Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

88 Jeanne van Eeden
the domestic space of home and practices of urban consumption. 144
According to Goss, the market has always been a place of liminality
between ‘the sacred and secular, the mundane and exotic, and the
local and global’, and in malls this translates into the substitution of
nostalgia for experience, absence for presence, and representation
for authenticity, sanctioning a politics of exclusion and the exclusion
of politics. 145 Liminality extends into the incorporation of both the
best of nature and the best of city bustle and dynamism in malls 146
and is also reflected in the ambiguity between going shopping and
going for a walk that is inscribed in the mall’s representation of
space. 147
Consequently, the rhetorical trope of nostalgia is frequently enacted
in shopping malls by recourse to a vocabulary that is already
gendered. It is surely not coincidental that suggestively feminised
words such as paradise, oasis, and cocoon are used to characterise
‘the consumer culture's Eden, the post-urban cradle, the womb, the
mall’. 148 Malls are inward looking, escapist cocoons in which Edenic
and paradisiacal allegories of consumption betray ‘a mirror to utopian
desire, the desire of fallen creatures nostalgic for the primal garden,
yet aware that their paradise is now an illusion’. 149 Edenic rhetoric
and imagery and the morphology of the womb serve to naturalise and
mythologise the spaces in which shopping is performed. Although
Edenic 150 imagery clearly signifies the sphere of consumerist temptation,
it also designates a specific iconography that resonates with
ideas concerning nostalgia, safety, refuge, and the myth of a former
Golden Age. Robert Simon supports this reading of the mall as a
modern version of an imperfect paradise that operates not only as a
garden of earthly delight, but also as a site of temptation. 151 He
maintains that the shopping mall is the contemporary version of the
western formal garden since both are social spaces that are rich in
meanings: ‘where once the vista was of the grandeur of nature, it is
144 Zukin (n 13 above) 142 explains:
much maligned for their standardised architecture and ‘decentered’ social life ...
shopping centers are nonetheless significant liminal spaces. They are both public
and private – privately owned, but built for public use. They are both collective
and individual – used for the collective rites of modern hunting and gathering, but
also sites of personal desire. They are … liminal spaces between the intimacy of
the home, car, and local store and the impersonal promiscuity of chain stores,
name brands, and urban variety. Shopping centers … are both material and
symbolic: they give material form to a symbolic landscape of consumption.
145 Goss (n 5 above) 27-30.
146 Crawford (n 71 above) 22.
147
Miller (n 4 above) 133.
148 Kowinski (n 14 above) 137.
149 Morris (n 8 above) 397.
150
In a similar vein, Friedberg (n 62 above) 446 sees malls as ‘heterodystopias, the
dialectical shadow of an Edenic ambulatory’.
151 R Simon ‘The formal garden in the age of consumer culture: a reading of the
twentieth-century shopping mall’ in W Franklin & M Steiner (eds) Mapping
American culture (1992) 232, 241.