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.