Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 71
The inscription of gender relations in the geography and spatial
practices of modernism, patriarchy, and capitalism identified women
with the spaces of domesticity and barred them from the freedom to
wander in the city like the flâneur. Griselda Pollock argues that
women ‘could enter and represent selected locations in the public
sphere — those of entertainment and display’ 69 — and shopping.
Pollock further argues that for men, public space signified freedom
from the constraints of both work and domesticity, whereas for
women public space connoted dirt, danger, and the possible loss of
virtue: ‘going out in public and the idea of disgrace were closely
allied’. 70 From the nineteenth century onwards, woman’s entry into
the public sphere was associated with consumption and not
production, and this consumption was sited in the new department
stores that allowed women to become browsers and to engage in light
sociability in a semi-public domain. Department stores such as Bon
Marché, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Macy’s in New
York changed the face of consumption because they were convenient
and provided a vast variety of goods, services, and entertainment. 71
Many large department stores in South Africa — OK Bazaars,
Ackermans, Stuttafords and Greatermans — also date from the middle
decades of the nineteenth century 72 and started to change the face
of South African consumption.
Like the shopping mall of the twentieth century, the nineteenth
century department store may be considered a liminal or in-between
zone that provided a safe and generally respectable ‘arena for the
legitimate public appearance of middle-class women’ from the 1850s
onwards. 73 Because the department store interiorised the public
street and transformed it into a private space, it became an
acceptable extension of the home that the bourgeois woman could
enter alone 74 — the only other place that conferred similar liberty was
the church. The department store’s liminal status between the public
and the private was embraced by women, and they assumed an active
role as consumers. Although women in a department store were highly
visible, they were also afforded anonymity, which frequently caused
unease in patriarchal society. 75 The majority of the shop assistants in
department stores were women, and consequently shopping not only
inscribed appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour and sexual
relations, but also class relations. 76 In the half-public, half-private
69 G Pollock Vision and difference: femininity, feminism and the histories of art
(1988) 79.
70
Pollock (n 69 above) 69.
71 M Crawford ‘The world in a shopping mall’ in M Sorkin (ed) Variations on a theme
park. The new American city and the end of public space (1992) 17-18.
72
CE Cloete Shopping centre management in South Africa (2002) 21.
73 Wolff (n 48 above) 46.
74 M Crang Cultural geography (1998) 54, 125.
75
Lancaster (n 65 above) 188.
76 Miller (n 4 above) 13; Crang (n 74 above) 125; Pollock (n 69 above) 68.