Embracing cuir possibilities: Can ‘consumer researchers’ drop the consumer?

Abstract

This reflective piece presents a critical examination of consumer research and proposes a shift beyond the conventional consumer paradigm. Drawing from a decolonial queer phenomenological approach – to embrace cuir possibilities – we emphasise its potential to challenge power hierarchies and foreground the experiences of peripheral lives. We do so by reflecting upon the life story of Carolina, a domestic worker in Brazil, whose experiences serve as a lens to interrogate traditional notions of consumer agency and sovereignty. Our take reveals the limitations of existing consumer orientations, particularly in addressing power dynamics and structural inequalities. By disorienting ourselves from normative frameworks and reorienting towards the lived experiences of peripheral lives, without reducing them to an othered consumer, we propose a shift in consumption research – one that embraces the multiplicity of identities and experiences beyond the conventional consumer paradigm. One that embraces cuir possibilities. Through this dis/reorientation, we aim to open new opportunities for critical inquiry within the field, inviting scholars to challenge the dominant narratives and explore other possibilities in the study of consumer culture and the politics of consumption.

Introduction

This reflective piece critically examines consumer research through a decolonial queer phenomenological approach – to embrace cuir possibilities – emphasising its potential to challenge power hierarchies and foreground the experiences of peripheral lives. By doing so, we engage with two intersecting conversations – or ‘tables’, following Ahmed’s (2006) work – that have already been in the making: a queer table (Pirani and Daskalopoulou, 2022) and a decolonial one (Kravets and Varman, 2022).

At the queer table, Pirani and Daskalopoulou (2022) have already highlighted that ‘the epistemological value of queer theory is in valuing the margins, rejecting dualism and questioning the hierarchies of power within capitalism’ (p. 293). They invite researchers to join their table to explore ‘how we live and consume in the wreckage of the capitalist promise’ (p. 294). As an inconclusive tool open to rethinking and reinventing (Halberstam, 2011), queer theory can help researchers problematise the norms that sustain heteronormativity and reproduction of life as we know it (Ahmed, 2014).

Whereas at the decolonial table, the conversation calls for collective advocacy towards a critical examination of epistemic structures in marketing with the aim of advancing perspectives and voices that have been systematically under-recognised, under-valued or obfuscated within the predominant hierarchies of knowledge (Kravets and Varman, 2022). The decolonial table then contests the unquestioned sovereignty of Western epistemological, economic, political, and cultural categories, following radical critiques of colonialism and imperialism (Lugones, 2010).

As Brazilian scholars researching peripheral lives, we have found ourselves inspired by these two conversations. Moreover, it is not hard to argue that these two conversation ‘tables’ overlap. In fact, Ahmed’s (2006) proposal to build a queer table arises from her critique of the privileged position of existential phenomenology (i.e. how sitting alone at a writing table in a dedicated room, next to a lamp, a glass to drink from, a piano, with a pen in hand and time for reflection without interruptions from others provides a specific and privileged perspective of the lived experience). For her, such a position pinpoints the limitations of the Western perspective in knowledge production, as our perceptions of the world depend on our positions within it and the spaces our bodies occupy. While her work overall lies at the intersection of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism, her work on queer phenomenology is rooted in postcolonial feminist critique.

Ahmed (2006) builds her argument by challenging the position of Husserl and the centrality of the object from which the philosopher writes. Because the writing table is centred on Husserl’s impressions of the world, certain objects in the room where he writes (e.g. ‘the glass to drink from,’ the ‘vase,’ and the ‘piano’) become reachable while other objects become unreachable. Some objects are not even part of the background. They become peripheral ¹ and consequently made invisible.

One might even consider the domestic work that must have taken place for Husserl to turn to the writing table, and to be writing on the table, and to keep that table as an object of this attention. (…) To sustain an orientation toward the writing table might depend on such work, while it erases the signs of that work, as signs of dependence. (…) What is behind Husserl’s back, what he does not face, might be the back of the house - the feminine space dedicated to the work of care, cleaning, and reproduction (Ahmed, 2006: 30-31).

We then turn to such living experiences and spaces. In our research with domestic workers in Brazil, we stepped away from ‘the writing table’ to examine what has been positioned as peripheral – what was out of sight, the back of the house. Such spaces in Brazil are not only a ‘feminine’ space, but also a space fundamentally occupied by racialised domestic workers (Sopas Rocha Brandão, 2019) in a subaltern position (Spivak, 1988). Such positionality allows us to extend the scrutiny of the intersectionality produced in marketing scholarship and practice (Rosa-Salas and Sobande, 2022), including but not limited to the idiosyncrasies of the relationship between queerness and coloniality (Pierce et al., 2021; Valencia, 2015).

