The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective
The Sex of Things is a collection of thirteen essays discussing the social history of consumption (loosely defined) and gender in France, England, Germany, Italy, and the United States from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Taking a primarily historical approach to the topic of gender and consumption, the contributors come from various academic disciplines: history, economics, area studies, English, art history, and gender studies. The contributors contextualize their analyses of gender and consumption historically in visual representations and popular social and political lines of thought.
In the introduction, de Grazia lays the groundwork for why we should be concerned with how gender impacts the study of consumption. Simplistic notions of naturally or inevitably identifying the female sex with shopping sprees are challenged in favor of a deeper inquiry into the assumptions revolving around AMr. Breadwinner@ and AMrs. Consumer@(3). Instead of merely debating whether consumption is liberating or oppressive, these essays are concerned with the study of consumption in terms of the construction of gender roles, class relations, the family, and the state.
Essays in the first section relate to the transition of consumption patterns from aristocratic to bourgeois society. De Grazia locates the growth of bourgeois consumption practices in the Afeminized world of the home@, where female heads of household not only were expected to be nurturing and sociable, but were also consumers of food, clothing, and furniture. Through their purchases, these women accumulated (for themselves and their children) what Pierre Bourdieu called Acultural capital, @ b...
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...en women and melodrama by consideration of statistical data on the female audience, as well as discursive contributions from popular media.
The Sex of Things concludes with selected bibliography by Ellen Furlough, highlighting gender and consumption in historical perspective. The bibliography includes histories of consumption and consumer culture as well as theoretical contributions and contains a number of categories rooted in feminist research on consumption. These categories include: sites of consumption, marketing and design , spectatorship and reception, production of representations, domesticity, sexuality, appearance, and politics and ideologies of consumption. Each section ranges historically from the Middle Ages to the present. Unfortunately, the bibliography is dominated by Western perspectives; only a few of the sources are non-Western in orientation.
One definition of a microscope is "an optical instrument that uses a lens or a combination of lenses to produce magnified images of objects." Holden Caufield can be symbolized by a microscope and its parts: the field of view, the focus, and the magnifier.
There are many people who are driven by consumerism and many people who wish they can get in touch with that type of world. Consumers are often promoted to advertise more of the products that they are buying to get more people to buy more products. Hari Kunzru, author of “Raj, Bohemian,” creates a narrator who is obsessed with maintaining his individuality and free will in a world that is overcome with consumerism. Believes that the world takes away individuality when consumerism comes into play and how hard it is to maintain their true self. In her LA Times article “Teen Haulers Create a Fashion Force,” Andrea Chang writes about the phenomenon of teenage Youtube users who make videos that publicize their latest shopping binges. She expresses
He cites middle class white women due to how they began to ritualize meals and how ceramic designs became more elaborate (pg. 174). Shackel again turns to the Beckham and Moor household ceramics in the amounts of fashionable goods found at the sites (174-175). This demonstrates the idea that material culture can represent the social activities of different genders.
Present day social status, values, and activities are centered on the consumption of goods and services. Thus, for women to claim existence in later life, they must participate in consumer societal practices on bodily appearance. Bourdieu argued that for women and their physical appearance; the attention devoted, time and effort invested, and the awareness of product benefits, are proportionate to material expenditure. Older women’s self-presentation can be intrinsically linked to quantifiable conditions used for maintaining the youthful self. Moreover, economic and cultural capitals validate certain fashions, tastes, and practices, to align with the current social structures, endorsing notions of materialization and bodily
On November 11, 1918 World War I ended. People celebrated by dancing and screaming with joy in the streets. Normally this wouldn’t be a huge controversy; however, the girls at Barnard College in New York danced around with their hands on the hips of each other causing uproar from the traditional communities and inciting the outlandish behavior of women during the 1920s. Thousands of people paraded the streets. Women came running to the roads with their hair pinned up, however, any other day this would be shunned upon because flaunting your neck was considered immoral. Nonetheless, there was still an all-around general feeling of freedom. Homemade confetti was tossed aimlessly into the air without a care in the world. A “cultural revolution” was now in place; this day was known as Armistice Day. Change was in the air and it wasn’t just about the war ending. We were entering the age of a modern society with prosperity and opportunity and nothing would ever be the same. Women were defying the perceptions of the typical female at this time and would be unrecognizable by the end of the decade. During the 1920s, the "flapper" challenged the traditional image of the housewife by creating a rebellious and independent image for women, effectively taking women out of the kitchen and on to the dance floor.
With the rise of industrialization, globalization, and mass production, the manufacturing productivity has been dramatically increased and accordingly the availability of consumer goods. And with the rise of the mass media, various products have been targeted on broad groups of consumers. Consumerism, which is propelled by a system of mass production and high levels of consumption, has been one of the themes in art works from twentieth century till now.
