The Anti-Mythical Myths of TikTok’s #Underconsumptioncore : The Market Capture of Gendered Sustainability

Douthwaite, Kate and Cronin, James and Wood, Rachel (2025) The Anti-Mythical Myths of TikTok’s #Underconsumptioncore : The Market Capture of Gendered Sustainability. In: Proceedings of Academy of Marketing 2025 Annual Conference :. Academy of Marketing, Cork. ISBN 9781919647319

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Abstract

This Žižek-Fisherian analysis of TikTok’s ‘#underconsumptioncore’, a trend that aestheticises conscientious individual consumption, illuminates how consumer counter-mythologies underscore the contestations of resisting capitalist realism within its cultural and digital ecosystems. Despite providing a performative forum for questioning several myths inherent to marketplace ideologies, #underconsumptioncore deflects systemic critique by reifying the social phenomenology of consumer culture it purportedly resists. Underconsumption’s post-political attachments to feminised personal responsibility and “ethical elitism” risk entrenching individualistic-narcissistic subjectivities and socio-economic hierarchies.