One particular encounter in this research project has been particularly destabilising. During an interview with Carolina, a domestic worker in Brazil, we began to question the role of the consumer in the field as a straightening orientation device. Her life story offered a lens to interrogate traditional notions of consumer agency and sovereignty, prompting us to critically reflect on the limitations of existing consumer orientations, particularly in addressing power dynamics and structural inequalities. This disorienting experience not only challenged our perspectives but also positioned us at the intersection of two discussion ‘tables’ in the marketing literature: the queer ‘table’ and the decolonial ‘table’, both of which have already been urging new reorientations within the field.

By disorienting ourselves from normative frameworks and reorienting towards the lived experiences of peripheral lives (without reducing them to an othered consumer), we propose a shift in consumption research – one that embraces the multiplicity of identities and experiences beyond the conventional consumer paradigm. One that embraces cuir possibilities – with a shift from queer to cuir – which ‘refers to a locus of enunciation with a decolonial inflection, both playful and as criticism’ (Valencia, 2015: 34). For Latin American scholars and activists, the latinised, tongue-twisted term ‘cuir’ enables a reorientation – a new locus of enunciation that integrates decolonial inflection and geopolitical displacement. Cuir is then proposed as a Spanishized-latin phonetic derivation (i.e. deviance itself) from the term queer to evoke the possibility to ‘speak in tongues’, as proposed by Anzaldúa (1981).

That is, in Latin America, the shift of the term queer to cuir evokes ‘radical criticism from sexual, economic, racial, gender, and functionally diverse peripheries, all fundamental enclaves for developing a politics of intersectional resistance’ (Löfgren, 2022: 4). Such shift opposes colonial epistemologies – including but not limited to Anglo-American (queer) historiography, where othered narratives are also overlooked.

Through this dis/reorientation towards cuir possibilities, we aim to open new opportunities for critical inquiry within the field, inviting scholars to challenge the dominant narratives and explore further possibilities in the study of the politics of consumption (Bradshaw et al., 2013).

Following a consumer orientation: straightening the field

The consumer orientation for consumer researchers is given in the field – it has then been shaping how we – consumer scholars – inhabit the (academic) space, ‘as well as “who” and “what” we direct our energy and attention toward’ (Ahmed, 2006: 3). For Ahmed (2006), orientations do that – they shape not only how we inhabit space but also how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitancy. In the multiple accounts about the emergence of the interpretative sub-field of marketing that addresses the ‘sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005: 868; see also Askegaard and Scott, 2013), the consumer always occupies the central position – it has been the field’s primary orientation.

This centrality, while foundational to the field, has also been a source of critique. For instance, Fırat and Dholakia (2016) argue that dominant consumer subjectivity, shaped by late modernity’s iconographic culture, reflects a market-dependent orientation that frames individuals as choice-makers. They propose transcending this consumer subjectivity toward a ‘construer’ subjectivity, which reimagines human agency through symbolic and cultural creation rather than market-determined consumption. By considering their perspective, we further emphasise the need to question and potentially reconfigure how consumption practices and consumer identities are framed within the field.

Despite the many tensions described in the history of marketing and consumer research (MacLaran et al., 2011; Tadajewski, 2004), the field of consumer research has established itself since the foundation of the Association for Consumer Research in 1969. Multiple philosophical debates underpinning marketing theory broadly were happening around the 1970 and 1980s, characterised by the questioning of the scientific nature of marketing and the dominance of logical empiricism in marketing theory. The late 1980s can be seen as a turning point for the field, marked by both the consolidation of consumer research and the subsequent insurgency of paradigm allegiance in marketing and consumer research with the emergence of the interpretive turn, giving way to the flowering of other non-positivist perspectives such as Consumer Culture Theory as we know it today (Anderson, 1986; Askegaard and Scott, 2013; Belk, 2009, 2014; Bradshaw and Brown, 2008; Holbrook and O’Shaughnessy, 1988; Hudson and Ozanne, 1988; Tadajewski, 2004; Thompson et al., 1989; Thompson et al., 2013).

In fact, during these paradigmatic debates, Holbrook (1987) has proposed that consumer research involves ‘the study of consumption (acquiring, using, and disposing) as the central focus pursued for its own sake whereas marketing research, among other things, involves the study of customers in a manner intended to be managerially relevant’ (p. 130). For him, the term consumer research should cover ‘the study of consummation in all its many aspects’ (p. 128). In an explicit alignment with Belk, he emphasises that consumer research should not be ‘the handmaiden of business, government, or consumers. It should instead be a viable field of study, just as these other [established] disciplines are, with some potential relevance to each of these constituent groups’ (Belk, 1986: 423, highlighted by authors).

This way, a key interpretive development in consumer research has been the exploration of the consumer experience as ‘the study of consummation in all its many aspects’, following the assumption that consumers are one of the three constituent groups of the multiplicity of consummation. The proposition of ‘putting the consumer experience back into consumer research’ by adopting the philosophy and method of existential phenomenology (Thompson et al., 1989) has become one of the primary choices for developing and sustaining this consumer orientation. It became an embracing position for much interpretative and critical research (Goulding, 1999).

