Consumer performances as territorial negotiations

Consumer performances are often tied to specific social contexts called theatres of consumption, where the space acts as a site of orchestration of cultural meanings. However, how consumers interact with varying levels of space as they engage in deliberate action, both in the physical and in the phenomenological sense, is an area ripe for exploration. Through an ethnography of drag performances, I theorise consumer performances as the negotiations between the body, private meanings, social meanings, and space. Drawing on Goffman’s (1971) territories of the self as a spatial framework of the self, I show how successful consumer performances are contingent on consumers being able to defend their sense of self across sociospatial domains, and performances may fail when space territory is infringed upon. I thus contribute to work on consumer performances by examining the importance of social geographies—space and boundaries—to the success or failure of consumers’ performances.