Athanasia Daskalopoulou

Self-tracking enables people to quantify and measure lifestyle and fitness activities and experiences. Our study focuses on the role of self-tracking in young people’s relationship with their body and their lived, ‘fleshy’ experiences in the social world. We draw on 23 in-depth interviews with young people using a life story approach. Our findings show that self-tracking affords young people to engage in different types of ‘body work’, to care for and transform their body that is in constant flux by treating it as either a ‘private’ or ‘shared’ project. We contribute to ongoing debates about the role of self-tracking in young people’s lives by offering a holistic approach that considers the individual and social circumstances that render self-tracking an ongoing, iterative, cumulative and embodied process of discovery, learning and lived and ‘fleshy’ experience.

In this manifesto, we explore how queer theory can contribute to expanding what we consider legitimate knowledge within marketing research. Previous scholars in marketing and management have highlighted the potential of queer theory, remarking how little it is used within the discipline. Reviewing marketing scholarship that uses queer theory shows how it is mostly applied in relation to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisex, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) consumers and contexts, reproducing the same dualism it challenges. To overcome this, we provide a brief outline of the theory, leading to five research avenues that are relevant to marketing: gender and sexuality; phenomenology; desire; failure and methodology. Each of these avenues considers how queer lenses have been and could be applied within our discipline. We stress that the epistemological value of queer theory is in valuing the margins, rejecting dualism and questioning the hierarchies of power within capitalism. In the utopian logic of the manifesto, we do not intend to provide guidelines, but horizons of possibility for marketing and consumer theorisation.