Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 63
indicative of the manipulation and seduction implicit in late
capitalism (eg Jean Baudrillard’s Consumer society, 1988). In terms of
this essay, a specifically feminist critique of commodity semiosis that
investigates the ‘tendency to feminise (for example, through a theme
of seduction) the terms in which that semiosis is discussed’ is also
relevant. 10 Another position that is pertinent in terms of a gendered
reading of shopping reclaims the mall as a site for potential resistance
and polysemic meanings. Accordingly, John Fiske believes that the
mall offers a space of potential empowerment for women because it
allows them to escape the confines of patriarchal domesticity. 11 Some
examples of how this manifests in the promotional material of South
African malls are referred to later in this chapter.
Shopping malls are significant sites because as well as being physical
spaces that are conceptualised in a specific manner, they are also
signifiers of the expansion of the commodity and advertising sign
systems in society. 12 As such, malls are good examples of Sharon
Zukin’s explanation of landscape as ‘an ensemble of material and
social practices and their symbolic representation [that] ...
represents the architecture of social class, gender, and race relations
imposed by powerful institutions’. 13 The academic discourse dealing
with shopping malls dates from key texts such as William Kowinski, 14
but the study of contemporary urban culture was already anticipated
by Walter Benjamin of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research
during the 1920s and 1930s. In One-way street and other writings
(1928) and the unfinished Passagenwerk (Arcades Project 1927-
1940), 15 Benjamin reflected on aspects of modern consumer culture
as exemplified by nineteenth century arcades and the figure of the
flâneur or stroller. The field of cultural studies took up Benjamin’s
groundbreaking work during the 1960s; because cultural studies is
interested in the ‘integrated experience of everyday life including the
urban environment, architecture, [and] consumer culture’, 16 it is an
obvious approach by which to study shopping malls. Cultural studies
acknowledges that culture, as a social product, is fluid and is
constantly being created, contested, negotiated and recreated,
specifically within the context of a mass-mediated world.
10 Morris (n 8 above) 406.
11
Fiske (n 8 above) 19-20.
12 Gottdiener (n 2 above) 84, 92.
13 S Zukin Landscapes of power: from Detroit to Disney World (1991) 16.
14
W Kowinski ‘The malling of America’ in CD Geist & J Nachbar (eds) The popular
15
culture reader (1983)137.
Translated and edited by Susan Buck-Morss as The dialectics of seeing: Walter
16
Benjamin and the arcades project (1989).
A McRobbie Postmodernism and popular culture (1994) 97.