Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how neoliberal consumerist logics shape the humanitarian imagination of volunteers in a thrift store. Volunteers' evaluative practices enact a symbolic violence that obscures the thrift store's implication in the hierarchies that the non-profit organization seeks to combat.

Paper long abstract:

Charitable acts in neoliberal contexts tend to be praised as moral goods in which freely acting citizens voluntarily choose to help those who have been marginalized. Although this logic positions charity as distinct from, or even in opposition to, market dynamics, this paper investigates how gifting, purchasing, and consuming merge to shape the humanitarian imagination and its material practices in the context of a charitable thrift store. Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Abby's House Thrift Store provides donated clothing and household goods to the non-profit organization's clients and, through sales to the general public, generates a significant portion of its budget for a shelter, housing units, and other supportive services for women experiencing homelessness. In their everyday work of sorting clothing and serving customers, the volunteers who staff the store engage in evaluative acts that conflate value in an economic sense and values in a moral sense. We trace how volunteers deploy disciplining dynamics related to race, class, and ethnicity to shape ontologies about "good" or "bad" consumer citizens in ways that also work to enhance volunteers' self-perceptions of their own moral and economic worth. Volunteers' evaluative practices and constructions of charitable selfhoods fuel a dynamic of misrecognition that naturalizes hierarchies between goods and people as essential to a retail, consumer space. These neoliberal market logics enact a symbolic violence that obscures the thrift store's implication in the reproduction of hierarchies that the non-profit organization otherwise seeks to combat.