ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the wider context of Jane sensory home, consumption and laundry practices as a case study in how everyday laundry practices and the sensory knowledge and strategies that inform them are constitutive of gendered identities. It introduces the ideas, methodology and materials that inform this analysis. The chapter discusses how interpretation informed by the anthropologies of the senses, experience, gender and the home. Understanding the home as a site of consumption is fundamental to social scientific analysis of how everyday life is lived in contemporary modern western capitalist societies. In Jane's case study below this exemplifies women's agency, highlighting Silva's point that women can be 'active agents in the family and its consumption practices', thus contradicting problematic and universalising theories of patriarchy that insist the home is a universal site of women's subordination. One motive for selecting Jane's case study shows her life and her laundry with an openness and enthusiasm combined with wit and self-confidence.
