Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India

This article examines how new, globally-inflected patterns of consumption among young people in the state of Kerala, India are configured in relation to a specifically postcolonial cultural politics of gender, class, and caste, rooted in the colonialist and nationalist projects. Rather than focus on the presence or absence of agency and/or resistance within consuming practices, the article elucidates the cultural-political terrain into which consumption as an objectified field of practice is inserted. By paying attention to this terrain, it becomes possible to examine the contradictions of consumption for young women and men who are both objects of commoditization and subjects of consumption. The article locates consumption within larger discursive domains, at both the national and regional level, which contest the meaning of globalization in ways that produce and circulate highly gendered constructions of consumer agency. Drawing on ethnographic material on gender, youth, and consumption in Kerala, the article traces the intersecting gender, class, and caste terrain that underlies this field of consumption. Negotiating the space of consumption under new conditions of globalization entails traversing a gendered terrain of masculinities and femininities in ways that reveal the link among youth, consumption, and globalization to be a fraught and contradictory.