Bringing culture into the home: femininity and consumer practices

This chapter examines the home as a gendered spatial context of cultural consumption, arguing that cultural practices cannot be understood independently from the social relations and everyday routines through which they are organized. Rather than treating consumption as an individual act of interpretation or self-realization, the paper approaches cultural consumption as a relational and situated practice, constituted through the material and spatial organization of domestic life. Drawing on studies of television, magazines, reading and popular culture, it explores how gendered divisions of domestic labour shape the time, attention and meanings attached to cultural consumption. The home emerges not as a private refuge opposed to the public sphere, but as a constitutive node of power relations in which femininity, masculinity and family identities are continuously produced and negotiated. At the same time, cultural consumption may create spaces of pleasure, autonomy, communication and collective identification, potentially opening private experiences towards forms of public participation. Domestic cultural consumption therefore reveals the ambivalent relationship between gender, spatiality, power and consumer culture.