It can be argued that negligence should never be enough to warrant a sufficiency of culpability for a serious offence when they did not foresee they might bring about the result of the offence. There are various reasons to support the idea that culpability lies in choosing to act wrongly, therefore negligence should not be enough to be convicted of a serious criminal offence.
In our given scenario we are asked to discuss legal principles influencing the likelihood of any successful action against Steve in the grounds of negligence. Steve’s negligent driving caused a series of events that caused losses to the other people presented in the scenario and they take actions against Steve in the grounds of negligence. At first we must understand what negligence is. The tort of negligence provides the potenti...
Sigismund Schlomo Freud, an Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis, once stated “When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty.” Had Sigismund Freud lived through the 21th century instead of the 19th, he might have had a good reason for hesitation. Now we live in an era when gender norms- and many other standards- must perhaps be questioned and dismantled. Over the last several years, the broader cultural shift in how people perceive gender has picked up speed in almost all spheres of society- politics, education, art, literature, and of course in the fashion industry. Clothing has become one of
The invention of compound microscope in 1590 started to way to a new era of microscopy. The primitive microscope could magnify the object 20 to 30 times its original size. With more development in the field of optical microscopy by the beginning of the 20th century optical microscopes became more powerful and are capable of magnifying objects to 1000x their original size.
Imagine this, you are walking through the forest when all of a sudden you come across the most fascinating insect (perhaps insects may not seem too fascinating at first but once you learn a little about them they are the most fascinating creatures). Well, back to the story, so you find this insect and you realize that it seems very different from those you've previously encountered. Well, being the curious scientist that you are, you take out your trusty magnifying glass and take a look. You move the lens back and forth until you find the perfect image. You see the insect's wonderful colours and patterns which you would not be able to see with your naked eye. What just happened? You simply placed a piece of glass between you and the insect and all of a sudden you get this wonderful view of nature which would otherwise be missed. Well, if you are at all curious as to know how magnifying glasses and microscopes work, then read on and find out.
Many theorists suggest that consumption is correlated to the identity of an individual, that by purchasing goods from the mass market, it enables us to visibly establish our position within society. This differs from previous times in which a range of factors such as family histories, character and personal achievements played a significant role (Gabriel and Lang, 2006). Instead, there is the idea that the consumer has the ability to gain pleasure over objects, not just solely by the manipulation of objects, but through the degree of control over their meaning. The degree of control is developed and achieved through imagination and provides greater possibilities of pleasure experiences. This suggests that modern consumption can be seen as device that enables individuals to ‘dream’ about the desires they wish to fulfill. (Campbell, 1989: 79) (Cited in Gabirel & Lang, 2006)
By representing fashion as an “exploitative consumer industry which limited women 's choice about who to be and encouraged them to think about clothing in terms of how other people perceived them” (Hollows, 2013, p. 9), Spare Rib tried to portray the idea of a responsible feminist consumer as active, informed, concerned, and conscientious. Spare Rib even went to the extreme and touched upon one of the key notions of this movement: disidentification from the identity of a housewife. In relation to food shopping, one of the main duties of a housewife, an article in Spare Rib in 1974 argued that “an attempt to remove responsibility for food shopping from the sexual division of labor by noting male partners’ equal participation in the work of the food co-op. [There are] joys of learning to shop at Spitalfields market, hunting for bargains and working co-operatively, divorcing responsible consumption practices from associations with asceticism and separating the pleasures of consumption from the role of the housewife” (Hollows, 2013, p. 10).
It is not clear who invented the microscope but it is said that in Circa 1000AD, an implement called a reading stone was discovered by an unknown inventor, this sphere shaped glass object magnified reading material when placed over it, this then began the birth of the microscope. In 1284 an Italian inventor named Salvino D’Armate was credited for inventing the first pair of wearable spectacles. It wasn’t then till 1590 that things developed with Dutch glassmakers, Zaccharias Janssen and his son Hans, experimented by placing multiple lenses in tubes, observing objects placed in front of the tubes they realised that the objects appeared massively larger, thus creating both the forerunner of the compound microscope invented about 1595 and the telescope. In 1609 a father of physics and astronomy, Galileo Galilei made a better instrument with a focusing device, by working out the foundations of the lenses after hearing rumours about the Dutch eyeglass makers.
Microscopy allows one to view samples and objects that cannot be seen with the human eye. With all the modern techniques used in the biology field today, microscopy is one of the most important one that allows us to see a world beyond what our eyes limits us too. The majority of both organisms that are helpful and harmful are too small to be seen with the human eye, and without the microscope we would have not understood the mechanism behind the major diseases we know today. Microscopy has helped scientists produce antibiotics and antiviral drugs to treat the diseases that once were in a world beyond our vision. There are three types of microscopy mainly used: optical (light), electron, and scanning probe microscopy.