Such consumer orientation has then become widespread among interpretative and critical scholars focused on consumption. For example, the term consumer can be seen in the multiple markers and acronyms disputed during the (interpretative) field’s emergence. Whereas Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) ‘became a reputational marker to be used to signal an affiliation to the broader marketing field’ (Bode and Østergaard, 2013: 184) and legitimised itself as the alternative stream to positivism in marketing (Coskuner-Balli, 2013), other markers and acronyms also highlight such orientation towards the consumer. A few examples are Heretical Consumer Research (HCR), Critical Consumer Research (CCR), Interpretative Consumer Research (ICR), and Radical Consumer Research (RCR).

However, as Fırat and Dholakia (2016) remind us, exploring beyond the entrenched frameworks and considering how subjectivities can evolve to embrace broader symbolic possibilities is essential. Such reorientation opens avenues for critical engagement that challenge the dominance of market logic and pave the way for new paradigms in consumer research. In alignment with the interpretative turn in the social sciences, such consumer orientation has inspired us due to its call for more contextualised, holistic, and critical research. Its inherent concern with the context, enabling research to uncover political, social, and cultural influences on consumers, and its potential to engage in critical conversations have been key legitimisation practices (i.e. code evocation; Coskuner-Balli, 2013). For example, under the CCT brand, the interpretative stream of consumer research has often been credited with the potential to engage in ‘critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation, freedom, and community’ (Denzin, 2001: 324). Through this turn, Denzin (2001) advocated for an opportunity to uncover previously silent voices, performance texts, and a concern with moral discourse.

However, some of these critical potentialities have not yet fully flourished (Cova et al., 2013) despite multiple efforts to decolonise (Benali and Kravets, 2022; Brace-Govan and De Burgh-Woodman, 2008; Eckhardt et al., 2022; Hemais and Rodrigues, 2023) and challenge the hierarchies of knowledge in the field (Hutton and Cappellini, 2022; Jafari, 2022; Kravets and Varman, 2022; Rosa-Salas and Sobande, 2022; Sandikci, 2022). Scholars discussing the epistemological boundaries of our understanding of consumption have already highlighted how the centrality of the individual consumer in the field also has its shortcomings.

Some scholars have centred their critique on how phenomenological accounts lacking sufficient contextualisation privilege an understanding of consumers as individuals in possession of agency and meaning-making proficiency but overlook cultural and political constraints (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Thompson et al., 2013). Other scholars have taken their critique further by emphasising the ‘underlying neoliberal sentiment at the centre of the CCT project’ and, consequently, its impossibility of covering a broader critical perspective (Fitchett et al., 2014: 495).

In their critique, Fitchett and colleagues (2014: 495–496) highlight how ‘marketing and consumer research have maintained an underlying commitment to micro-level, managerialist and functional concerns and that this has severely limited the possibility of using a marketing research agenda to examine broader social, cultural, and macro-level considerations’. For Moisander et al. (2009: 335), consumer researchers must ‘reject or at least problematise the overly individualistic view on human agency that characterises much of consumer research’, recognising ‘the significance of cultural conditions of possibility in guiding and constraining consumers’ ways of being and acting in the world’.

Fitchett and colleagues (2014) then argue that interpretative consumer scholars have often reified the consumer as ‘the hero in history’. In contrast, other theoretical streams have often cast ‘the consumer as victim and villain, removing or marginalising the consumer from alternative histories or myths’ and suggest that ‘discussions about the consequences of neoliberalism would be enhanced by more sophisticated representations of consumer culture and consumer behaviour’ (p. 504). This way, they stress the vital role of consumption in providing a critical analysis within contemporary neoliberalism in contrast to production-oriented analyses that emphasise labour and capital, overshadowing complex and nuanced ideas about consumption and culture.

As scholars from the Global South, we find all these debates both compelling and inspiring. Yet, it became clear to us that any Western gaze on consumers in the global periphery – such as the bottom-of-the-pyramid approach and its ‘rhetoric of salvation and progress’ (Faria and Hemais, 2017: 273) – tends to be reductionist. Investigating phenomena that involve not just consumption but also power asymmetries, domination, and privilege could benefit from a critical re-examination of the consumer subject from a different position and, consequently, also a different perspective.

As researchers of consumption, we occupy a unique position to continually reflect on the locus of the consumer subject. Firat and Dholakia (2016), for example, have contextualised the transition process of dominant forms of human subjectivity, from the citizen subject in early modernity to the consumer subject in late modernity. Lambert (2018) has argued that ‘only by recognising critical theorisations of the consumer as dominant subject positions of neoliberalism can cultural consumer researchers begin to imagine opportunities for resistance and emancipatory change’ (p. 330). For her, it is fundamental that we engage in critical re-examinations and investigations of the multiple forms the consumer subject does and may take. We agree, and extend her argument by emphasising that, as researchers of consumption, we are in a unique position to also reflect on how multiple forms of human subjectivity, through consumption, can be obfuscated, challenged, and denied.

