Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice:Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery

Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined persona to an accomplished body to embody pride. Six novel stigma resistance strategies emerged—experimenting, guarding, risk-taking, spatial reconfiguring, self-affirming, and integrating. Body-in-practice thus explains how shame weakens, pride strengthens, emotions stabilize, and self-confidence grows. This research contributes by explaining the hard work of identity repair, exploring stigma resistance across safe and hostile social spaces, and highlighting the emancipatory potential of embodied mastery

Moving Gender Across, Between and Beyond the Binaries:In Conversation with Shona Bettany, Olimpia Burchiellaro and Rohan Venkatraman

This panel discussion explores why marketing and consumer behaviour has struggled to move beyond the binary, the importance of disrupting the conventional binaries to recognize gender/sex/ual diversity, and the challenges in so doing. It raises to the fore concerns about institutional pressures, sanitization of work, academic positionalities, everyday encounters of discrimination against gender/sex/ual diversity, and the emancipatory but oppressive dynamics of categories. Yet the panellists also reflect on ways to challenge binaristic thinking. Just being in the academy and doing (small but) meaningful acts of institutional activism can produce ripple effects and open pathways for a better articulation of lived experiences and realities