Consuming Subjects

Consuming Subjects PDF Author: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231105797
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Consuming Subjects is an insightful exploration of the origin of the modern idea of women as shoppers. Kowaleski-Wallace considers the origins of current ideas about women and consumerism to call into question the "natural" link between women and the commodities they buy. While previous scholars have posited the nineteenth-century department store and arcade as the crucial place for understanding the emergence of the female consumer, Kowaleski-Wallace argues that the eighteenth century yields a keener understanding by allowing us to view the foundations of contemporary cultural practices. Drawing on feminist criticism, cultural studies, and new historical ideas, she surveys eighteenth-century literary texts, material objects -such as china- and cultural events to illuminate the ways in which women are both controlled and empowered through images of consumption. Kowaleski-Wallace links the rise of shopping to the appearance of modern pronography: like pornography, shopping embodies a cultural fantasy, claiming to locate and control female "pleasure." This elegant study is an important contribution to eighteenth-century studies and will appeal to a broader audience of readers interested in feminist and cultural issues.

Consuming Subjects

Consuming Subjects PDF Author: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231105797
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
Consuming Subjects is an insightful exploration of the origin of the modern idea of women as shoppers. Kowaleski-Wallace considers the origins of current ideas about women and consumerism to call into question the "natural" link between women and the commodities they buy. While previous scholars have posited the nineteenth-century department store and arcade as the crucial place for understanding the emergence of the female consumer, Kowaleski-Wallace argues that the eighteenth century yields a keener understanding by allowing us to view the foundations of contemporary cultural practices. Drawing on feminist criticism, cultural studies, and new historical ideas, she surveys eighteenth-century literary texts, material objects -such as china- and cultural events to illuminate the ways in which women are both controlled and empowered through images of consumption. Kowaleski-Wallace links the rise of shopping to the appearance of modern pronography: like pornography, shopping embodies a cultural fantasy, claiming to locate and control female "pleasure." This elegant study is an important contribution to eighteenth-century studies and will appeal to a broader audience of readers interested in feminist and cultural issues.

Consuming Fantasies

Consuming Fantasies PDF Author: Lise Sanders
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210171
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl - both historical figure and fictional heroine - from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. As the author reveals, the shopgirl embodied the fantasies associated with a growing consumer culture: romantic adventure, upward mobility, and the acquisition of material goods. Reading novels such as George Gissing's The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage as well as short stories, musical comedies, and films, Sanders argues that the London shopgirl appeared in the midst of controversies over sexual morality and the pleasures and dangers of London itself. Sanders explores the shopgirl's centrality to modern conceptions of fantasy, desire, and everyday life for working women and argues for her as a key figure in cultural and social histories of the period. This study will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Consuming Cultures

Consuming Cultures PDF Author: The Feminist Review Collective
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134718942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Consuming Cultures is concerned with the interrelationship of gender and the circuits of consumption, distribution, production and reproduction. The book looks at the ways in which gender intervenes in all parts of the circuit or the linkages between different elements.

Consuming Space

Consuming Space PDF Author: Michael K. Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317161114
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
An examination of the relationship between space, place and consumption offers important insights into some of the most powerful forces constructing contemporary societies. Space and place are made and remade through consumption. Yet how do cultures of consumption discover space, and how do they construct place? This book addresses these questions by exploring the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly global, yet intensely localized activity. The work develops integrative approaches that articulate the processes involved in the production and consumption of space and place. The result is a varied, engaging, and innovative study of consumption and its role in structuring contemporary capitalist political economies.

Consuming Life

Consuming Life PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745655823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market. The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences. The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

Consuming Visions

Consuming Visions PDF Author: Maite Conde
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city. The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban spectators--women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population--to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena--popular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines--reflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.

Consuming Race

Consuming Race PDF Author: Ben Pitcher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136238174
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
From the rise of Nordic noir to a taste for street food, from practices of natural gardening to the aesthetics of children's TV, contemporary culture is saturated with racial meanings. By consuming race we make sense of other groups and cultures, communicate our own identities, express our needs and desires, and discover new ways of thinking and being. This book explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption. Ranging across the terrain of popular culture, and finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, it offers fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives. Consuming Race provides an accessible and highly readable overview of the latest research and a detailed reading of a diverse range of objects, sites and practices. It gives students of sociology, media and cultural studies the opportunity to make connections between academic debates and their own everyday practices of consumption.

Consuming Schools

Consuming Schools PDF Author: Trevor Norris
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144264205X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The increasing prevalence of consumerism in contemporary society often equates happiness with the acquisition of material objects. Consuming Schools describes the impact of consumerism on politics and education and charts the increasing presence of commercialism in the educational sphere through an examination of issues such as school-business partnerships, advertising in schools, and corporate-sponsored curriculum. First linking the origins of consumerism to important political and philosophical thinkers, Trevor Norris goes on to closely examine the distinction between the public and the private sphere through the lens of twentieth-century intellectuals Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard. Through Arendt's account of the human activities of labour, work, and action, and the ensuing eclipse of the public realm and Baudrillard's consideration of the visual character of consumerism, Norris examines how school commercialism has been critically engaged by in-class activities such as media literacy programs and educational policies regulating school-business partnerships.

Identifying Consumption

Identifying Consumption PDF Author: Robert G. Dunn
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592138713
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A challenging new theoretical approach to the study of consumption and identity.

Consuming Behaviours

Consuming Behaviours PDF Author: Erika Rappaport
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189708
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In twentieth-century Britain, consumerism increasingly defined and redefined individual and social identities. New types of consumers emerged: the idealized working-class consumer, the African consumer and the teenager challenged the prominent position of the middle and upper-class female shopper. Linking politics and pleasure, Consuming Behaviours explores how individual consumers and groups reacted to changes in marketing, government control, popular leisure and the availability of consumer goods.From football to male fashion, tea to savings banks, leading scholars consider a wide range of products, ideas and services and how these were marketed to the British public through periods of imperial decline, economic instability, war, austerity and prosperity. The development of mass consumer society in Britain is examined in relation to the growing cultural hegemony and economic power of the United States, offering comparisons between British consumption patterns and those of other nations.Bridging the divide between historical and cultural studies approaches, Consuming Behaviours discusses what makes British consumer culture distinctive, while acknowledging how these consumer identities are inextricably a product of both Britain’s domestic history and its relationship with its Empire, with Europe and with the United States.