Affect, consumption, and identity at a Buenos Aires shopping mall

This paper explores the built environment of a shopping mall in light of recent theoretical interventions that stress the affective dimensions of everyday political life. By drawing on sixteen weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I explore how retail affects are unevenly distributed across a diverse public, and how different bodies, in turn, affect the mall in particular ways. In short, this paper explores embodiment as an affective experience that coheres around raced, classed, and gendered bodies at the mall. As such, this paper helps clarify how ethnographic research can benefit from nonrepresentational theory and the 'new materialism' literature that challenges prevailing conceptual approaches to the politics of consumption.