Mainstream Consumer Culture Research Articles

Trans Failure

AbstractThis article explores potentialities for experiencing trans joy via creative praxis, which the author coins “trans failure.” As the author defines it, trans failure builds on examples set by queer failure, such as casting off limiting cultural norms (like binary gender and oppressive framings of what identities should look like), and incorporates new strategies such as deploying play as a means of self-articulating beyond the bounds of what is currently available. Trans failure's use of play has a utopian impulse often achieved via alternating strategies of theatricality, pleasure, collaboration, and experimentation in a mode of enacting alternative worlds and experiencing joy. The article discusses how play, a strategic mode of trans failure, is used to intervene in consumer culture and to work toward self-articulation and the procurement of joy. First, an explanation of gender as we understand it today is sketched out. Then, issues around representations of trans constituencies are discussed as problematically informed by dominant conceptions of gender and perpetuated in mainstream consumer culture. Then two distinct contemporary projects that disrupt the space of consumer culture are analyzed, deploying what the author names a praxis of trans failure in search of creating joy.

A Study in Anxiety of the Dark

A Study in Anxiety of the Dark

‘It's the outline of a pig and then it has the words underneath, “vegan for life”‘: Vegans and their Tattoos

This paper examines the relationships between vegans living in Australia and their tattoos. While tattooing has become an increasingly popular part of mainstream consumer culture, vegans often identify their tattoos in terms of major life events (of which catalysts to become vegan and vegan transition are but one), marks of remembrance or aides-mémoire, and tools to signal to other vegans and begin conversations with non-vegans. Defying simple classification, many of the tattoos sported by vegans are overlaid with multiple meanings. While some aspects of tattoo culture are found within this subset of tattooed people, practice behaviours such as ingredient checking shape tattoo acquisition practices, while the notion of veganism as an ‘final state’ has implications for the way tattoos are commonly seen as marking the ongoing flow of life events. Significantly, a high proportion of vegans’ tattoos express vegan themes implicitly or explicitly, with a significant minority seeing them as part of practices of activism and/or proselytisation. I conclude that this practice is non-trivial and represents an important political practice for many, but certainly not all, of my research participants.

On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care

The reimagination and revaluation of discarded goods, through repair and reuse is, for many, a quotidian and mundane element of everyday life. These practices are the historical precedent and continue to be the stuff of common sense for a significant portion of human society. And yet, reuse, repair and other elements of a ‘circular economy’ have recently emerged as a significant focus in environmental and economic policy. Proponents claim that reuse practices represent a potentially radical alternative to mainstream consumer culture and a form of carework that generates new social possibilities and personal affects. This essay explores the myriad dimensions of reuse as care, relational practice and as consumer alternative by examining these practices in their social context, lived experience and as embedded within larger political and economic structures of capitalist accumulation and abandonment. We argue that the study of reuse, in old and new forms, takes on added political significance in an era of environmental and economic crises, especially as a critical part of state-based approaches toward the circular economy that attempt to appropriate carework in new forms of value generation.

Thin blue lines: product placement and the drama of pregnancy testing in British cinema and television

This article uses the case of pregnancy testing in Britain to investigate the process whereby new and often controversial reproductive technologies are made visible and normalized in mainstream entertainment media. It shows how in the 1980s and 1990s the then nascent product placement industry was instrumental in embedding pregnancy testing in British cinema and television's dramatic productions. In this period, the pregnancy-test close-up became a conventional trope and the thin blue lines associated with Unilever's Clearblue rose to prominence in mainstream consumer culture. This article investigates the aestheticization of pregnancy testing and shows how increasingly visible public concerns about 'schoolgirl mums', abortion and the biological clock, dramatized on the big and small screen, propelled the commercial rise of Clearblue. It argues that the Clearblue close-up ambiguously concealed as much as it revealed; abstraction, ambiguity and flexibility were its keys to success.

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

"Nanna Style": The Countercultural Politics of Retro Femininities

Over the past two decades in the West, practices of ethical consumption have become increasingly visible within mainstream consumer culture (Lewis and Potter). While they manifest in a variety of forms, such practices are frequently articulated to politics of anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and sustainable consumption through which lifestyle choices are conceived as methods for investing in—and articulating—ethical and social concerns. Such practices are typically understood as both a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship and a response to the destabilisation of capitalism’s certainties in the wake of ongoing climate change and the global financial crisis (Castells et al.; Miller).

