Romantic Consumption Research Articles

Honeymoon Tourism as Romantic Consumption in China

Honeymoon Tourism as Romantic Consumption in China

“I’d Have Divorced My Husband If Not for Korean Dramas” – Vietnamese Women’s Consumption of Television Romance and Melancholia

ABSTRACT Drawing on the Freudian concept of melancholia and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s contemporary approach to the concept, this article discusses how Vietnamese married women consume romantic South Korean television dramas as a means to deal with unacknowledged and unresolved loss, or the psychic condition of melancholia. Through a case study of melancholia in a female research participant and a discussion of Vietnamese women’s marital lives, the article proposes two arguments. First, romantic consumption can be a private way for Vietnamese married women suffering from restricted freedom due to societal overemphasis on their familial duties to cope with melancholia. Second, the mass romantic culture, as a melancholic genre, allows married women to collectively mourn lost emotions such as the feeling of being young and being in love. The article makes a theoretical contribution by utilising Freud’s melancholia and Eng and Han’s contemporary approach to the concept for its empirical research. It also enriches an academic understanding of melancholia through its application of the concept to married women’s psychic lives within a contemporary Vietnamese context.

Contemporary Tourism in Asia: Religion, Heritage and Commercialism

Bruntz Courtney and Brooke Schedneck (Eds.), Buddhist Tourism in Asia, University of Hawaii Press, 2020. Zhu Yujie, Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Press, 2018. These two books are very different, the first is an edited collection of case studies from all over Asia in a Contemporary Buddhism series and the second is a single authored ethnographic monograph about a heritage city in China in an Asian Heritage series. Yet, they have much in common...

Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China, by Yujie Zhu. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 165 pp. €85.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsHeritage and Romantic Consumption in China, by Yujie Zhu. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 165 pp. €85.00 (cloth).Tim OakesTim OakesUniversity of Colorado–Boulder Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 83January 2020 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706717 Views: 52Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The marketing of love: how attachment styles affect romantic consumption journeys

The experience of romantic love is closely interlocked with consumption journeys—yet how and why consumers engage in romantic consumption is not fully understood. This research emphasizes romantic consumption as a novel scholarly domain of theoretical and substantive richness due to its fundamental importance to nearly every consumer’s life and its considerable economic relevance. Specifically, we investigate how attachment styles influence romantic consumption across various contexts, from movies, books, and greeting cards to romantic gaming and online dating. Across six studies, we show that consumers with an avoidant attachment style are less likely to engage in romantic consumption, whereas consumers with anxious and fearful attachment styles are more favorable toward it and emulate the romantic consumption of consumers with a secure attachment style. We propose that this pattern is driven by the interaction between attachment avoidance and anxiety such that the negative effect of attachment avoidance is attenuated when attachment anxiety is high. These attachment style differences are mediated by a motive for emotional intimacy, suggesting that personal romantic consumption (e.g., reading a book) can serve as a surrogate to fulfill unmet relational needs. Notably, positioning products via types of romantic love serves as an important moderator: products positioned via companionate love are more appealing to securely attached consumers, products positioned via passionate love are more appealing to avoidant consumers, and anxious and fearful consumers find both equally appealing. Consistent with the notion of consumer-based strategy, we discuss how managers can leverage these insights in their segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

Amor, posmodernidad y perspectiva de género: entre el amor romántico y el amor líquido

Bauman acuñó el término modernidad líquida para conceptualizar y visibilizar la nueva manera de relacionarnos y vincularnos interpersonalmente. En el trabajo que aquí presentamos hemos querido analizar esta transición, mediante análisis del discurso, en concreto de repertorios interpretativos del programa de adolescentes para la búsqueda del amor Chicos y Chicas de YouTube, identificando las características que conforman el repertorio del amor líquido tanto en sus elementos teóricos como retóricos. El análisis que hemos llevado a cabo nos ha permitido identificar a su vez el conflicto, convivencia, complementación y fusión entre el amor romántico y el líquido, produciéndose así un fenómeno al que hemos denominado Consumo Romántico. Desde el análisis de género, tanto las prácticas románticas como las líquidas suponen una subordinación y objetivización de lo femenino frente a lo masculino. En ambas prácticas la mujer es desprovista de su capacidad de agencia, y se la presenta cual ente a la espera de ser conquistada en el amor romántico, y consumida en el amor líquido.

Bridal photos and diamond rings: the inequality of romantic consumption in China

Although sociological insights into the relationship between consumption and class are mostly borne out by current research in the Chinese context, it is important to consider the implications of applying such an analytic framework—which arose within American and European social contexts—to contemporary China. This paper examines the relationship between consumption and class relations. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with young urban professionals in Beijing and Nanjing and young rural migrants in Shenzhen, it asks how individuals from these two socioeconomic cohorts participate in the ritual of romantic consumption. In particular, the paper asks how individuals from these groups think about and rationalise their decisions surrounding two wedding-related consumer items: bridal photography and diamond engagement rings. The discussion reveals some distinct features in class formation in contemporary China, where class structures are fluid, unstable and still in the process of being defined.

Purifying Practices: How Consumers Assemble Romantic Experiences of Nature

Prior consumer research theorizes nature as an ideal stage for romantic consumption experiences by framing nature as external to culture. The same studies, however, problematize this framing by highlighting the consumer-cultural resources through which nature is harnessed and interpreted. Through an ethnography of surfing culture, this article theorizes consumers' experiences of nature as emerging from assemblages of heterogeneous resources. A theory of assemblage shows that material geographies are vital to the reproduction of romantic discourses. Assemblages of nature are characterized by fragility and contestation, however, due to service structures, technological resources, and social tensions that betray the ideal of external nature. Consumers overcome these contradictions through purifying practices. Purifying practices preserve romantic beliefs that nature is external to culture by masking or purging problematic elements of assemblages. The negative environmental effects of these practices are discussed and compared with sustainable purifying practices that redress the damaging impact of consuming nature.

Consumption and literature: the making of the romantic disease

This book answers an important and unanswered question: How consumption – a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic romantic malady. It argues that literary works (cultural media) are not secondary in our perceptions of disease, but are among the primary determinants of physical experience. In order to explain the apparent disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, it examines literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, and covers a wide range of authors and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie; Clarissa, Little Eva). Lawlor shows that consumption’s symptoms made it a suitable disease for the Christian Good Death and a disease of love. These two discourses of consumption and the rise of sensibility and nerve medicine arrived at the moment of Romantic consumption and developed into the more Evangelical version of consumption in the Victorian era. The book was supported by AHRC research leave (matched-funding). Lawlor’s PhD student’s thesis, ‘Gender and Disease in eighteenth-century literature’ (Grant) relates to this research. Lawlor’s new project on fashionable diseases emerged from the questions posed by the book.