ABSTRACT
This collection points to some of the ways in which it is important and appropriate to develop gender-informed perspectives of consumption. In the introduction to this book, we argued that existing accounts of consumer culture are lacking in terms of the dearth of attention paid not only to the particular role of women as consumers, but also to the everyday, gendered practices underpinning consumer activity pertaining to domestic and intimate life. One of the key issues that the chapters in this collection bring to the surface of consumer studies is the very multi-faceted nature of a whole range of women’s consumer practices. Moreover, they demonstrate the ways in which gender operates alongside other structural categories such as class, sexuality and age; all of which work to shape and reproduce women’s consumption decisions and activities. The chapters also draw attention to the ordinary and mundane in everyday patterns of consumption. Building upon the arguments developed in Gronow and Warde (2001), this allows the reader to juxtapose the different purposes served by consumption in women’s lives in different contexts. Moreover, it points to the dialectic between the special and the mundane, embodied not only in the diverse forms in which consumer culture confronts us, but in dominant ways of thinking about what constitutes improvement in the quality of life during the twentieth century. Arguably, this is an important prevailing theme that is shared by the collection’s otherwise often diverse chapters and which will be a central theme for discussion in this afterword.