Domestic workers, whose labour is deeply entangled with consumption yet rarely positioned as consumer subjects in their own right, offer a compelling locus to rethink these multiple positions and orientations. By focussing on their experiences, we shift attention from market-mediated consumer agency to the ways historical inequalities, power asymmetries, and everyday survival strategies structure consumption. Through Carolina’s story, we introduce an orientation that challenges entrenched consumer subjectivities and opens space for alternative investigations of consumption beyond the consumer-market dyad. Through Carolina’s story, we turn to peripheral investigations of consumption.

We started our project on domestic workers

We wanted to talk to domestic workers precisely because they are an ‘institution’ in the peripheries of Brazil; they are part of all Brazilian families. Whether one employs a domestic worker or has a family member who works as one, their presence is ubiquitous. For example, they are present in all our telenovelas, which are an important part of the Brazilian way of life and the country’s main audiovisual product (Macedo, 2016). Imagining one telenovela without a domestic worker seems almost impossible for a Brazilian person.

Domestic workers have been part of the representations of Brazilian daily life since artistic records of Brazilian society have started to gain international recognition. The French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret became famous for his lithographs depicting Brazil during the transition from colonial rule to the early years of independence. One of his most well-known works, Jantar (dinner in Portuguese), illustrates a Brazilian family gathered around a table while enslaved domestic workers serve them, their presence both essential and invisible. In the background, enslaved individuals appear almost as part of the furniture, reinforcing their objectified status. Naked Black children are sitting on the floor, eating leftovers – a stark reminder of the brutal inequalities embedded in Brazilian social life. This historical depiction of servitude and racialised labour persists in contemporary imaginaries, including telenovelas, where domestic workers remain integral yet marginalised figures in the narratives of Brazilian families.

Whereas slavery and colonialism have officially ended in Brazil, domestic work is probably one of the most salient manifestations of colonial inheritance and persistance in daily life in contemporary Brazil. Domestic work is often the work that is destined for poor women, especially Black women in Brazil. More recently, there have been contemporary accounts of the absurdities of domestic workers in Brazil.

Rara, 2019, for example, has collected multiple stories of humiliation and derealisation of domestic workers in Brazil using their own words. After sharing her own experience of humiliation (Varman and Meshram, 2024) working as a domestic worker on Facebook, Preta Rara began to receive hundreds of messages from other domestic workers who had also been denied their humanity. With the creation of a Facebook page called ‘Eu, empregada doméstica’ (which can be translated as ‘I, a domestic worker’), she gathered testimonials from thousands of domestic workers from all over the country. These testimonials cover stories of multiple humiliations, mistreatments, and violence, which are implicated in a degrading system of segregation that produces them as abject (Kristeva and Lechte, 1982) and less-than-human beings (Magalhães Lopes, 2023; Varman and Meshram, 2024).

More recently, there has been a formal and consistent effort from authorities to rescue domestic workers living in conditions of modern slavery. These domestic workers have been rescued after living most of their lives in families’ houses. Often, they start working at a very young age, lack social bonds beyond the respective families they work for, and work without any remuneration or vacation for decades. This is the story of Madalena Santiago, who worked for 54 years at a house without any payment or annual leave and was rescued in 2022 (AB-TV 2, 2022; G1-BA, 2022; see also Leal, 2024). This is the story of many other Brazilian women whose shocking stories started to be investigated by public authorities and covered by the media.

Already knowing this would be our scenario, we started the project.

And then we met Carolina: a shattering experience

Our encounter with Carolina promoted a shattering experience: meeting and interviewing Carolina ² disoriented us. We cried with her, laughed with her, and were moved by her (Ahmed, 2014). Carolina is a 42-year-old domestic worker in São Paulo, Brazil. Her life story encompasses multiple manifestations of the dis/orientations of consumption and capitalism. Yet, we wonder what the consequences of framing her as a consumer are and what the normalisation of such framing in the field is.

Her life story then shifted our orientation as we wondered: how could we frame her in the literature? Is she a marginalised consumer (Hansman and Drenten, 2023; Stephens, 2023), a vulnerable consumer (Dunnett et al., 2016; Hill, 2023; Varman and Vijay, 2018), or is her life story an intended consequence of consumer culture (Bauman, 2007; Fraser, 2022)? What spaces can she occupy in our literature?

It seems to us that framing her as a marginalised or vulnerable consumer would corroborate to straighten her existence and her relations to the world into a progression line that ends in a Western (hetero)normative ideal – the normalised consumer. Additionally, it would also obfuscate important dynamics of consumption/production in the derealisation of the periphery (Varman and Vijay, 2018), as the sharp separation of these two elements into opposite positions fails to capture how they are interdependent and mutually constitutive (Sassatelli, 2007) – in favour of the realisation of the consumer (Magalhães Lopes, 2023).

