring South Korean cultural knowledge and traditions, and elaborate how their self-sacrificial and compensatory consumption aids in re-embodiment. The paper contributes to theoretical understandings by elaborating the force and layered dynamics of the agentic body in opposing and supporting women’s maternal identity construction, and as a powerful, gendered agent that orients consumer acculturation processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Agentic body
• motherhood transitions
• disembodiment
• re-embodiment
• identity reconstruction

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to three anonymous reviewers. The reviewers’ valuable and constructive insights were indispensable in the development of this paper. The authors also thank Professor Jonathan Schroeder, the editor, for his patient guidance throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hyun Jeong Min is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Pacific University, Oregon, USA. She received her PhD degree in Business Administration with emphasis in Marketing from the University of Utah, USA in 2011. Her primary research interests are in consumer behavior, especially in consumer identity issues across various consumption practices and settings.

Lisa Peñaloza is Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School where she teaches cultural branding strategy, qualitative research, and consumer culture. Her ethnographic research uses interviews, photographs, and film in exploring how consumers collectively produce identity and community and negotiate economic value with products and services and with market and civic institutions. Her published work appears in such journals as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Public Policy and Marketing, and the Journal of Strategic Marketing. She is a former editor of the Journal Consumption, Markets, Culture, co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Ethnic Marketing (2015) and Cultural Marketing Management (Routledge, 2012), and has produced two documentary films, Generaciones: Cultural Identity Memory and the Market, and Inside the Mainstream: Credit and Debt in the White US Middle class.