Next stop, Pleasure Town: Identity transformation and women's erotic consumption

This study examines erotic consumption by a diverse group of Brazilian women with a particular focus on material culture. Its specific objectives are to understand (1) how women are transformed by their relationships with the erotic products industry and (2) how the erotic products industry may be transformed by its relationship with women. The ethnographic research draws from and interrogates Miller's dialectical theory of material culture. Female orgasm is a key outcome of the assemblages created by women's erotic consumption. That embodied experience becomes a key actor in other emergent assemblages or agencements encompassing identity, conjugal and social relationships, the erotic products industry, and Brazilian society itself. A key contribution of this research is the use of theories of material culture to explain individual consumer identity as a psycho-socio-technical assemblage constructed and transformed in the contexts of other constantly emergent social phenomena. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.