The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader

by Jennifer R. Scanlon

Overview

A interdisciplinary collection of readings that answers the question: How do men and women practice consumer culture differently?

What is the relationship between gender and consumerism? Jennifer Scanlon gathers a collection of readings and archival materials to explore the multiple and contradictory ways in which women and men consume. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in scope, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader introduces the reader to some of the most compelling issues and arguments in this growing field of study. In questioning traditional ways of analyzing the relationships between gender and consumer culture, these essays analyze the liberatory and oppressive nature of consumer culture in both historical and contemporary contexts.

The scholars gathered here look at the gendered relationship between the home and consumer culture, individual and group identity through purchasing, the supply side of consumer culture, and the ways in which consumers embrace, resist, and manipulate the messages and the activities of consumer culture. Topics range from white middle-class female shoplifters to the gendered depiction of Native Americans in nineteenth-century advertising, from gay men's acquisition of domestic space in early twentieth-century New York to black and Latino men's cultural resistance through dress. Archival materials link the essays in each section, creating a further historical context, and providing a connection between the readings and larger questions and issues currently being debated about gender and consumer culture.

Contributors include Andrew Heinze, Erika Rappaport, George Chauncey, Steven M. Gelber, Jeffrey Steele, Ann McClintock, Robert E. Weems, Jr., Lillian Faderman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jennifer Scanlon, Lizabeth Cohen, Jane Bryce, Susan J. Douglas, Kenon Breazeale, Kathy Peiss, Elaine S. Abelson, Natasha B. Barnes, Danae Clark, Stuart Cosgrove.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814781326
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	508,062
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Scanlon is Associate Professor and Director of Women's Studies at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. She is the author of Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
Part I.	The Home: Stretching the Boundaries of the Domestic Sphere	13
1	Jewish Women and the Making of an American Home	19
2	"A New Era of Shopping": The Promotion of Women's Pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914	30
3	Lots of Friends at the YMCA: Rooming Houses, Cafeterias, and Other Gay Social Centers	49
4	Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity	70
5	Archival Material: Playboy's Penthouse Apartment	94
Part II.	You Are What You Buy: Individual and Group Identity through Proper Consumption	101
6	Reduced to Images: American Indians in Nineteenth-Century Advertising	109
7	Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising	129
8	Lesbian Chic: Experimentation and Repression in the 1920s	153
9	Consumerism and the Construction of Black Female Identity in Twentieth-Century America	166
10	Listening to Khakis: What America's Most Popular Pants Tell Us about the Way Guys Think	179
11	Archival Material: Paramount Pictures and Linit Advertisements	192
Part III.	Under Whose Direction? Consumer Culture's Message Makers	195
12	Advertising Women: The J. Walter Thompson Company Women's Editorial Department	201
13	In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer	226
14	From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America	245
15	Narcissism as Liberation	267
16	"Young T'ing Is the Name of the Game": Sexual Dynamics in a Caribbean Romantic Fiction Series	283
17	Archival Material: New Yorker and Fortune Cartoons	299
Part IV.	Purchasing Possibilities: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Resistance in Consumer Culture	303
18	Shoplifting Ladies	309
19	"Charity Girls" and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880-1920	330
20	The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare	342
21	Face of the Nation: Race, Nationalisms, and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants	355
22	Commodity Lesbianism	372
23	Archival Material: Nobody Makes a Pass at Me by Harold Rome and Among the Things That Use to Be by	388
	Permissions	393
	Contributors	395

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Pulls together some of the most cutting-edge literature on consumer culture. This comprehensive collection demonstrates the contested and continually constructed meaning of consumer identities. Scanlon provides accessible and useful overviews that make this volume an exceptional resource for the classroom."

-Meg Jacobs,M.I.T.

"Offers students multiple ways of understanding and coming to terms with the relationships between gender and consumer culture. With a rich mixture of scholarly articles, archival materials, and Scanlon's own useful introduction, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader will help readers comprehend the complicated connections between sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, identity, and the daily activities of consuming that Americans have engaged in both historically and today."

-Daniel Horowitz,Director of American Studies, Smith College

Editorial Reviews

"Pulls together some of the most cutting-edge literature on consumer culture. This comprehensive collection demonstrates the contested and continually constructed meaning of consumer identities. Scanlon provides accessible and useful overviews that make this volume an exceptional resource for the classroom."

Meg Jacobs

"Offers students multiple ways of understanding and coming to terms with the relationships between gender and consumer culture. With a rich mixture of scholarly articles, archival materials, and Scanlon's own useful introduction, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader will help readers comprehend the complicated connections between sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, identity, and the daily activities of consuming that Americans have engaged in both historically and today."

Daniel Horowitz

"Pulls together some of the most cutting-edge literature on consumer culture. This comprehensive collection demonstrates the contested and continually constructed meaning of consumer identities. Scanlon provides accessible and useful overviews that make this volume an exceptional resource for the classroom."

-Meg Jacobs,Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Offers students multiple ways of understanding and coming to terms with the relationships between gender and consumer culture. With a rich mixture of scholarly articles, archival materials, and Scanlon's own useful introduction, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader will help readers comprehend the complicated connections between sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, identity, and the daily activities of consuming that Americans have engaged in both historically and today."

-Daniel Horowitz,Director of American Studies, Smith College

From the Publisher

In this consumer culture studies anthology, 23 reprinted essays (1934-98) consider both the empowering and disempowering elements of consumerism. In her introduction, Scanlon (women's studies, Plattsburgh State U. of New York) views consumer culture as a collaborative process, not simply a matter of perpetrators and victims. The themes the essays address are: stretching the boundaries of the domestic sphere; you are what you buy; the message makers; and sexuality, pleasure and resistance in consumer culture. The book features b&w illustrations promoting the cults of domesticity and identity through proper consumption. It lacks an index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews