Economic Anthropology 2019 DOI:10.1002/sea2.12157 Logics of affordability and worth: Gendered consumption in rural Uganda Catherine Dolan 1 , Claire Gordon 2 , Laurel Steinfield 3 , & Julie Hennegan 4 1 Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, WC1H 0XG, UK 2 Social Life, London, SE17 3LH, UK 3 Department of Marketing, Bentley University, Waltham, MA 02452, USA 4 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA Corresponding author: Catherine Dolan; e-mail: cd17@soas.ac.uk This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled. Keywords Consumption; Gender Relations; Affordability; Logics of Worth; Uganda In recent years, menstruation has become a growing concern in development circles, with poor sanitary care linked to a range of adverse outcomes, from early pregnancy and gender disparities in education to shame and social exclusion (Kuhlmann, Henry, and Wall 2017; Sommer and Sahin 2013). In countries like Uganda, where many households skirt precariously along indices of deprivation, the lack of adequate sanitary care is ofen attributed to “period poverty”: the inability of poor households to aford safe and hygienic menstrual protection for women and girls (Birkwood 2018; Cooney 2017; Egunyu 2014). Yet though conditions of economic hardship may appear to delimit consumption at a household level, the picture becomes less clear when seen from within the household, where the capacity to exercise choice is diferentially available. When asked whether sanitary pads were a regular household expense, for example, many men in our study expressed an inability to aford them for their wives or daughters. “We would have loved to buy for them, but we can’t aford,” bemoaned one group of men; women, it was repeated, would “have to fnd alternatives” (focus group, June 19, 2012). Sanitary pads were, however, relatively inexpensive. Priced at around a dollar per pack (Van Dijk, de Kort, and Musiime 2014), they were equivalent in cost to a bottle of beer. What, then, did these participants mean when they said they could not aford to buy sanitary pads? As a key concept, afordability appeared to extend beyond the monetary value of goods and a household’s fnancial capacity to purchase them. It served to index a range of economic, social, and moral valuations, grounded in distinct understandings of worth. In this article, we explore logics of afordability within rural Ugandan households, examining how worth is diferentially ascribed to certain goods and the conditions under which worth is given, contested, and reworked. Drawing from Boltanski and Tévenot’s (2006) notion of “orders of worth” 1 and Folbre’s (1994) concept of “structures of constraint,” we examine how acts of prioritization that constitute household economies refect and © 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved 1