Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India

In much popular discourse, a short-hand way to mark the advent and impact of globalization is to point to the evidence of "global" youth consuming practices and symbols in often remote corners of the world: during the 1990s, for example, the popularity of the basketball star Michael Jordan and his team the Chicago Bulls in the slums of Brazil and in rural villages in Africa, the spread of hip-hop music around the world, and the popularity of McDonalds among young people in China. These examples have a theory of globalization and youth embedded within them. Youth is seen as a consuming social group, the first to bend to what is understood to be the homogenizing pressures of globalization, a globalization fundamentally tied to Americanization. Youth consumption practices become an index of the presence and reach of globalization.