Power for Pleasure

Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2011, 315pp, $24.95 paperback In this timely work, Weiss interrogates the purported transgressiveness of BDSM subcultures and practices using ethnographic research methods and the insights of feminism and queer theory. BDSM culture is understood, not as a utopian realm of free expression that escapes the influence of everyday life, but rather as 'a formally organized community with very particular social and educational practices' (p5), which is shot through with 'often-invisible race and class privilege' (p5). The mention of 'circuits' in the subtitle of the book alludes to the key thesis Weiss propounds: namely that the BDSM lifestyle and the neo-liberal marketplace exist in a relationship of mutual interdependency, rather than the former offering any kind of inherent critique of, or challenge to, the latter. And, more broadly, Weiss's circuitry imagery suggests that sexuality is always in a relationship with economic and social power structures and hierarchies, rather than lying beyond them. Indeed, for Weiss, 'although sexuality is imagined as a break from material social relations, sexuality is, instead, the raw material of these circuits' (p230). The research that led to this book involved Weiss's thorough submersion as a participant observer in the Bay Area BDSM scene. Weiss attended a number of events such as play parties, munches (social events where sexual acts are discouraged), clubs, fund-raising auctions such as the 'Byzantine Bazaar', and educational classes. She worked as a volunteer archivist for the Society of Janus. She also interviewed sixty-one participants whose interviews form the basis of the data on which she draws in analyzing the subculture, its practitioners, and its practices. Weiss establishes a dichotomy (that some scholars, such as Gayle Rubin, would likely question) between the 'old guard' and 'new guard' of BDSM participants in her field. The 'old guard' describes the gay leather men who lived in the Folsom Street district of San Francisco prior to the AIDS crisis and the area's gentrification, and who are seen as now existing on the margins of mainstream consumer culture. The 'new guard' comprises younger players who self-identify largely as heterosexual, bisexual, or pansexual; are internet-savvy and often employed in the IT sector; and are heavily consumerist in lifestyle and sex-style. Weiss is particularly interested in how much money these 'new guard' BDSMers spend on toys, costumes and other paraphernalia, seeing in the financial commitment to the scene the players make one of the main ways in which 'SM produces both subjects and communities' via engagement in 'consumer practices' as well as the acquisition of 'SM techniques' (p111). The argumentational thread drawing together the various analyses in Techniques of Pleasure is the idea that the alternative scene of BDSM is alternative only in very limited ways. It fails, for example, to exclude mainstream prejudices and stereotypes; indeed it shores up many normative assumptions about gender, heterosex and race, replicating, at the very least, the appearance of systems of oppression within the community space. Describing the various participants in the Byzantine Bazaar, she asks 'how do we read the political effects of ... selling black bodies at a pretend slave auction in front of an almost exclusively white audience?' (pp56). Yet, Weiss also reported some disquiet and demurring among the audience at the spectacle of the black woman offered 'for sale' by her white 'master', suggesting that the question she poses is already--at least implicitly--working on those participating in the community. That the problem of race remains implicit, however, is returned to in Weiss's Chapter 4, where she explores the similarity between BDSM dynamics and mainstream sexual and relationship norms. Many players interviewed by Weiss, keen to insist upon the transgressiveness of BDSM and to reinforce the boundary between it and its vanilla counterpart, articulated concern that, too often, heterosexual BDSM partnerships take the form of dominant men and submissive women in a constellation that seems to ape the heteronormative stereotype and the patriarchal power dynamic. …

It Is Not Old‐Fashioned, It Is Vintage, Vintage Fashion and The Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices

AbstractThis article reviews consumption practices concerning vintage, a fashion style based on used or retro‐style garments. Existing studies connect vintage with authenticity, nostalgia and identity. We explore how the vintage style deploys and comments on consumer culture, bypassing producers by wearing old garments to communicate ‘authentic’ identities. We argue that existing theories on consumption, fashion and subculture cannot fully explain vintage practices. Bypassing the dichotomies and one‐dimensional explanations of these theories, we show that vintage, with its ambivalent relation to both subcultural distinction practices and mainstream consumer culture, serves as a prism through which to examine and understand the complexities and subtleties of 21st century consumption practices.

