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A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities.

This research analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews with adult siblings and their elderly parents through the lens of assemblage theory.

This paper advances a conceptulisation of the family as an evolving assemblage of components, including individual members; material possessions and home(s); shared values, goals, memories and practices; prominent familial attributes of love and care; and marketplace resources. Three features of the assemblage come to the fore in senior families: the fluid meaning of independence for the elderly parent, the evolution of shared family practices and the trajectory of the assemblage that is a function of its history and future.

This research focuses on a stage of family life that has been under-theorised; applies assemblage theory to the family collective, demonstrating that a family can be conceptualised as an ever-evolving assemblage of human and non-human components, and this is a useful lens for understanding how senior families “do” family; and argues for a broader notion of family – one that is not household-centric or focused on families with young children, that encompasses members and materiality and that foregrounds the dynamic, evolving nature of family life.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of male customers of escorts who provide a sexual service known as the “girlfriend experience” or GFE.

Methodology/approach – A combination of depth interviews and netnography is used to study how men experience the GFE.

Findings – Unlike most customer-prostitute encounters, the GFE involves more than the exchange of money for sex; to derive the full value of the experience, the consumer must not only pay the escort but must also provide her with sexual pleasure and emotional intimacy. The resulting encounter is more romantic and intimate than purely sexual in nature. Findings are organized around three central themes: consumption of covert (i.e., secretive) pleasure, consumer fantasies, and the ways in which consumers cocreate value in the consumption experience.

Originality/value of the chapter – This research explores how consumers engage in a form of consumption that has been largely overlooked by consumer researchers, and how consumers experience the blurring of boundaries between purely transactional service encounters and those that entail a deeper connection between provider and consumer. In addition to shedding light on this consumption context in the form of description, this research illuminates some aspects of GFE consumption that are theoretically interesting (beyond the context itself) to consumer researchers.