Consumer Sexualities

Consumer Sexualities explores womens 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, womens 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 womens 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.