Consumption research is burgeoning across a wide range of disciplines. The Routledge Handbook on Consumption gathers experts from around the world to provide a nuanced overview of the latest scholarship in this expanding field. At once ambitious and timely, the volume provides an ideal map for those looking to position their work, find new analytic insights and identify research gaps. With an intuitive thematic structure and resolutely international outlook, it engages with theory and methodology; markets and businesses; policies, politics and the state; and culture and everyday life. It will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social and economic sciences.

Consumer Sexualities explores women’s experiences of shopping in ‘sex shops’ and using sexual commodities in their everyday lives. This enlightening volume shows how women take up sexual consumer ‘technologies of the self’ to work upon and understand themselves as confident and active sexual agents in postfeminist neoliberal culture. In guiding the reader through the historical emergence of sexual commodities ‘for women’ in feminism and postfeminism, Wood points to the normalisation and regulation of sexual practices and identities in and through consumption. Indeed, women’s accounts show the work involved in constructing the ‘right’ – knowledgeable, tasteful, and confident – orientation to sexual consumption and, by extension, in becoming an intelligibly ‘good’ sexual person. At the same time, the author draws upon de Certeau to show how the ordinary contexts in which sexual commodities are used can lead to unpredictable moments of adaptation, discomfort, playfulness, and resistance. A rich analysis of women’s everyday strategies of ‘making do’ with the kinds of femininity and female sexuality that sex shop culture represents, Consumer Sexualities will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and gender studies with interests in gender, sexuality, sex, and consumption.

The volumes in the series Werbung - Konsum - Geschichte investigate advertising, marketing, consumerism, and material culture both past and present by taking perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, cultural studies, communication studies, and integrative scholarship. The series' editorial team aims to promote productive discursive and interdisciplinary exchange, and to provide fresh impetus for further research into these areas. Editorial board: Reinhild Kreis, Holger Schramm und Guido Zurstiege.

Explores how evolutionary psychology has begun to identify the prehistoric origins of human behavior and discusses how those discoveries have influenced the way consumer spending is viewed and controlled by companies, retailers, and marketers.

Combining historical and ethnographic analysis, this book deals with the making of the heterosexual imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present in the Indian context. This unique book uses methods from anthropology, cultural studies and history to explore the making of modern cultures of sexuality in India. It provides an analysis of the sexual and domestic politics of the period by focusing on the vast corpus of publications and journals on sexology from the 1920s to the 1940s, and links Indian activities with those in other parts of the world. The author analyzes material that has thus far been outside the purview of scholarly studies, namely, ‘footpath pornography’, magazines such as Sexology Mirror (in Hindi), women’s magazines dealing explicitly with sex and sexuality.

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Drawing upon anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives, this volume provides a unique insight into women’s domestic consumption. The contributors argue that domestic consumption represents an important lens through which to examine the everyday production and reproduction of socio-economic relations. Through a variety of case studies (such as gambling, wedding day consumption and bedroom décor), the essays explore and reconsider the nature of public and private spaces, and the subsequent nature of domestic space - often by challenging traditional notions of what constitutes ’the domestic’. The volume demonstrates the broad range of experiences that domestic consumption offers women and reveals some of the complex meanings and motivations underpinning women’s consumption practices.