Performing Consumers

<p><em>Performing Consumers</em> is an exploration of the way in which brands insinuate themselves into the lives of ordinary people who encounter them at branded superstores. </p><p>Looking at our performative desire to ‘try on’ otherness, Maurya Wickstrom employs five American brandscapes to serve as case studies: Ralph Lauren; Niketown; American Girl Place; Disney store and <em>The Lion King</em>; and The Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In this post-product era, each builds for the performer/consumer an intensely pleasurable, somatic experience of merging into the brand and reappearing as the brand, or the brand’s fictional meanings.</p><p>To understand this embodiment as the way that capital is producing subjectivity as an aspect of itself, Wickstrom casts a wide net, drawing on:</p><ul> <li>the history of capital’s relationship with theatre</li> <li>political developments in the United States</li> <li>recent work in political science, philosophy, and performance studies. </li> </ul><p>An adventurous study of theatrical indeterminancy and material culture, <em>Performing Consumers</em> brilliantly takes corporate culture to task.</p> Introduction 1 On the move at Niketown and Ralph Lauren 2 Robots, gods and greed: the theatrum mundi in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace 3 The Lion King, mimesis, and Disney’s magical capitalism 4 Making Americans: the American Girl Doll and American Girl Place Epilogue