Consumer acculturation, gender, and food: Romanian women in Italy between tradition and modernity

Motherhood in migration: schools as acculturation agents

“…Our research shows that dominant acculturation agents leave little room for individual migrants to protect the multidimensionality of their identity projects. This is contrary to what was observed in other consumption contexts, such as food consumption (Chytkova 2011). Thus, the vulnerability of these migrant women-mothers resides on them being subject to the unrelenting pressure of an institution that imposes significant demands on their productive time, and impede them from developing mutifaceted identities.…”

“…Migrants can also develop hybrid identity projects by combining cultural elements from the home, host, and global cultures (Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005;Oswald 1999). For instance, Chytkova (2011) argues that even in contexts of constraint, consumers' creative use of marketplace resources can still allow them to recreate multiple hybrid identities and demonstrates how poor migrant women adapt their cuisine as a possible response to the constraints on both the home and the host cultures. Food consumption, however, is a mostly private consumption domain that awards more agency to the consumer.…”

Theorizing Reactive Reflexivity: Lifestyle Displacement and Discordant Performances of Taste

“…In all these cases, critically reflexive consumers have become sensitized to the normative limitations and While acknowledging that resistant gender performances can precipitate social stresses, stigmatization, and interpersonal tensions, these aforementioned studies portray critical reflexive awareness as a revelatory state that ultimately empowers consumers to assert a self-directed agency against forces of social determination and to reconfigure their identities in ways that offer an enhanced sense of empowerment (Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013;Moisio, Arnould, and Gentry 2013;Sandicki and Ger 2010;Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). Accordingly, these analyses also tend to highlight the ways in which marketplace resources are reflexively leveraged (and in some cases co-created) to facilitate and legitimate alternative performances of gender identity and to modify embodied predispositions that would otherwise anchor consumers to conventional gender ideologies (Chytkova 2011;Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2012;Goulding and Saren 2009;Gurrieri and Cherrier 2013;Harju and Huovinen 2015;Hein and O'Donohoe 2014;Kates 2002;Martin et al 2006;Moisio et al 2013;Scaraboto and Fischer 2013;Thompson and Üstüner 2015).…”

“…In regard to the reflexive relationship between habitus and taste, consumer researchers have most commonly investigated contexts in which consumers are seeking to cultivate new tastes and, thereby, internalize new forms of cultural capital that would transform their habitus in a desired way (Chytkova 2011;Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013;Chytkova 2011;Kravets and Sandikci 2014;McAlexander et al 2014;Holt 2007, 2010). Our study profiles a case in which consumers are reactively seeking to prevent their habitus from being reshaped by a new alignment of (less abundant) lifestyle resources.…”

Gender and Migration-Driven Changes in Rural Eastern Romania. Migrants’ Perspectives

“…He relies so much on me in thinking, money-wise, in all he does. But his masculine pride won't let him admit that all we have, we have it because I have This may seem astonishing, but selfsacrifice for the interest of family is found as one of the main characteristics of women's identity in Romania, as shown by Chytkova (2011) in her study on consumer behavior of Romanian women in Italy. Bearing this in mind, is difficult to determine the share of economic remittances sent by women.…”