By taking a cuir (i.e. decolonial queer) phenomenological approach to life stories such as Carolina’s, we wonder if consumption researchers could follow the orientations and disorientations of peripheral lives without reducing them to an othered consumer and consequently open other possibilities for scholars to explore consumer culture and the politics of consumption. The proposition of using queer and decolonial theories seems powerful precisely because of its potential to question normalised positions and orientations, and, consequently, uncover idealised-normalised objects as fundamental to the reproduction of life. It might then offer consumption researchers the possibility to unpack how markets and consumption can be contested, disrupted, shattered, repurposed, and reoriented.

As we sit at the table that Pirani and Daskalopoulou (2022) started to build in their queer manifesto, we echo them to highlight the potential of queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) to disrupt existing social relations to find new ones – that is, to challenge what is felt reachable and what is ‘out of reach’ or ‘out of place’. Like them, we also advocate for the possibility of disorienting and reorienting ourselves to create new forms of living (Ahmed, 2006) and consequently start reimagining ourselves ‘opportunities for others to re-imagine the practice of making and building lives’ (Berlant, 2011: 198).

Furthermore, we also echo the voices of the decolonial table (Jafari, 2022; Södergren and Vallström, 2024; Varman, 2018a; Yalkin and Özbilgin, 2022) that reinforce earlier voices, such as Spivak’s (1988) and her argument on the subaltern subject, marginalised and silenced by dominant power structures, who often lacks the possibility to articulate their own experiences and perspectives. This is because dominant discourses, forged by those in positions of power, shape language itself and the interpretative structures through which experience is understood. Even when the subaltern attempts to speak, their voice is often mediated and interpreted through the lens of dominant discourses. As for Lugones (2010), the colonial difference operates as a boundary that separates those constructed as less than human (racialised, colonised, gendered subjects) from those seen as fully human (white, European, male, heterosexual) – to which we can add consumer. As we wonder how the dominant structures of knowledge production in marketing and consumption tend to silence people like Carolina, we believe that one of the silencing forms is by only listening to her as a consumer – an othered consumer, but a consumer nonetheless.

This way, by proposing a joint table for interconnecting decolonial and queer conversations, we evoke a commitment to engage with silenced narratives and cuir possibilities. In alignment with Spivak (1988), Lugones (2010), Valencia (2015), and Ahmed (2006), we would like to start listening to Carolina as other than a consumer rather than an othered consumer, as the latter seems to contribute to the normalisation of the consumer as the human that counts. We argue that our task as consumption researchers is not to ‘speak for’ the peripheral but to engage in a deconstructive project that challenges the power structures of knowledge construction and creates space for subaltern voices to emerge in all their complexity and plurality.

Turning our orientation towards Carolina: peripheral orientations

We then allow ourselves to turn to Carolina and her life story, which is often intertwined with consumption and consumer culture, but seldom as a consumer herself. We have identified three distinct moments in Carolina’s life story that challenge the orientation towards a ‘normalised’ consumer.

1^st moment – Becoming a modern slave, to become a consumer

Carolina’s story is deeply shaped by the socio-economic conditions of Northeast Brazil. In this region, historical inequalities, high levels of poverty, limited access to education, and insufficient infrastructure are more blatant, partly due to a legacy of economic neglect and unequal income distribution (Sobel et al., 2010). At 10, Carolina left her parents’ house in a small village in the countryside of one of the poorest areas of Brazil to work in a nearby small town. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Carolina was growing up, Piauí, like much of the Northeast region, experienced intense rural poverty, forcing many families into precarious living conditions and limited opportunities (Belandi, 2022; Sobel et al., 2010). The region’s economic struggles led to widespread internal migration, with many children and adolescents like Carolina leaving their villages to work in larger cities, often under exploitative conditions. She has explained to us that this first experience working as a domestic worker was ‘like an exchange’, through which she would have access to essential ‘things like clothes, shoes, period pads, shampoo’. Driven by a desire for basic commodities previously beyond her and her parents’ means, she undertook the challenge of working for a family, exchanging her labour for minimal comfort without a formal salary. She added that her relocation also aimed to support her family, as she said, ‘I left the countryside to assist my parents, striving for something better for them’.

This transition underscores the significance of access to resources for individuals like Carolina to exercise their consumer freedom within the confines of a capitalist system governed by markets (Varman and Vikas, 2007), which is often marked by its negation. To become a consumer, she became a modern slave. At this first moment, Carolina’s living conditions unfolded into consumption conditions that generated her production/working conditions (Sassatelli, 2007). Adopting a consumer perspective could then blur such dynamics of consumer culture, perpetuating the illusion of choice and agency while overlooking the inequalities and power imbalances inherent in Carolina’s situation.

