Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture by Sally Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture by Sally Robinson Abigail Cheever Sally Robinson. Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture. U of Massachusetts P, 2018. ix + 239 pp. Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture provides a compelling exploration of anti-consumerist thought from the second half of the twentieth century, examining the persistent conflation and inevitable deployment of discourses of authenticity and masculinity in support of anti-consumerist ideologies. Sally Robinson discusses a range of texts—novels and films, but also sociology, literary and film criticism, theory, and best-selling anti-shopping manifestos—to expose the assumptions about class and gender that underpin such critiques. In Robinson’s analysis, texts we might initially regard as registering understandable concern about the centrality of consumption in late twentieth-century life are revealed to be structured around longstanding and powerful cultural hierarchies: masculine over feminine, producer over consumer, and elite over popular. Noting that “anti-consumerist critique rests on the assumption that consumer culture is inauthentic and de-individualizing” (23), Robinson begins by tracing the ways in which those critiques “identify and locate the authentic and individual . . . through a symbolics of gender.” She considers the critical prevalence of the “feminization thesis” (8)—a master narrative in American cultural studies that believes consumer culture produces conformist, passive, and especially feminized citizens, deprived of agency and manipulated by marketing—to explore how anti-consumerist discourse genders authenticity as masculine and imagines narratives of cultural decline that can only be arrested by an authentic, autonomous, and rebellious masculinity. An early chapter on authenticity in the 1950s positions William Whyte’s The Organization Man and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd alongside J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as representatives of this masculine revolt, indexing and analyzing their shared rhetoric of imperiled manhood and encroaching feminization. In the latter discussion, in particular, Robinson reads against the critical consensus to note the remarkable absence of consumer culture within a novel frequently interpreted as a rejection of consumerism. She asks: “Why insist that On the Road targets consumer culture as the thing against which Sal is rebelling, even when the novel pays very little attention to shopping or commodities?” (83). Noting that the novel condemns any system, including white privilege, that might limit masculine freedom and autonomy, [End Page 781] Robinson convincingly argues that the critical emphasis on consumer culture is most frequently brought to the novel by critics themselves. As her interpretation of On the Road demonstrates, Robinson attends carefully to the critical reception of anti-consumerist texts. A discussion of David Fincher’s Fight Club, for example, finds scholars and critics largely replicating the film’s explicit anti-consumption and overlooking the misogynist terms through which that critique is expressed. More compellingly, in an extended analysis of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and the critical response that canonizes it, Robinson argues that the standard interpretation of the novel, which imagines a clear link between postmodernism, consumerism, and cultural decline, “betrays a nostalgia for a fantasized modernism marked by a clear separation of literature from mass culture, aesthetics from consumer practices, reading from shopping, and masculinity from the feminizing forces that threaten autonomy, authenticity, and meaning” (99). Robinson’s own analysis of the novel locates a more nuanced role for consumerism within postmodern life. She emphasizes the important ways in which White Noise challenges, rather than endorses, both the standard anti-consumerist critique and the gender politics through which that critique is imagined. Shopping in White Noise emerges as a site of critical engagement, aesthetic discernment, and autonomous agency. As she notes, “it is possible to read in the novel’s representation of consumer culture a complexity we grant to the supposedly more ‘authentic’ cultural realms of intellectual and artistic production” (111). The final chapter examines “consumerist anti-consumerism, a form of anti-consumerist critique and activism that understands consumers as empowered to fight the commodification of everyday life” (165). The examined texts—particularly Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year without...