The Political Life of Everyday Sustainability. Conspicuous Sustainable Consumption and Normative Resistance

Moral ambivalence has long characterized consumer practices and discourses, becoming more pronounced as sustainability gains relevance. This paper argues that sustainable consumption is not normatively neutral: it participates in the production of social distinction through competing claims to moral legitimacy. It develops the concept of conspicuous sustainability to capture how sustainability operates as a visible marker of moral worth and social positioning in contemporary consumer culture. Rather than treating visibility as a superficial dimension of display, the paper conceptualizes it as a mechanism through which ecological legitimacy is produced, distributed, and contested. Considering the tensions animating conspicuous sustainable consumption, it shows how moralized visibility structures the recognition of environmental subjects, generating asymmetries in ecological valuation whereby some practices are publicly legitimized while others remain invisible or devalued despite comparable environmental impact. The paper further argues that such dynamics may generate normative resistance when dominant sustainability narratives are experienced as exclusionary and ultimately extractive. Developed as part of the Symposium “Conspicuous Sustainability: Consumption, Climate Change and Morality”, which it introduces, the paper highlights sustainability as an arena of moral and political valuation in which legitimacy, inequality, and recognition are continuously negotiated.