ABSTRACT
Few empirical insights exist within the marketing or consumer research fields about the gendered origins and consequences of consumer stress, and in particular, how economically disadvantaged groups experience it. Highlighting the absence of stress as a theoretical construct in the field of marketing, Moschis (2007) has advocated its usefulness as an overarching framework in consumer behaviour, with a number of consumer researchers incorporating elements of stress in their work to determine its impact on consumer decision-making and coping strategies (Andreasen, 1984; Duhachek, 2005; Euehun, Moschis, & Mathur, 2007; Hibbert & Piacentini, 2003; Mathur, Moschis, & Lee, 2006; Mick & Fournier, 1998; Moschis, 2007; Sujan, Sujan, Bettman, & Verhallen, 1999). Yet, gender as an important analytical category, remains invisible in a large proportion of scholarship on consumer stress. This study therefore contributes social stress as a new theoretical lens to explore the gendered complexities of economic disadvantage, consumption and marketplace activity. The paper makes a further contribution by surfacing the hidden, unequal social relations and associated consumption strains bound up with the disadvantaged position of an intersectional group of women experiencing poverty. To date, the marketing and consumer behaviour literature has not sufficiently incorporated these alternative perspectives, with studies on the feminisation of poverty, and its interrelationship
with consumption and hardship notably absent (Catterall, Maclaran, & Stevens, 2005; McRobbie, 1997).