The new 'porno-chic'? Fashion, consumption and film pornography

This article studies the emerging links between fashion, consumption and film pornography. Drawing on recent work on the 'pornification' of popular culture, it situates its discussion around the ongoing influence of pornography on mainstream consumer culture and the emergence of branded consumer goods from the American pornographic film industry. It considers recent controversy concerning the impact on pornography on the style and appearance of young western women but also develops these ideas around an analysis of both how American pornographic films sell related product such as T-shirts, baseball caps and sweatshirts as well as how the mise-en-scène of these texts is customized in order to accommodate such marketing strategies. Reference is made to Playboy, Hustler and Vivid Video, but the central case study is an analysis of the role of less-established American production companies such as Anabolic Video in creating and commodifying their products in a range of ways beyond the basic manufacture of hard-core pornographic films. This is located alongside other companies that draw on the transgressive appeal of pornography past and present as a way to differentiate their products (the 'Porn Star' clothing range and the use of soft-core pornographic techniques and hard-core performers in the marketing campaigns of American Apparel).

Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism: How Myth and Ideology Animate a Brand-Mediated Moral Conflict

Consumer researchers have tended to equate consumer moralism with normative condemnations of mainstream consumer culture. Consequently, little research has investigated the multifaceted forms of identity work that consumers can undertake through more diverse ideological forms of consumer moralism. To redress this theoretical gap, we analyze the adversarial consumer narratives through which a brand‐mediated moral conflict is enacted. We show that consumers’ moralistic identity work is culturally framed by the myth of the moral protagonist and further illuminate how consumers use this mythic structure to transform their ideological beliefs into dramatic narratives of identity. Our resulting theoretical framework explicates identity‐value–enhancing relationships among mythic structure, ideological meanings, and marketplace resources that have not been recognized by prior studies of consumer identity work.

Gossip Girls in a Transmedia World: The Sexual and Technological Anxieties of Integral Reality


 
 
 The proliferation of sexualised imagery of children and adolescents – especially girls – within media and advertising has elicited considerable public debate and academic discussion within Australia and overseas. Within these debates, girls are commonly configured as being ‘at risk’, that is, in danger of being sexualised, objectified and exploited. They are said to be in danger of growing up believing that popularity and success are tied to sexual appeal (Durham 2008; Reist 2008; Rush and La Nauze 2006). Books for young people are not exempt from these critiques, with children’s literature implicated in the agendas of mainstream consumer culture (Kline 1993). A case in point is Cecily von Ziegesar’s hugely popular Gossip Girl series, which has come under fire, most notably by American feminist Naomi Wolfe (2006) in a review essay for the New York Times. Wolfe criticises the books, and others like them, for fostering the sexualisation of young women through the championing of sex, shopping and status as the pathways to social approval and personal fulfillment for teenage girls. While acknowledging an established history of texts that grapple with the dilemmas of adolescence – including themes of sexual exploration and identification – Wolfe insists that these newer versions of the genre are not in keeping with ‘the frank sexual exploration found in a Judy Blume novel’, but instead present us with ‘teenage sexuality via Juicy Couture, blasé and entirely commodified’ (Wolfe 2006).
 
 

