Fashionable subjects and complicity resistance: power, subjectification, and bounded resistance in the context of plus-size consumers

ABSTRACT

The relationship between consumer governability and consumer resistance has received increasing attention in consumer research, especially with regard to consumers’ physical bodies. However, a deeper understanding of how consumers juxtapose different forms and strategies of governability with respect to which discourses they embody or resist is necessary. Through an analysis of various sources of data, including interviews, fashion blogs, an online retailer’s website, and a fashion magazine, we explore the nuances between processes of subjectification and resistance in the fashion field by considering the multiple powers that act on overweight female consumers’ bodies. We demonstrate the complicated process by which these vulnerable consumers attempt to establish themselves as fashionable subjects as they move between adherence to expectations (biopower and subjectification) and resistance when faced with the impossibility of subjectification in a creative-agentic manner. Finally, we propose the idea of complicit resistance. This resistance only partially confronts the strategies of biopower in the process of subjectification because it is limited by a threshold imposed by biopower.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• biopower
• governability
• subjectification
• resistance

Notes on contributors

Maria Carolina Zanette holds a PhD from EAESP – Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil. She is an Assistant Professor at ESLSCA Paris.

Eliane Pereira Zamith Britob has more than 15 years of management experience in companies dealing with consumer goods and retailing. She holds a PhD from Manchester Business School, UK. She is Professor of Marketing at EAESP – Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil and teaches in the PhD Program of this institution.