Consumption Markets & Culture

Conservative Consumer Movements and Reactionary Forms of Consumption

Conservative Consumer Movements and Reactionary Forms of Consumption

Guest Editors

Alisa Minina Jeunemaitre, emlyon business school, minina@em-lyon.com
Stefania Masè, IPAG Business School, s.mase@ipag.fr 

As cultural scholars, we are interested in the ways consumption shapes how people inhabit the world, acting as a cultural and political practice through which people express identities, negotiate values, and imagine alternative ways of living together. Over time, the political dimension of consumption has become increasingly visible, as ideological struggles have permeated virtually every sphere of social life from everyday household routines to activism on social media. In this context, consumption has emerged as a key arena in which people across the political spectrum articulate, enact, and contest competing visions of society and its future. 

Within Consumer Culture Theory research, progressive and emancipatory consumer movements have received sustained attention (e.g., Kozinets & Handelman, 2004; Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013; Thompson & Üstüner, 2015). By comparison, research on conservative consumer movements remains more limited and dispersed, with the notable exception of works by Ulver and Laurell (2020) who examine political opposition to multicultural marketing, Diaz Ruiz and Nilsson’s (2023) fascinating exploration of the flat earth online echo chamber, Drenten et al.’s (2024) analysis of gun influencers on Instagram, Andéhn, Hietanen, and Wickström (2026) examining affective production in the Red Pill collective or Minina Jeunemaitre’s (2026) examination of modest fashion as a form of consumer resistance in the tradwife communities. 

Many existing studies have often approached conservative consumer movements through categories such as extremism, disinformation, the far right, or social danger (i.e. del Campo 2022; Sykes and Hopner 2024). Such categories may indeed be analytically relevant in particular cases. At the same time, they can obscure important distinctions among politically conservative, populist, religious, nationalist, and explicitly extremist positions.

In this special issue, our aim is to understand conservative and countercultural consumer practices within their social and cultural contexts. We invite contributions that foreground participants’ perspectives, exploring how they understand and experience the relationship between everyday consumption and political commitment. Such an emic approach can illuminate the categories, meanings, and interpretations through which political identities are constructed and lived. While this orientation does not require researchers to adopt participants’ political positions or to suspend critical analysis, it calls for reflexive distance from our own assumptions and for careful differentiation among forms of conservatism. Contributions may critically examine exclusion, inequality, and harmful consequences while also asking how participants themselves understand, justify, and experience their practices. The special issue therefore welcomes research that combines critical engagement with analytical openness and that avoids treating conservatism as a single, internally coherent position.

Specifically, we invite contributions that examine conservative consumer movements, practices, and ideologies from a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. The topic encompasses a range of phenomena and contexts, including, but not limited to: 

• ·      Tradwife and gendered lifestyle movements
• ·      Conservative and populist consumer activism
• ·      Religious consumption and faith-based markets
• ·      The rise of religious influencers and religious marketing
• ·      Prepper, survivalist, and self-sufficiency movements
• ·      Conspiracy theories and consumer communities
• ·      Gun cultures and influencer economies
• ·      Nationalist and anti-globalist consumption
• ·      Modest fashion
• ·      Anti-multicultural and antiprogressive market practices and consumer resistance
• ·      Boycotts, buycotts, and ideological consumption
• ·      Platforms and the circulation of political identities
• ·      Consumer culture and family values
• ·      Traditionalism, nostalgia, and heritage
• ·      Domesticity and conservative subject formation
• ·      Market responses to reactionary and populist movements
• ·      Consumption and dialogue across ideological divisions 

We welcome empirical, conceptual, and theoretically informed submissions on any other forms of consumption associated with conservative, populist, or reactionary social movements. Submitted papers may focus on specific consumer movements or develop broader arguments about ideology, markets, and social life.

What needs and anxieties do these movements express? What forms of belonging do they create? How do markets, brands, platforms, and material practices contribute to their formation?

We hope that addressing these questions will help us examine conservative consumer movements with analytical openness, without reducing them to irrationality or political threat, as we believe that attending carefully to how participants understand their own practices may create opportunities for dialogue across ideological differences. Such dialogue can help us encounter political and cultural differences without reproducing the distance and othering that often accompany it. 

We are particularly interested in conceptual and empirical contributions that distinguish among conservatism, populism, reactionary politics, and related categories, rather than treating them as interchangeable. These positions warrant distinct analytical treatment. We therefore invite contributors to ground such distinctions in the empirical characteristics of the movements under study, rather than inferring them from a movement’s perceived distance from progressive political positions. 

While research on these topics is spread across several fields, including consumer research, marketing, sociology, media studies, gender studies, and political communication, we hope that this special issue will bring these conversations into closer dialogue. We are particularly interested in research that explores the following questions:

• ·      How do conservative consumer movements emerge and organize?
• ·      How do they sustain participation over time?
• ·      How do consumption practices express political, religious, gendered, or national identities?
• ·      How do brands and influencers participate in the circulation of conservative ideas?
• ·      What role do digital platforms play in creating ideological communities?
• ·      How do nostalgia, resentment, anxiety, hope, or existential concerns shape consumer practices?
• ·      How do consumers use boycotts, buycotts, alternative markets, or lifestyle practices as political action?
• ·      How do traditional family roles and gender norms become connected to consumption?
• ·      How do religious values and national identities become embedded in market practices?
• ·      How do conservative movements negotiate individual freedom and collective belonging?
• ·      How are these practices represented by the media and contested by other consumers?
• ·      How are reactionary ideas translated into products, services, brands, and market strategies?
• ·      What can consumer research learn from studying ideological positions across the political spectrum?
• ·      Can consumption create possibilities for dialogue across ideological divisions?

We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and a range of methodological approaches. All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review. Manuscripts should make a clear contribution to consumption research and demonstrate relevance to the aims and scope of Consumption Markets & Culture.

The deadline for manuscript submission is February 28th, 2027. Manuscripts should be submitted through the journal’s online submission system:

Potential contributors are welcome to contact the guest editors regarding the suitability of their proposed paper or with any other questions:

Alisa Minina Jeunemaitre — minina@em-lyon.com
Stefania Masè — s.mase@ipag.fr

Authors should consult the journal’s author guidelines for manuscript preparation, formatting, and submission requirements.