ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a thematic overview of the motivating interests, conceptual orientations, and theoretical agendas that characterize the research stream to date, with a particular emphasis on articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). It examines those seemingly ordinary brands that are part of the lifestyle of the household. The chapter commences with brash overstatement, continues with ever-mounting hyperbole, and climaxes with a sucker punch of tremendous rhetorical power, a real haymaker. It expresses that consumer research, like other bodies of knowledge, has sometimes misrepresented women and a portion of consumer research's theory and knowledge are gendered in unrecognized ways, and that feminist critique is required to clarify the implicit assumptions. One leading view, called the substantive theory, contends that technology is a power in its own right, fundamental to the historical trajectory of Western civilization. Without it, "contemporary culture—work, art, science and education, indeed the entire range of interactions—is unthinkable".
