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A Carnivalesque Approach to the Politics of Consumption (or) Grotesque Realism and the Analytics of the Excretory Economy

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Politics of consumption analyses often evince a moralistic subtext that traces to the nineteenth-century fusion of Calvinism and patriarchal sexual politics. This spermatic legacy has channeled these critical discourses in a therapeutic direction that attenuates their realpolitik relevance. Drawing from Bakhtin's account of the carnivalesque, the author argues for an analytics of the excretory economy that eschews therapeutic goals in favor of muckraking scholarship that critically analyzes specific market systems and their constitutive networks of power relationships and material consequences. The author concludes by discussing some ways in which muckraking scholarship can mobilize citizen-consumers to the activist cause of transforming structural conditions that render specific facets of commercial culture problematic.

Key Words: muckraking scholarship • grotesque realism • moral critiques of consumption • therapeutic consumption

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