Shopaholic stories: Tales of therapeutic addiction, governance, and political economy

Abstract

Contemporary culture encourages shopping to abate negative emotions or alter one’s disposition. This phenomenon has become known as retail therapy. Using two types of narratives – those told by mass media and those told by individual shoppers collected through interviews – this article compiles them together to illuminate the tension between the experience of agency (the therapeutic effects of shopping) and constraint (the addictive qualities of shopping) people experience. The article argues that this tension situates shoppers, especially those who participate in retail therapy, as ideal subjects for governance in a neoliberal society that values self-regulation and relies on immaterial labour. As shoppers participate in the narratives of retail therapy, they qualify themselves as citizens.