Performing Consumers: Global Capital and its Theatrical Seductions

Performing Consumers: Theatrical Identifications in Corporate Culturesis a searching exploration of the way in which brands insinuate themselves into the lives of ordinary people who encounter them at branded super-stores. Looking at our performative desire to "try on" otherness, Wickstrom employs five American brandscapes to serve as case studies: Ralph Lauren; Niketown; American Girl Place; Disney store andThe Lion King;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. To understand this embodiment as the way that capital is producing subjectivity as an aspect of itself, Wickstrom casts a wide net, drawing on: the history of capital's relationship with theatre, political developments in the United States, and recent work in politicalscience, philosophy, and performance studies. An adventurous study of theatrical indeterminacy and material culture,PerformingConsumersbrilliantly takes corporate culture to task.

Maurya Wickstrom is Assistant Professor of Drama at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.