ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents women's gambling experiences, and the everyday processes of gambling. It offers new, alternative ways of understanding gambling behaviour by re-writing women's everyday routines and practices of UK National Lottery play into the gambling literature. The book also makes three main challenges and contributions to existing, current scholarship, and subsequently develops a new theoretical framework for researching gender, class and National Lottery play. The language adopted in the journalistic accounts of Lottery play is echoed in the vast majority of existing gambling scholarship, which has tended to focus on pathological, deviant gambling, and has criticised the decision-making abilities of those who play. By examining the women's National Lottery participation as it intersects with the ideological and material constraints placed on their everyday lives. The book shows how the women of this research worked to make their Lottery play legitimate.
