131 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 3 • no 1 • 131–33 • © Policy Press 2014 • #FRS Print ISSN 2046 7435 • Online ISSN 2046 7443 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674313X13808737332960 Intimacies, families and practices of consumption Emma Casey, Kingston University, UK, e.casey@kingston.ac.uk Yvette Taylor, London South Bank University, UK, taylory@lsbu.ac.uk In this special section of Families, Relationships and Societies, we present six contributions that discuss novel, original research fndings surrounding the theme of intimacies, families and practices of consumption. They are versions of presentations originally given in February 2013 to a combined meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Family and Interpersonal Relationships Study Group and the Leisure and Recreation Study Group. The intention of the study group meeting was to facilitate a space for the continued study of at-home leisure and consumption, a comprehensive study of which we argued necessitated an examination of the role of emotions, feeling and experience and, crucially, intimacy.This intention extends to this special section where we present new ways of thinking about consumption patterns. The contributions are diverse in topic and vary in terms of theoretical approach, but they all share a common theme of exploring everyday routines and practices; or the intimate practices of consumption. By doing so, they tease out some of the frequently overlooked and taken-for-granted subjective processes that, we argue, help to defne and underpin everyday life. As Gabb (2008) has argued, mainstream sociology has often been defcient in providing any account of intimate, domestic practices, a defcit that has often resulted, we argue, in the specifc experiences of women consumers being overlooked (see also Casey and Martens, 2007). Here we attempt to contribute to a readdressing of this imbalance by presenting a collection of papers that prioritise accounts of intimate spaces of consumption including, but not exclusively focusing on, the home.They advance debates about the home as a space for the display of goods, and in particular goods that signify ‘value’ (eg, Skeggs, 1997), by introducing notions of ‘intimacy’ into accounts of consumption by, for example, considering the various ways in which emotions might intersect with cultural and economic forms of exchange. Drawing on earlier work concerning notions of ‘emotional capital’ (Gillies, 2007; Reay, 2008), they unpick the relationships between domestic life and consumption (eg, Casey and Martens, 2007) and everyday spaces for the pursuit of intersections of class, gender and sexualities (eg,Taylor, 2010). The papers examine and place emphasis on everyday life and mundane forms of leisure and consumption and the various afective and symbolic materiality of domestic environments. For example, Julie Seymour’s paper considers the home as a commercial entity and examines the shifting roles of ‘host families’ who ofer up their homes as commercial settings. Seymour demonstrates how the commercial investment in and presentation of ‘home’ coalesce with the unfolding of family life for those living and working within the hospitality industry. For these families, the display of family life ‘at play’ was an important element of being a host family. Landscapes of caregiving open space • introduction THEMED SECTION • Intimacies, families and practices of consumption Unauthenticated | Downloaded 06/18/22 01:57 PM UTC