Thesis
Black bodies out of place: how Black women navigate consumer spaces
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2026
- Thesis identifier
- T18013
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202273032
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This research investigates how Black women navigate and experience consumer spaces that continue to centre whiteness as the normative standard. Within the contemporary marketplace, often perceived as a “white space” (Anderson, 2022), their presence is frequently marked as exceptional, surveilled, and implicitly unwelcome. Such exclusionary dynamics erode feelings of belonging and self-worth, shaping how Black women perform and negotiate their consumer identities. The vulnerability of “Black bodies in white spaces” highlights the persistence of racialised structures in everyday consumption, influencing behaviour, emotion, and identity formation. A review of existing scholarship shows that consumer spaces reproduce racial hierarchies through microaggressions, surveillance, and routine acts of exclusion (Pager, 2007; Pachankis et al., 2018). As a result, Black women engage in heightened vigilance to anticipate discrimination and navigate environments that often cast their Blackness as suspect (Winters, 2020; Anderson, 2015, 2022). This continuous psychological and embodied self-monitoring constitutes a form of emotional labour that shapes well-being, identity, and marketplace participation. Understanding these dynamics is essential for examining how racial identity, fatigue, and coping strategies intersect in consumer life. Theoretically, the research integrates Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) to explore how structural racism and cultural meaning-making co-produce marketplace experiences. Incorporating Black Feminist Theory (BFT) foregrounds the lived experiences and epistemic authority of Black women as central to understanding consumer culture. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative Black feminist approach, drawing on in-depth interviews with Black women in Edinburgh and Glasgow to illuminate how everyday consumption is shaped by racialised power relations. The findings demonstrate that consumer encounters are not isolated events but recursive cycles of anticipation, navigation, and reflection. The research introduces the Racialised Consumer Navigation Cycle, theorising racialised consumption as an ongoing process unfolding across three interconnected stages: pre-space (anticipatory labour and strategic preparation), in-space (performing legitimacy under surveillance), and post-space (processing harm and recalibrating future strategies). This model operationalises CRT’s principle of racism’s permanence, showing how racialised encounters accumulate over time to shape identity, emotion, and future consumer practices. All those spaces are looked through, navigating identity, navigating emotions and navigating safety. The research advances Race in the Marketplace (RIM) scholarship through two key contributions. First, it conceptualises the Racialised Consumer Navigation Cycle as a temporal-spatial framework demonstrating that marketplace discrimination is cyclical rather than episodic, unfolding across anticipatory, performative, and reflective stages. Drawing on Anderson’s (2015) “white space,” McKittrick’s (2006) “space as race,” and Lipsitz’s (2011) “white spatial imaginary,” the framework reveals consumer spaces as racialised geographies that actively produce and police racial difference. Second, it operationalises Black feminist epistemology as methodological praxis, showing how the researcher’s shared positionality as a Black woman enabled conditions for authentic knowledge production, challenging extractive research traditions and offering an ethical model for studying marginalised consumers.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Hewer, Paul
- Hamilton, Kathy
- Resource Type
- DOI
Relations
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PDF of Thesis T18013 | 2026-07-22 | Public | Download |