Soper, Kate

Ryle, Martin

Thomas, Lyn

The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently

Basingstoke

2009

9780230537286

Alarm over the contribution of affluent lifestyles to global warming and environmental destruction is combining with growing disquiet over the damage affluence does to consumers themselves. Consumerism is increasingly felt to be both unsustainable and harmful to health and happiness. The search for alternative conceptions of the good life has moved from the margins to the centre of contemporary debate.
This collection offers a vital intervention in the context of this anxiety, disenchantment and openness to other ways of living. It engages with these developments as they are being reflected in culture and shaping experience in Britain, Europe and the United States. Its 'alternative hedonist' perspective informs an analysis that covers representations in film, TV and writing; new initiatives in the production and marketing of food; the ethics and politics of consumer choice; and philosophical and cultural inquiry into the nature of happiness and desire. Original, forcefully written and timely, it points towards a new inter-disciplinary understanding of how the consumer society and its future will be theorised, researched and taught in higher education and beyond.

Notes on Contributors
Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Counter-Consumerist Concern
Kate Soper

Part I Texts and Representations

1 Representing Consumers: Contesting Claims and Agendas
Roberta Sassatelli

2 The Past, the Future and the Golden Age: Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral
Martin Ryle

3 Ecochic: Green Echoes and Rural Retreats in Contemporary Lifestyle Magazines
Lyn Thomas

4 Mediated Culture and Exemptionalism
Simon Blanchard

Part II Value, Hedonism, Critique

5 The Bohemian Habitus: New Social Theory and Political Consumerism
Sam Binkley

6 Sustainable Hedonism: The Pleasures of Living within Environmental Limits
Marius de Geus

7 Green Pleasures
Richard Kerridge

Part III Everyday Consumption

8 Happiness and the Consumption of Mobility
Juliet Solomon

9 Gendering Anti-Consumerism: Alternative Genealogies, Consumer Whores and the Role of Ressentiment
Jo Littler

10 Growing Sustainable Consumption Communities: The Case of Local Organic Food Networks
Gill Seyfang

Part IV Conclusion

Conclusion
Martin Ryle, Kate Soper and Lyn Thomas

Index