Browsing by Subject "Consumer Culture"

This dissertation explores the quotidian experience of economic development by studying both the material realities and discursive worlds of 1960s Argentina. I reveal the gendered relationship between economic development and an expanding consumer culture by analyzing the use, circulation, and meanings attributed to household appliances by journalists and public intellectuals. In the late 1950s, many economists, politicians, and intellectuals fervently believed they had found an economic model -- developmentalism -- that would finally provide the means of raising Argentines' standard of living and make the Argentine economy as robust as those of the United States and Northern European countries. Household appliances played a key role because they achieved both those goals, (supposedly) improving women's lives in the process by in part facilitating their increased participation in the workforce. Developmentalists believed their economic model to exist independently of ideology and cultural influences, but their model encountered cultural realities that limited its success. Consumerism--the way through which Argentines interacted with development--and its effects on family and gender relationships complicated the process. Both supporters and critics of developmentalism attacked women's roles as consumers to articulate many of their protestations against changes in women's status and to express anxieties about seemingly unrelated social and cultural changes. I argue that through the course of the 1960s the discussion about consumerism increasingly became a way through which different groups offered distinct visions of how "Argentine society" ought to be transformed.

This study draws on a broad array of written and oral sources. To trace the connection between economic development and consumer society, I interweave an analysis of economic and infrastructural data - such as production statistics or the availability of gas, water - with a study of socio-cultural discourses found in a wide variety of magazines, essays, films, and interviews. I juxtapose these sources in unusual ways to demonstrate two things. First, the cross-referencing of disparate sources to reveals a fuller, more complete picture of economic development and its effects--transcending macro-structural phenomenon to offer a view of quotidian change. And, two, this more complete pictures details how a narrative of hope and idealism evolved into one of anxiety and vitriol as the decade progressed.

My dissertation, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay, proposes that the history of economic nationalism in India and the spread of middle-class patriotic consumer culture is a gendered history. In 1930, an unprecedented number of middle-class Hindu women took to the streets of Bombay, now Mumbai, to participate in the Civil Disobedience movement under the leadership of M.K. Gandhi. Their task was to promote swadeshi: a form of political consumerism centered around the boycott of foreign goods and preference for homespun cloth and indigenous products. At the same time, urban women residing in this cosmopolitan city were deeply entrenched in the globally proliferating consumerism of the interwar years. In the face of a critical moral demand to alter their consumer habits to demonstrate their patriotism, women found themselves navigating the contested demands of a desire for a modern urban lifestyle and their commitment towards the nationalist cause, rooted in the homegrown and homespun.Urban and middle-class women’s recalcitrance in giving up their consumer lifestyle emboldened local businesses and merchants to offer indigenous alternatives to popular and global consumer goods. Ultimately, this enabled domestic capital and industries to gain significant market share in Bombay, the principal commercial center of the British Empire outside of London, and to transform it into a swadeshi bazaar. My dissertation thus demonstrates the centrality of women’s nationalist work in shaping market relations and the making of a consumer politics that defined both Indian nationalism and the wider anti-colonial movements of the interwar world. Recent studies point to (another) nationalist turn in contemporary India that inflects the forms of economic globalization embraced by the country’s middle classes today. The evidence from swadeshi Bombay reveals that contemporary consumer politics have much deeper historical roots, dating back to the interwar years, and sprouted in the city that was the commercial and financial hub of British India. Narrated across four thematically organized chapters, this dissertation follows a group of female volunteers known as desh sevikas, or “servants (sevikas) of the nation (desh).” While a substantial section of Indian historiography, including but not limited to the early Subaltern Studies collective, has centered the peasant in the vast Indian countryside as the protagonist of colonial history, this project “disobediently” turns to the “consuming” category of middle-class, upper-caste, urban (and Hindu) women as gendered citizens of British India’s urbs prima, “first city.” Sparsely mentioned in official record, the sevika more frequently appears in a range of image sources such as documentary photos, print advertisements, and political caricatures. The composite figure of the sevika thus lies at the intersection of the history of women and gender, consumerism, and anticolonial movements and invites methodological approaches from visual culture studies. My project deploys the sevika as a heuristic figure to tap into the multiple identities assumed by Bombay women—as city dwellers, as anticolonial workers, and as self-fashioned modern consumers. In doing so, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City locates urban women albeit those belonging to a specific class and caste as political-economic actors. It traces the many modes in which they practice their disobedience towards the British colonial state as well as traditional gendered norms, while remaining caught within the sobering limits of their caste and class.

My dissertation, "The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present" draws on a range of visual cultural forms - cinema, documentary, and fashion - to track the cultural dimension of the emergence of the new middle class subject in China's encounter with global capitalism. Through cultural studies methodologies and critical theoretical practices, I explore the massive reorganization of national subjectivity that has accompanied the economic reforms since 1978. How, I ask, has the middle class replaced the proletariat as the dominant subject of Chinese history? What are the competing social forces that contribute to the making of the new middle class subject, and how do they operate? By considering these questions in terms of the cultural cultivation of new sensibilities as much as identities, I trace China's changing social formations through the realm of cultural productions. This project is organized into three parts, each of which attends to a particular constellation of middle class subjectivities and ideologies. In Part I (Introduction and Chapter 1), I explore how the Chinese middle class subject is shaped by historical, political-economic, and cultural forces. I show that the new social actor is structurally dependent on the national and transnational bourgeoisie and the post-socialist party-state. In Part II (Chapters 2-5), I focus on the relationship among fashion, media, and Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist eras. By engaging with films such as Xie Tieli's Never Forget (1964), Huang Zumo's Romance on Lushan (1980), Qi Xingjia's Red Dress is in Fashion (1984), and Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) and Useless (2007), I suggest that the representation of fashion and consumption in Chinese cinema, documentary, and new media is a privileged site for deciphering otherwise imperceptible meanings of class, ideology, and history in the formation of the Chinese middle class subject. In Part III (Chapter 6), I attend to the repressed underside of Chinese consumer culture: rubbish. This project reorients our understanding of socialist and post-socialist China, seeing them as underpinned by the contradictions emblematized in the Chinese middle class.