Shifting the discourse: feminist perspectives on consumer behaviour research

Fischer 1993) and representations of women (Hirschman 1993; Bro,vn 1998). Our approach can be distinguished from these earlier applications, as will be shown,

Our central contention is that the contribution of feminist theory to sociology, anthropology and psychology - which coincidentally are all key disciplines in marketing - can be used to transform research practices and enrich epistemological debate in marketing and the study ofconsumer behaviour. This, we believe, can be achieved by altering 'the nature of the audience, the range of readership and the kinds of interactions between author and reader, and [thereby] altering the . . . conversation in a way that allows others to speak' (Strathern 1984, cited in Rabinow 1986: 255 [emphasis added]). In other we concentrate on the voices in the conversation of research practice in order to identify and then shift the discourses in our field.