Fashionably voluptuous: normative femininity and resistant performative tactics in fatshion blogs

Abstract

While research on consumer identity projects has begun to include marginalised consumers, we nevertheless lack insight of the ways in which socio-historical understandings of gendered identity are (re)constructed in the context of consumer resistance and in relation to the market. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw on Butler's notion of performative identity formation and combine this with Bourdieu's notion of capital as identity resource, first to explore performative identity construction of fatshion bloggers embedded in the normative understandings of gendered identity, of adopting and negotiating the dominant cultural discourses of fashion, and second to consider the subversion of such discourses and resistant acts as these are enabled by normativity. We establish two performative identity tactics that highlight normativity as a resource for resistance.     

Do destinations have multiple lifecycles?

This research note tests the proposition empirically that destinations have multiple lifecycles. It studies tourist arrivals to over 200 destination countries and economies over a 35 year period and applies Butler's parameters to map their lifecycles. Six different lifecycle patterns were identified. Empirical findings from this study echo's Baggio's conceptual notation by showcasing that destination lifecycles seems to follow specific traits commensurate with other destinations to form a typology of networked lifecycles. In other words, we go beyond the single-destination lifecycle paradigm to improvise a new research direction that centers on co-occurrence of destination changes that reflect a certain type of lifecycle. It paves the way by introducing the concept of destination coevolution as an analogy to describe lifecycle reciprocity among a cluster of destinations that undergo a similar evolutionary odyssey.