This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use
this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of
everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by
sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering
as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the
changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and moral positioning of
showering. We then consider how the multiple and contingent constituents of
showering are arranged and re-arranged in and through the practice itself. In
taking this approach, we address a number of more abstract questions about the
relation between practices, technologies and infrastructures and about what
these relationships mean for the fixity and fluidity of ordinary routines and
for associated patterns of consumption. The result is a method that allows us to
analyse the ways in which material cultures and conventions are reproduced and
transformed. This has practical implications for those seeking to contain the
environmental consequences of resource-intensive practices.
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