The body embodies differing cultural, economic, political, and social interventions, manifesting through art, consumption, and medicine. Complimenting this has been an ongoing dispute over who owns one’s body and the related embodiment. Consumption literature has focussed on tattooing, plastic surgery and other consumer lifestyle self-enhancements, yet ignores those aspects of embodiment transcending into the margins of society: disabilities, transgender, diseased bodies, aging bodies, the incarcerated and obesity. This track explores our understanding of who owns embodiment and how others, supported by the market, also embody values on our bodies, marginalising individuals as outliers to the market ideal.

Track Leaders

Dr. Andrew Lindridge's  (andrew.lindridge@newcastle.ac.uk ) research interests focus on the marginalized consumer, i.e. consumers who feel unable or unwilling to identify with the consumer market, or who the market intentionally excludes owing to cultural, economic, political, religious, or social reasons. His research has received numerous awards and has appeared in a variety of refereed journals, including: The European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and The Annals of Tourism. Andrew is currently the Editor for Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, and an Associate Editor for The Journal of Marketing Management.

Anoop Bhogal-Nair (anoop.Bhogal-Nair@dmu.ac.uk ) research interests focus upon understanding how consumers negotiate and consume both their sense of physical being and their self-identity within the spaces they occupy. Her interests remain rooted in: (a) understanding how young Indian women negotiate the contours of modernity and tradition in contemporary Indian society, and (b) how ethnic minority consumers negotiate hyphenated identities in Britain. Anoop’s research has appeared in Advances in Consumer Research and has been presented at a variety of conferences, including: The Association for Consumer Research (ACR), Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT).