The political dimension of consumption work, or political consumption as work: how French households do gatekeeping on the food market

Food policies increasingly expect consumers to regulate markets through their purchases. In this article a parallel is drawn with the sociology of art markets, where gatekeepers are intermediaries who select products in a context of excess supply and complex evaluation criteria. The authors see gatekeeping as part of consumption work, extending Glucksmann's "total social division of labor" to the labor of regulating markets. At the same time, gatekeeping is part of food work, so it requires interacting with both market products and household members. Using a multi-site qualitative study of working-class families in France, it was found that all respondents engaged in gatekeeping when shopping in supermarkets. This had consequences for both the organization of consumption work and interactions with household members. Some households also sourced food outside of the supermarket (from the garden or local producers); this implied interacting and sharing work with the extended family network, but involved no gatekeeping. The interactional work involved in gatekeeping (before, during, and after purchases) or in other forms of provisioning contributed to reinforcing mothers' gendered identities both within their families (as providers of care and facilitators of family relations) and in the labor market, and related to households' positions in the property market.