Narratives of sustainable ways of living: constructing the self and the other as a green consumer

Abstract

This paper discusses the representation of “green consumerism” in the prevalent institutionalised discourses of green consumerism, and in the selfnarratives of people who identify themselves as ecologically oriented citizens, focusing on the construction of the self and the other in these texts. The aim is to investigate the ways in which “radical” ecologically oriented citizens, who are largely “marginalised” and positioned as the other in the dominant discourses of green consumerism, engage in resistance towards western, materialistic consumption culture. Drawing from the Foucauldian ideas of political struggle as the “politics of the self”, and personal ethics and moral agency as a mode of selfformation, this paper analyses the ways in which these “green consumers” reject their received subjectivity as consumers. The focus is on the practices of self, and on the ways in which they invent and promote new forms of subjectivity that are more in line with their environmentalist ideology. © 2002, MCB UP Limited