ABSTRACT
Marketing and consumer research has shown an increasing interest in exploring material culture and gender. In studying object-person relations, scholars have treated objects as carriers and mediators of gendered meanings (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979), as means for enacting gender roles and relations (Bettany, Kerrane, & Hogg, 2014; Cronin, McCarthy, Newcombe, & McCarthy, 2014; Fischer & Arnold, 1990; Ostberg, 2012), as resources deployed in negotiating individual and collective gender identities (Holt & Thompson, 2004; Martin, Schouten, & McAlexander, 2006; Schroeder, 2003), and more recently, as important ‘agents’ that shape and frame both the actions (Borgerson, 2013; Epp & Price, 2010; Scott, Martin, & Schouten, 2014; Valtonen, 2013) and emotions (Kuruoğlu & Ger, 2014) of gendered consumers. Scholars have thus engaged in materialising the object from various theoretical perspectives. They have, however, been less concerned with materialising the other part of the relation – the person. Therefore, the embodied nature of the consumer has not received adequate attention. This is a significant gap, since, as Tilley, Keane, Kuchler, Rowlands, and Spyer (2006) argue in their introduction to the Handbook of Material
Culture, ‘a theory of materiality requires a theorization of the embodied subject and the multiple ways in which the world is sensed and experienced’ (p. 5).
