Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 85
dure. The alliance between shopping and abstract self-worth rests
upon the implication that the ‘buying and possession of material
goods is an outward, physical sign of inner goodness and the value of
the person possessing the goods. Shopping thus becomes a virtuous
ritual’. 127 The perception that shopping is a patriotic duty that
bolsters national economies is encountered in most countries, and
comes to the fore in two print advertisements for the Proudly South
African campaign (2004). The copy reads respectively ‘Clothe yourself,
clothe the nation’ and ‘Feed yourself, feed the nation’. In both
examples, the figure who is addressed and who holds the future of the
South African economy in her hands (and purse) is a discerning black
female consumer.
The use of the black woman as a marker of the new face of
consumption in South Africa can be related to the myth that consumer
choice and consumption are signifiers of personal freedom. This
rhetoric has been invoked in many examples of South African
advertising since 1994. Eve Bertelsen points out that when the African
National Congress came to power in 1994, it moved away from its
critique of capitalism and the attendant inscription of classed and
gendered relations in society to endorse the notion of the ‘free
market’ of late capitalism. 128 The project of producing a new national
identity, a new black elite class, and new subjectivities was embraced
with alacrity by the ‘institutions and agents of consumer culture’ that
aimed their advertisements at the new black consumers. 129 Bertelsen
shows convincingly how the discourse of political ‘struggle’ was
appropriated by consumer culture, which then redefined democracy
as ‘individual freedom and, especially, the freedom to consume’. 130
A recent advertisement for Sammy Marks Square in Pretoria (2003)
addresses the black female consumer in a similar mode (Figure 6).
Shopping has also been reclaimed as a proto-feminist gesture that
objected against the masculinist colonisation of the public sphere;
this can be located in the historical alignment between feminism and
female consumerism that accordingly sees the contemporary mall as
the logical culmination of female empowerment. Friedberg thus
detects a key moment in the nineteenth-century American feminist
Elizabeth Stanton’s exhortation that women should go out and spend
their husbands’ money. 131 Stanton’s rallying cry ‘GO OUT AND BUY!’
met with female delight, and the burgeoning feminine individualism
of the late nineteenth century was endorsed by the realisation in
127 J Nachbar & K Lause Popular culture. An introductory text (1992) 196.
128 E Bertelsen ‘Ads and amnesia: black advertising in the new South Africa’ in S
Nuttall & C Coetzee (eds) Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South
Africa (1999) 221.
129 Bertelsen (n 128 above) 221-224.
130
Bertelsen 228.
131 Friedberg (n 62 above) 449.