To Market, To Market : Gendered Contradictions

Prologue

In the early 1800s, a mother goose rhyme went: ‘To market, to market to buy a penny bun / Home again, home again, market is done.’ Later nineteenth-century versions become sumptuous – include a plum bun, a fat hog and a fat pig while the young lad returns home dancing a jig. The market seems modest in the first but expands and becomes exhilarating in later versions, but there is a regularity in the passages between home and market. One of the things I want to seize in this somewhat schematic talk are the contemporary passages between home – as familial, as nation-state – and the market.