"It's her shopping list!" Exploring gender, leisure, and power in grocery shopping

Abstract

This paper explores how the grocery shopping trip has the potential to offer opportunities for leisure. Whilst previous work on consumption has focused on more public sites of consumption, we focus on the mundane, day-to-day reality of supermarket shopping and leisure within family relationships. This paper argues that any leisure gained through shopping is devalued, as it is subject to gendered power relations in the household. The data from 13 heterosexual couples illustrates how these negotiations are played out in the shopping activity. We found that gendered social relationships determined the experiences and opportunities for leisure for the women in the study. Our findings further demonstrate that rather than providing an empowering space for leisure, grocery shopping actually reproduced and positioned these women within traditional discourses of housewife and mother, thus restricting and reducing their access to clearly defined and valued leisure time.