Shame, consumption, redemption: reflections on a tour of Graceland

Abstract

In this auto‐ethnography, the author recounts a day spent at Graceland with other consumer researchers. During the tour, the author attends to a specialized set of details about Graceland Mansion that both reflects and amplifies his interior state. Biographical details of Elvis’s life are attended to in similar fashion, forming a narrative of shame, alienation, and despair. After the tour, the author is prompted to confront details of his own life that may account for this perspective. A chance meeting with a merchant, followed by a deliberate act of consumption, prove liberatory for the author, enabling him to complete an angst‐filled legal assignment, then begin writing this paper.

Keywords:

• Bakhtin
• dialogic imagination
• heteroglossia
• psychoanalytic literary theory
• Southern Gothic
• body image
• clothing
• liberatory postmodernism