Consumption, Gender and Class.
The Glass Clift of Ordinary life


Roberta Sassatelli


The paper considers how gender and class dynamics are implicated and get realized through a transformation of consumer practices and attitudes facing the perception of risk as related to broad economic dynamics. The financial and economic crisis has impacted greatly on middle-class families, especially in the South of Europe, including Italy. Drawing on empirical research conducted among Italian middle class families, the paper looks into consumer practices and how they get mobilized to face the crisis, foreshadowing a re-appreciation of social standing and social relations in ordinary life choices and options. The re-organization of the patterns of consumption tell us something not only of the survival strategies of middle-class families, but also of their creativity and resourcefulness and of the way gender relations are both re-organized and reproduced. Exploring families’ strategies and attitudes we get a sense of how gender arrangements and class distinctions are getting transformed or otherwise and how the realm of everyday life is linked to wider social structures. In particular, the paper looks at how visions of the future and of family security are imagined and emotions put at work to face conflicts as emerging from the perceived ordinariness of the crisis. The discussion gets rounded off with a reflection on the shifting notion of consumer sovereignty. Bibliography: Sassatelli, R. (2007) Consumer Culture. History, Theory and Politics, Sage, London; Sassatelli, R. (2015) Consumer culture, sustainability and new visions of consumer sovereignty, published ahead of print in Sociologia Ruralis.