The Branded and Gendered Brazilian Body: Material and Symbolic Constructions in an Overlooked Context

Bernardo Figueiredo

Since its first conference in 2006, CCT has been growing in size and reach. Some have noted that CCT has become much more European in the recent years, with North American and European countries taking turns to host the event. A recent paper by Thompson, Arnould, and Giesler (2013, p. 164) argues that the CCT heteroglossia should be incentivized through the promotion of a shift “in a direction that more fully recognizes the distinctive theoretical, contextual, and institutional interests of scholars located in the global South.” Indeed, previous culture-centric work focusing on the global South (e.g., Arnould, 1989; Bonsu & Belk, 2003; Dolan & Scott, 2009) has demonstrated the benefits of moving beyond Americo-Eurocentrism in consumer research. Contexts from global South help promote a distinctive logic of marketing and consumption practices, which revitalizes the CCT field as a whole and promotes the development of theory. However, studies coming from, or based on, these contexts are not numerous. The few existing studies have focused mostly on parts of Southeast Asia and Africa. Latin America remains a vastly unexplored area for consumer culture researchers. More work on the area is imperative, given the political and economic weight recently acquired by some countries in the international scene. Brazil, for example, now has the seventh largest GDP in the world (http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/brazil/overview), and a variety of unexplored issues related to the socio-historical shaping of localized cultures of consumption.