Resistance has been conceptualized in two ways in relation to consumer culture. First, as symbolically subversive practices that are largely autonomous from consumer culture but susceptible to being co-opted into consumer culture or transformed into commodities. Second, as meanings and practices that arise from within consumer culture, so that audiences of mass media and consumers of commercial culture are understood to be actively engaged in resisting or negotiating with the dominant ideologies encoded in the texts and commodities they consume.

Resistance against Consumer Culture

The first definition of resistance emerged from the initial forms of critical theory, the development of the counterculture in the late 1960s, and the first studies of youth subcultures in the so-called Birmingham school during the 1970s. The originators of critical theory, particularly ...

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