Valued Amish Possessions: Expanding Material Culture and Consumption

Old Order Amish1 life is often romanticized in the contemporary American imagination. Despite the severe persecution that drove the from their European homeland and their subjection to ridicule and hate crimes throughout much of the twentieth century, today they generally enjoy a hallowed status. While they are sometimes the source of humor in the popular media, appearing in credit card commercials, Hollywood comedies, nationally syndicated cartoons, and reality television, behind this light-hearted mocking often exists a quiet respect for their stubborn refusal to be swept up with mainstream consumer culture. Moreover, the criticisms levied against the for such infamous transgressions as the 1998 arrests of two Lancaster youth for dealing cocaine, serve to advance the mythologizing trope when cast, as it was by the national media, that even the were unable to maintain their innocence (Weaver-Zercher 193). Indeed, the purity and wholesomeness of the reputation are seen in the association of its name with a variety of high-quality food products (e.g., chicken, honey, bacon, melons, pies, and cheese) featured in fine restaurants and specialty food stores across the nation. furniture is a multimillion-dollar business with many retailers, super-stores, carrying their goods exclusively and touting the quality of old-world craftsmanship in their showrooms and on their Web sites. Their popularity is also evidenced by the multimillion-dollar tourist industries that have blossomed in the three largest communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and While mere curiosity is at play, so too is the romantic notion of witnessing a simpler, more pristine life as it might have been for our forefathers: It wraps around your mind like a cozy blanket. A cool Fall day, yellow and purple leaves flying, puffywhites floating by, a horse-drawn buggy just ahead, horse tail flickering in the northwest breeze. A white house, immaculate, with a gold and orange backdrop of flickering in the slanted sun. Tow-headed kids walking, carrying baskets of flowers. Some call it small town America. Mapmakers call it Northern Indiana. Folks that live around here call it Amish Country. (Amish Country 4) The hundreds of thousands of visitors to Amish country each year might, however, get slight glimpses of incongruity from the photos and descriptions in their travel guides and vacation brochures. One might witness an mother holding her child's plastic, batteryoperated Disney toy while shopping for frozen dinners at a local Wal-Mart; or an man purchasing the latest cordless tool set featured at a home improvement center; or a horse and buggy hitched to a post outside a McDonald's restaurant as an family dines inside on Big Macs and Happy Meals. These paradoxical images are increasingly common among the 180,000 Old Order adults and children living in twenty-eight American states and in Ontario, Canada (Luthy 18). Unifying the dispersed population, religiosity conceptualizes two distinct and competing human spheres: who are obedient and those who are alienated from God-the latter of a blind, perverted world (Phil. 2:15) replete with unfruitful works of darkness (Hosteller 22). Their evil-worldliness-is defined as (1) seeking comforts (convenience), (2) the love of material things, and (3) self-enhancing activity (22). How then, if consumptive spending is carefully guarded by meaningful rules against luxuries and conveniences (22), do we account for the seemingly contradictory presence of such things as cigarettes, cologne, battery-powered flashlights, hired automobiles, electric-powered washing machines, remote-controlled lanterns, and families dining in restaurants? The Academic Literature and the Gaps Addressed by this Study Steeped in the discourse of social and cultural change, the academic literature has focused on the peculiarities, puzzles, riddles, compromises, stresses, struggles, and warfare separating traditionalism and modernity. …

Auto-Eroticism: Narcissism, Fetishism, and Consumer Culture

In a recent article on cross-gender identification and spectatorial pleasure, Sharon Willis recalls a childhood fascination with the boys and cars of Route 66.' Her memories of identifying with the leads of the television series prompt Willis to develop a theory of identification across boundaries of difference and constituted along the axis of desire-of spectatorial identification-as-bricolage. Willis develops her theory specifically within the context of responses to the film Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)--a work that problematizes privilege (and standards of representation) by placing female characters in the lead roles of a formerly masculine genre. Thelma and Louise represents a kind of outlaw sensibility or desire, both in its narrative content and in its structural approach, by usurping a highly codified genre of experience and making it other. Like Thelma and Louise, a number of other recent films have begun to work at eroding some of the stereotypical standards of the masculine genre, most notably Gregg Araki's The Living End (1992), which features two HIV positive gay males and Bruce MacDonald's Highway 61 (1992), a work set in Canada that illustrates the lure of the elusive American dream to those outside or at the margins of American mainstream consumer culture. These films align themselves with a position of disempowerment with respect to the pervasive culture that literally defines both the mise-en-scenes in which their characters find themselves and the terms of the characters' exclusion. Willis's argument for what might be termed a postmodern reader formation allows for a variety of interpretive positions to develop. It takes into account various spectatorial/reader responses across a wide spectrum, from the kind of straightforward viewer response anticipated during the planning and preproduction phases of film development (audience market research) all the way to responses like camp that radically re-interpret the messages and images presented by the work and, in doing so, negate the exclusionary standards of representation, repositioning the outsider as inside the system of meaning production (through interpretation). For the above mentioned works (and especially the latter two), this kind of interpretive instead of passive receptive approach is literally incorporated into the narrative. These films cite, through the comments of their characters or