A dialectical reflection on the emergence of the ‘citizen as consumer’ as neoliberal citizenship: The 2013 Brazilian protests

Abstract

In this article, we argue that citizenship conceived within a context of neoliberal rationality helps explain the emergence of what we term the ‘citizen as consumer’. We define the citizen as consumer as someone who relates to the state and the public realms from the private perspective of consumption. We ask how this emergent neoliberal citizen is configured in peripheral countries that are regarded as exemplifying ‘weak’ citizenship. To respond to this question, we consider the protests that occurred in Brazil in 2013 as an empirical illustration. Our main objective is to rethink the citizen/state relationship in consumer studies, employing a dialectical analysis to understand how the better-known consumer-citizen movement, in which the consumer acts as a citizen and gives birth, under a neoliberal rationality, to a movement that somehow disrupts these roles such that the citizen starts to act as a consumer. The Brazilian protests provide insights that advance debate on the scope and limits of the hybridisation between citizens and consumers and on the transformations in the relationship between citizenship and politics.