Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Four / Shopping for gender
Jeanne van Eeden
1. Introduction
This chapter considers some of the roles that gender plays in the act
of shopping and in the constitution of shopping malls. Shopping malls
arose from the profound changes encapsulated in the process of
suburbanisation from the 1950s onwards; they not only symbolise the
American dream of consumerism, but have also become the principal
sites of social communion that embody a new type of public space.
The old notion of neighbourhood and an intimate knowledge of the
people and places in it have been replaced by impersonal shopping
malls, and these spaces of consumption are now believed to be the
spaces in which people form their identities and interact with each
other. 1 The mall is a sign that connotes far more than its function as
a seller of goods; 2 it has become a ‘shaper of community patterns and
character ... [and] a social force’. 3 Because of this, malls can be read
as texts sited within the ideology of capitalism that articulate ideas
concerning space, identity, class, race, and gender. In this essay I
focus specifically on the notion of shopping as a so-called female
activity and point out a few instances of how this manifests in the
promotional material and spatial practices of selected South African
shopping malls.
Shopping is an everyday social activity with networks of societal
processes, relations and conventions inscribed in it that are socially
acquired. 4 Shopping is the second most important contemporary
leisure activity in the Western world (watching television is the first),
and because shopping is enacted within specific places, it is a spatial
activity. 5 Malls are typical postmodern spaces dedicated to consumer
culture because they combine shopping with leisure activities such as
entertainment and tourism; not only has buying become part of a new
contemporary lifestyle, but it has also inveigled itself by pretending
1 S Chaplin & E Holding ‘Consuming architecture’ in S Chaplin & E Holding (eds)
Consuming architecture (1998) 8.
2
M Gottdiener Postmodern semiotics. Material culture and the forms of
postmodern life (1995) 86.
3 R Maccardini ‘Foreword’ in JR White & KD Gray (eds) Shopping centers and other
retail property. Investment, development, financing, and management (1996) xv.
4 D Miller et al Shopping, place and identity (1998) 14-15.
5 J Goss ‘The “Magic of the Mall”: an analysis of form, function, and meaning in the
contemporary retail built economy’ (1993) 83(i) Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 18.
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