Power and resistance: reflections on consumer practices from stories of young university men

Abstract

This work analyzes consumer practices, using some theoretical proposals by Michel Foucault. It is proposed that consumption operates in and on the bodies of the subjects, which becomes a field of deployment of power-knowledge. To that end, Foucault's concepts of discipline and biopolitics are used. Following a qualitative methodology, the corpus of analysis is constructed, consisting of stories by young university men from La Araucanía (Chile). It shows how the consumption practices of these young people operate as mechanisms of resistance, which necessarily occurs alongside the deployment of disciplinary power-knowledge.