2^nd moment – Becoming a commodity to be (de)valued

After 3 years of working in that house in modern slavery conditions, Carolina considered leaving it to find a paying job, which finally triggered her boss to start paying her some money. It was not a proper salary, but a little cash (25% of the country’s minimum wage), and she decided to stay. She told us that she had then her worst experience in 30 years as a domestic worker – a false accusation made by a colleague. The house where Carolina worked was also home to another worker, Viviane, who was already there when Carolina arrived. She recalls that Viviane was responsible for looking after the couple’s daughter.

One day, the daughter’s necklace disappeared, and Viviane accused Carolina of stealing it. Carolina emphatically denied it. Her boss then went back to her father to tell him that Carolina had stolen it and that they wanted compensation. The couple had internalised the consumer sovereign ethos (Bhatnagar, 2020) and felt entitled to claim the right to their property, even if it would represent taking something from someone who had almost nothing. Carolina’s father tried to argue that there was no way the bosses could be sure that it was her: someone else could have taken it, or something else could have happened to the necklace. Exhausted by the bosses’ inflexibility, who continued to uphold the accusation against Carolina, her father negotiated that she would work for 3 months without receiving any pay as compensation – which she did. After many years, when the daughter was already a grown-up, she bumped into Carolina in the street and recalled that the necklace had fallen down the shower drain when Viviane was bathing her, and it was not Carolina’s fault. As she tells us this story from 30 years ago, Carolina sobs (We cry with her.).

At this moment, Carolina seems to be more a commodity than a consumer – more precisely, a commodity with the bare minimum exchange value. Even though her father believed in Carolina, he agreed to pay something that was not owed. This episode in Carolina’s life can be seen as an act of dispossession (Anker, 2021). Although this moment does cover how rights of property and dispossession permeate our contemporary social relations within consumer culture, not everyone is a sovereign consumer (Sassatelli, 2007) with rights.

Consumption – or consumer culture -— researchers could then explore moments of dispossession of peripheral people that escape the becoming of the consumer (Karababa and Ger, 2011). For example, Fraser (2022) mentions that expropriation practices – ‘the forcible seizure, on a continuing basis, of the wealth of subjugated and minoritised peoples (p. 14)’ – are a brutal confiscation without the ‘niceties’ of ordinary exploitation (which includes the payment of a wage, albeit not in line with the wealth generated). Fraser (2022) differentiates between two types of workers: exploitable workers and expropriable others. The former is ‘accorded the status of rights-bearing individuals and citizens; entitled to state protection, they can freely dispose of their own labour power’ (p. 15). The latter ‘are constituted as unfree, dependent beings; stripped of political protection, they are rendered defenceless and inherently violable’ (p. 15). In her attempt to achieve any consumer freedom through work, Carolina has become incorporated into the expropriable category.

3^rd moment – Becoming a neoliberal self-entrepreneur

After working in other families’ houses in the Northeast, Carolina moved to São Paulo, Brazil’s wealthiest city. There, she worked as a formal employee – a cleaner in a janitorial company – which was initially a source of pride for her. However, she told us she is no longer proud of having a signed contract because the pay is too low. This dissatisfaction is her main justification for becoming a freelance domestic worker using apps.

Through these apps, Carolina seems to not only accept her commodification but also prefer this model of commodification and expropriation, as it offers her a bare minimum of freedom – the freedom to choose, such as selecting employers via an app interface rather than relying on colleagues’ recommendations. Although these apps can be understood as neoliberal technological apparatuses that facilitate corporate accumulation through the derealisation of peripheral lives (Varman and Al-Amoudi, 2016), they provide Carolina with one possibility: the possibility of experiencing another type of ugly freedom – the almost insignificant freedoms through which we can resist in our daily lives that are often not recognised as resistance acts (Anker, 2021). Moreover, this example aligns with the everyday practices of other workers who use technology, personal networks, and available social capital to subvert, however imperfectly, the norms designed to constrain them (Abílio et al., 2021).

While Carolina seems resigned to her limited possibilities within the system, she allows herself – through these apps – to do what she has not been able to do before: she can refuse to accept jobs from certain employers or even stop listening to or replying to them.

Carolina’s third moment illustrates the tension between the notion of freedom as a concrete possibility for autonomy and the structuring dynamics that restrict the scope of that autonomy. It becomes apparent that the ‘freedom’ obtained through apps does not correspond to any form of full emancipation. The capacity to choose within this framework does not challenge the system of oppression itself; it merely offers narrow openings within an already unequal context. At the same time, this third moment in Carolina’s life reveals the entrenched pressures rooted in a colonial past, evoking Lugones’ (2010) analysis of how categories that limit subjects’ capacity for self-determination are naturalised.

