ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how gender and class are significant for the family as a unit of consumption. It merges empirical insight with theoretical conjecture to demonstrate how identity and consumption are inextricably bound, and how these inform women's strategies of emotional investment. The chapter explores the idea of the use and exchange value of emotional capital, expanding Pierre Bourdieu's threefold characterisation of capital economic, social and cultural to interrogate the significance of gender and boundaries of class for family practices. It investigates how family practices overlap with consumption practices to reveal this process of construction and representation of a way of living. It follows from David Morgan's suggestion that the use of the term practices recognises that family life is never simply family life because it is always continuously connected with other areas of existence. This chapter draws in a case-study of a family, which selected from a total of 23 included in Ethnography of Home Life project.
