Caring for choice: Fur, anthropocentric orderings and ethicalisation in consumer culture

This paper responds to calls that theorising care using approaches that move beyond the human is particularly useful for engaging in debate in consumer culture on environmental challenges. Despite this call, we note that recent analyses have remained anthropocentric in content and tone, with consequences for how care and choice are conceptualised. We speculate that the impasse in advancing beyond human-centric perspectives relates to anthropocentric leniencies in consumer culture research but propose that moving beyond the human is possible and using feminist STS approaches for ‘thinking with care’ (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2011, 2017) enables attending to anthropocentric ordering. We present a historical analysis of how fur (animal skins) used in women’s dress was discussed in the cultural intermediary, US Vogue magazine. Focusing especially on what is foregrounded and excluded (Giraud, 2019), we attend to the question ‘what is cared for’ in the magazine’s entangled textual creations. The analysis shows that by downplaying the significance of animals, over time, Vogue cared for choice by (re)creating the logic of choice (Koskinen and Jauho, 2024) and (re)establishing the cultural dominance of this logic. The logic of choice thus harbours and performs two salient cultural practices: rendering choice dominant and human exceptionalism. We conclude by reiterating the importance of moving beyond human-centric modes of thinking in consumption research, especially that which addresses environmental challenges, warn of the menace of human exceptionalism in drawing scholarship away from beyond human attentiveness, and propose some ways for tackling anthropocentric tendencies.