In practice, the ‘freedom’ promised by neoliberalism and the categories imposed by colonialism result in a partial and marginal experience of autonomy. Power remains concentrated in the hands of employers and digital platforms, while workers are left to navigate the crumbs of freedom the system grants them. The contradictions emerging from these digitally enabled labour relations not only reveal the persistence of colonial and patriarchal hierarchies but also highlight the need to view freedom not merely as a theoretical ideal. Instead, freedom must be seen as a relational practice -– situated, continually negotiated, and frequently distorted by the structural realities in which the subjects exist (Lugones, 2010).

Challenging the consumer as a straightening device

Previously, we argued that portraying Carolina as a marginalised or vulnerable consumer would be another device to straighten her existence and experiences. Having (quickly) reviewed three moments of her life, we can see why these terms would not be accurate enough. Firstly, these terms presume a ‘correct’ point of reference: the existence of a ‘normal’ consumer, and consumption is a part of having a ‘normal’ life – rather than normalised possibilities of living in a cruel attachment to the capitalist promise (Berlant, 2011). Hence, all lives that do not conform to this normative Western standard would be considered deviant (Lugones, 2010). The existence of beings in a country where social and commercial relations are built on colonisation – and therefore exploitation and enslavement – is not deviant. It is ubiquitous.

As such, the definition of marginalised consumers as those who are on the margins of the market, systematically excluded from consumer opportunities (Hansman and Drenten, 2023; Stephens, 2023), fails to account for the mechanism of contemplating the life of someone like Carolina, who becomes a commodity in order to have commodities. Similarly, a vulnerable consumer is an individual or group that faces an imbalance of power in market interactions, making them more susceptible to exploitation and harm (Dunnett et al., 2016; Hill, 2023). The need to assimilate beings into the role of the consumer can obfuscate the different dynamics of exploration and exploitation (Fraser, 2022). This way, attaching ‘a consumer’ position to othered lives seems counterproductive to explore the multiple positions Carolina can take.

As Fırat and Dholakia (2016) have reminded us, the consumer is just one of the most overriding contemporary forms of human subjectivity. Moreover, human subjectivity is not static; it has taken on different governing forms over time, and it will continue to do so. Carolina’s multiple positions and experiences have the potential to challenge the reiteration of the consumer subject as the human subject that counts. As researchers of consumption, we have a role in challenging such reiteration. Being oriented by Carolina and her experiences allows us to extend Fırat and Dholakia’s critique, exploring how consumption is deeply entangled with stories of dispossession, racial capitalism, and informal economies. Being oriented by Carolina has the potential to foreground the experiences of peripheral lives in neoliberal-colonial normativity (Magalhães Lopes, 2023).

The renowned Brazilian philosopher and activist Sueli Carneiro (2019) argues that black women in Brazil have historically been confined to the most undervalued segments of the country, particularly domestic work, a remnant of the country’s colonial and slavery past. This form of labour, largely reserved for black women, reflects the intersection of racial, gender, and class oppression that continues to reproduce violence and derealisation (Lugones, 2010; Varman and Al-Amoudi, 2016). From Carolina’s early departure from her home in search of work until her current role as a freelance domestic worker using apps, her life and its multiple lines have been permeated by the ugly freedoms of consumption (Anker, 2021) and marketplace violence (Varman, 2018b).

As we quickly exemplify in these three moments, Carolina’s life story – entrenched in consumer culture – has been marked by multiple acts of dispossession and derealisation (Varman and Al-Amoudi, 2016) and permeated by the multiple ugly freedoms of neoliberalism (Anker, 2021). We believe that straightening Carolina to be portrayed as a normalised consumer could be a final act of violence, now dispossessing her of the intricacies of her story. Rather, an orientation towards her – and many peripheral lives – without adopting the consumer as a straightening device can potentially expand the field’s landscape, in line with Lugones’ (2010) recognition of the multiplicity and fluidity of lived experiences within structures of power rather than an idea of a singular and static identity. Moreover, as Ahmed (2006: 2) recalls, phenomenology ‘emphasises the importance of the lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds’. Yet, she warns us that by talking from a phenomenological position in relation to objects, such orientation towards these objects also gives us a position in the world.

As one of our reviewers has brilliantly pointed out, a certain disorientation by embracing cuir possibilities ‘perhaps could involve not only looking at peripheral lives (what, though necessary, other disciplines have done quite extensively), but also looking at what consumption does to peripheral lives, something that is at the centre of consumer culture itself. (…) We overlook [consumers] villainy, and we overlook not only the “context of the context” but how the act of consumption itself can affect so many environments and others’. We believe this is the conversation ³ that consumption scholars cannot overlook any longer, as we realise markets are dying and killing (Varman et al., 2024).

