Consuming Happiness

Auteur

Mehita Iqani is South African Research Chair in Science Communication at Stellenbosch University. Her current research focusses on the links between consumer society, quality of life (happiness), and environmental and planetary sustainability. She is the author and editor of several books on media, consumer culture, luxury, waste, and the global south, the most recent of which include Garbage in Popular Culture (2021), Consumption Media and the Global South (2016), Media Studies: Critical African and Decolonial Approaches (2019), and African Luxury (2019).

Texte du rabat

This book offers a collection of scholarly writing on the meanings of happiness in relation to consumption. The chapters in this volume explore how material practices link to structures of power and exploitation. The chapters in this book were originally published in Consumption Markets & Culture.

Contenu

1. Consuming happiness: aspirational practices in/from the margins 2. Divine discontent: aspirations and subjective well-being at a time of social mobility and high inequality 3. Prophets making gendered interventions: a feminist discourse analysis of gendered online miracles, advice, advertisements, and testimonies 4. Your boy is a boiii: capturing the consumption of trans joy in the form of synthetic testosterone 5. Performing drag in a pandemic: affect in theory, practice and (potential) political mobilization 6. Consuming Africa: safari aesthetics in the Johannesburg beauty industry 7. Managing sullied pleasure: dining out while black and middle class in South Africa 8. Consuming the rich white Bitch on The Real Housewives of Johannesburg