Migrant Women's Identity Formation and the Marketplace: Between Constraint and Creativity

This presentation offers an insight into migrant women’s deployment of marketplace symbolic resources in their negotiation of their traditional gender role. Based on the data on Romanian women in Italy and their food consumption practices, we identify different strategies they employ to negotiate the traditional gender script based on the dominant discourses in their home culture, and the modern woman myth featured in the marketplace representations in the host culture. We then show how this process encourages the acquirement of social and cultural capital, that eventually leads to the transcendence of the ascribed dominated position of a low-status immigrant within the host culture’s social structure.

Citation:

Zuzana Chytkova and Dannie Kjeldgaard (2011) ,"Migrant Women's Identity Formation and the Marketplace: Between Constraint and Creativity", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 31.