CONSUMER CAPITALISM, RACE AND CLASS

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CONSUMER CAPITALISM, RACE AND CLASS
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Gender, Race Class

• sex biological, anatomical, hormonal, genital
• gender social ie. Learned behaviour,
  attitudes, expectations, etc.
• girls have to be thin pretty boys dont cry
• Nb all intersect inflect each other peoples
  perceptions assumptions

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Social Class

• group of people who have similar social status
• socioeconomic class hierarchical system based on
  economic status, wealth, or income
• bi-partite model Upper (wealthy/powerful)
  Lower (poor/powerless)
• 20th c. 3 strata includes Middle Class
  (managers/professionals)

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Other Ways of Defining Class

• Structural based on how money is earned, not how
  much money is earned - business owners or wage
  workers
• Non-economic other distinctions - culture or
  education taste (Bourdieu)
• Hereditary/legal caste - lineage, breed or race
• Hindu priests, warriors, merchants or
  workers/peasants

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caste-based societies

• South Africa during apartheid
• U. S. South slavery era until Civil Rights
  movement
• colonial Latin America - Spanish Portuguese
  rule
• India until 1947
• Feudal Europe also had estates clearly separated
  by law

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Social attributes

• Hindu castes
• Worker violent temper, crude tongue, drunkard
• Merchant hardworking, dutiful, but avaricious
• Warrior noble, learned, selfless
• Brahmin/priest kind, loving, spiritually
  advanced
• Combine class gender?

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Race

• common lineage - "The whole race of mankind"
  (Shakespeare) - c. 1580
• concept of "race" - small number of groups of
  human beings based on lineage
• 19th c cosmetic characteristics - skin color,
  facial type, cranial profile amount, texture
  color of hair
• moral character, intellectual capacity, other
  aptitudes

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Modern Thought

• Franz Boas - race height in 1920s NYC -
  inheritance environment
• By 1950s anthropologists questioning race as a
  biological phenomenon
• descent from common ancestor biological
  differences not taken into account by race (e.g.
  blood type) differences between same race
  greater than average genetic difference between
  races

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Politics of race

• posited historical existence of "races" such as
  German French race, branching from basal races
  supposed to have existed for millennia ("Aryan)
• crimes gain extra intensity thoroughness when
  perpetrators believe sanctioned by science
• Debate still on

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Conclusion

• race class - floating signifiers (Stuart
  Hall)
• change meanings in different social, historical
  political milieux
• one-drop rule
• Class, race, gender intersect

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White people
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Intermission
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Why People Buy

• Theoretical Models
• Manipulation
• Negotiation Resistance
• Rational, Deliberative, in Control
• Politics of consumption
• Positional / competitive consumption
• Free Structurally Unbiased market

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Manipulation

• advertising as culprit
• J.K. Galbraith manipulated into participating
  in dumbed-down consumer culture that yields few
  true human satisfactions
• prevalent model in 1960s 1970s
• related to reflection theory of mass media
• unconscious power

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Negotiation Resistance

• contemporary cf. Darling-Wolf
• studies show audiences able to reinterpret use
  cult texts in meaningful ways
• consumers develop skills knowledge agency
• Survival skills
• resistance

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Critical Politics of Consumption

• Rational, Deliberative, and in Control?
• deliberation, control, long-term planning
• law of invariant right decompression zone
  credit cards brand preference
• Consumer desire non-rational
• other motivators - fantasy, play, desire, escape,
  emotion

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Consumption is Social

• positional - compared to selected group
• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction A Social Critique
  of the Judgement of Taste (1984)
• family socialization, education
• consumption rel. to structures of power
  inequality

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Free and Structurally Unbiased?

• positionally driven spending
• lack of alternatives in market for non-positional
  goods
• market structurally biased vs public goods
• consumption linked to larger collective decisions

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Reminder

• complications many factors
• emphasis on 3-pronged approach context, textual
  analysis, reception
• always take race, class, gender into account