Consumption is central to violent and othering processes. Yet, there seems to be little space to explore the multiple positions Carolina takes within consumer culture that go beyond her normalisation as a ‘consumer’. For us, such detachment from the consumer orientation in exploring othering processes embedded in consumer culture has the potential – as another reviewer has highlighted – to reveal ‘the layered complexities of consumer identities and experiences, as well as the very definition of what consumption means and who a consumer is’. This way, such detachment also responds to Miles’ (2012) warning that,

the danger for research into consumption is that a reluctance to engage in the lived political complexities implied by a consumer society and the dominance of a way of thinking in which it is easier to condemn dominant power structures than it is to interrogate their inherent paradoxes may ensure such research is destined to a life on the academic fringes. As far as it does exist the ‘discipline’ of consumer studies needs to challenge and indeed reinvent dominant modes of social scientific thought. And in doing so it must inevitably focus on the actual lived realities of consumption rather than their assumed effects (p. 227-228).

Shifting our orientation towards Carolina – in her multiple positions, other than straightening to a consumer – might enable us to (a) not only uncover the back of the house, peripheral lives, spaces, objects, and multiple signs of dependence that have remained concealed in the literature but also uncover (b) the multiple acts of violence and injustices that are produced through markets and consumption as well as (c) the inherent paradoxes and the lived political complexities implied by a consumer society – whether becoming ‘a consumer’ or not.

We must then challenge how Western, neoliberal, ‘WEIRD’ (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) assumptions are baked into the use of the concept of ‘the consumer’ and advance the conversation ‘on what we as a discipline can imagine about “the consumer”’, as pointed out by yet another of our reviewers. Ahmed’s queer phenomenology is both a critique and a proposal to shift our orientations, to start taking different positions, to challenge what we have been facing and what we have been concealing, what we keep denying to become visible despite our dependency on. Like Ahmed (2006), we believe it is time to disorient ourselves as critical scholars. And, like Valencia (2015), we also believe it is time to deviate from what has been normalised as critical positions of enunciation.

Concluding remarks

‘To make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things’ (Ahmed, 2006: 161). Nothing could disturb the order of things more in the consumption research field than challenging the centrality of the consumer in the field. For example, Ahmed uses the word ‘black’ as a reorientation device and, consequently, a political orientation, so we propose developing other reorientation devices. It might be time to let go of this attachment (Berlant, 2011) to the consumer and start opening up to cuir possibilities and ‘not presume that lives have to follow certain lines in order to count as lives, rather than being a commitment to a line of deviation’ (Ahmed, 2006: 178).

Since its emergence, scholars interested in exploring consumption and consumer culture have stressed the potential of the field to examine how both consumption and consumer culture permeate our contemporary social relations and thereby can uncover power relations, highlight injustices, and engage in critical conversations that are crucial for promoting social change. Overall, the self-critique about the reasons why the field has not been able to achieve its full transformative potential has often alerted to the limits of focussing on the lived experience of the consumer (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Fitchett et al., 2014; Moisander et al., 2009; Thompson et al., 2013), which obfuscates the macro-conditions that reproduce multiple marketplace injustices and oppressions.

In this reflective piece, we would like to challenge both their diagnosis and the multiple proposed solutions. Rather than disregarding phenomenological accounts, we propose that we can reorient our phenomenological accounts by following peripheral lives through their cuir lines. By following peripheral lives without straightening them into consumers, researchers can then reorient themselves to cover the complex realities and struggles of multiple people living within consumer cultures and uncover the multiple forms of exploration and expropriation inherent to consumer culture and capitalism (Fraser, 2022). After all, ‘queer phenomenology demands an acknowledgement of these normative lines in shaping consumer experience’ (Pirani and Daskalopoulou, 2022: 299). In alignment with queer theories as well as decolonial theories, expanding our views to multiple peripheral lives – and their cuir lines – is a productive way of destabilising taken-for-granted knowledge hierarchies and their by-products.

This way, we can start designing ‘research spaces where the logic of consumption can be questioned in more critical terms, perhaps examining contexts where consumption either does not, and arguably should not, be the primary unit of analysis’ (Fitchett et al., 2014: 503). Following peripheral lives could be one possible route to start designing such spaces. In other words, for us, the potentiality of the field to further engage in critical discussions as well as increase its relevance (and avoid its siloed position in academia) resides less in the impossibility of micro-accounts to advance critical discussions and more in the possibility of reorienting ourselves to peripheral lives without straightening them to the one life to be reproduced – the ‘consumer’, as the human that can be recognised in consumer culture.

By following a queer phenomenology approach and critique (Ahmed, 2006) and embracing cuir possibilities (Valencia, 2015), we would like to reorient ourselves to peripheral lives and look at how their orientation shapes their experiences and the very subjectivities inscribed in their contexts. We do not claim that this should be the solution. Still, we would like to propose such detachment from the consumer as an additional possibility – a possibility for researchers interested in uncovering the normative lines in the wreckage of the capitalist promise – in which we continue to live and consume. As the intelligibility of the subject depends on its orientation, we would like to refute the current consumer orientation and invite other researchers to get disoriented with us towards cuir possibilities.