Height matters: practicing consumer agency,gender, and body politics

The significance of body and gender in the formation of consumers’ identities and agencies has been widely scrutinized. Nevertheless, this study argues that this formation is not fully understood, unless the role of height is taken into account. It leans on a practice-based perspective and critical auto-ethnographic methodology so as to examine how a distinct agency is fabricated for a short-sized female body by a whole range of social, material, and sensory practices that are continuously enacted across various domains of life. It thereby adds to the existing literature on body, gender, and consumer agency by way of incorporating height into critical inquiries this far mostly concerned with weight; by way of materializing and sensorializing the fabrication of an embodied consumer agency this far addressed in visual terms; and by way of considering everyday life as the site in which it continuously unfolds. These insights bear important implications for the development of body politics.