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This seminar will critically engage with important social and cultural transformations that have accompanied the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian economy since the 1990s through the lens of consumption cultures. It retraces how people engage with constantly evolving imaginaries of global modernity through particular cultural patterns of consumption. The individual sessions examine interplays between market forces and various “sites” for consumer cultures such as religion, salaried work and corporate environments, practices and discourses of intimacy, love and sexuality, as well as new forms of relating to one’s own and other bodies.
We will examine topics like the international and domestic marketing of spirituality, neoliberal disciplines of professionalism, online dating, queer identities, bodybuilding and beauty pageants. The seminar will thus explore emerging and intersectional social formations that cut across or reorganize entrenched social categories of religion, gender, class, or caste.
The seminar is divided into four blocks, each focusing on a specific site with its own changing consumption dynamics.
Block 1: Religion
Block 2: Work
Block 3: Love, Sexuality, Dating
Bock 4: Body, Fashion
Each session will rely on sources like still-images, billboards, videos, documentary films and new social media platforms used for both dating and worship.
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