Who’s Buying It? Queering American Ethical Consumerism is my first book project. I am currently revising the manuscript, which is under contract with The University of Washington Press.
As I mentioned in my About page, I investigate knowledge systems and methodologies using intersectional queer-feminist theories and methods. For this book, I researched contemporary American ethical consumerism as a set of practices and ideas about how to shop our way to a better world. My formal book description can be read below.
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Who’s Buying It? contends that transnational American ethical consumerism arose in response to creative survive-and-thrive techniques of marginalized people—specifically women and femmes, queer folks, people of color, immigrants, enslaved people, indigenous people, folks with disabilities, and the chronically ill—navigating environmental destruction, violence, and identity-based legal and social discrimination. The book takes a long view of ethical consumerism, weaving together histories of colonization, migration, and the rise of contemporary neoliberalisms to better understand ethical consumerism’s current—and unexpected—global popularity. I focus particularly on gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and national belonging as they appear and are contested in ethical consumerist branding and advertising, business contracts, organic / fair trade certifications, and transnational technoscientific interventions into health and environmental justice issues. I engage key concepts in transfeminist studies by Butler and Stryker to theorize how girl-centered economies play into raced, classed, and sexualized assumptions about women, girls, and development by playing on presumed “dangers of femininity.” A hollow nod to feminism, this tactic promises that ethical consumption will bring individual empowerment for de-racialized American consumers, and collective benefits to women and girls of color in developing economies of the global south. I argue that this creates a strange paradox: contemporary transnational consumer brands—such as Product (Red)TM, Café Femenino®, and Susan G. Komen®—maintain certain racialized, sexualized, and geographically located femininities, while also creating new openings for transnational trans and queer gender identities and expressions. The book also pairs Cathy Cohen’s positing of queer alongside Greta Gaard’s formulation of queer ecofeminism to investigate ways contemporary American ethical consumerism might hold less-visible forms of environmental justice efforts and thus engage in what feminist science studies scholars have called “worlding.” Who’s Buying It? magnifies the interesting contradiction that participation in American ethical consumerism is astonishingly varied, while at the same time, ethical consumerism reconfigures disadvantages within the US. Methodologically, Who’s Buying It? pushes the boundaries of LGBT/Queer Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by using global queer-feminist methodologies from queer ecologies and critical disability studies, as well as JK Gibson-Graham’s groundbreaking work in feminist political economy. In summation, Who’s Buying It?, through its careful attention to empirical evidence, innovative intersectional and assemblage queer-feminist research methodology, and engagement with field-shaping debates, produces exciting theoretical contributions to transnational feminist scholarship. This research has been supported by more than $310,000 in internationally competitive funding.