The received wisdom of consumerism, both as a science and as a behavior, takes a binary approach to understanding consumers. The marriage between the consumer and a given industry or institution functions as the paradigm for nearly all business. But for academics, and even for companies whose primary motive is profit, this binary perspective places severe restraints on creative thinking. Imagined as a binary relationship, a type of heteronormative marriage, the consumer-industry coupling offers a feeling and image of stability. It focuses on one aspect of the economic system where the exchange between consumer and "producer" appears straightforward: one offers a product, the other purchases the product. The systems of debt, today signs of unsustainable economic growth, remain invisible. And as Marx argues in Capital, we never see surplus value, the profit and congealed labor that makes many markets fundamentally unequal.
Tourist destinations offer as part of the leisure activities a narrow focus on the acts of exchange, downplaying any images concerning debt. Consumer-industry exchanges, in fact, become leisure activities. Going shopping provides the pleasure of purchasing and exchange, a fleeting escape from the debt that increases with every escape. The mythic marriage between consumer and industry becomes a dominant form of escape, not just an unquestioned coupling resonant with heteronormative relations.
Co-evolution, in the meanwhile, with other people, objects, plants, technologies, spirits has been ongoing, building a store of relations that can be called upon to challenge the dominance of consumer-industry couplings. Recent cultural research in animal studies, embodied in scholars like Donna Haraway, draw attention to the way humans and pets co-adapt to environments and even produce new ecologies that share only weak links with consumerism. Eating practices--vegetarianism and veganism--often bring into relief our powerful links with animals and the affective character of food, its capacity to induce certain feelings in us. Whether these are queer modes of consumption or not remains a question of their capacity to connect us to a diversity of actors, rather than any narrow focus on what goes in to our mouths.
