The gender and consumer culture reader

Jennifer Scanlon, ed.New York and London: New York University Press, 2001; 397pp.Reviewed by Cynthia WrightToronto, Ontario In an excellent review essay in The Nation, American historian Lawrence Glickman observes that, in the past decade and a half, the study of consumer society has taken its place at "the center of historical inquiry" in the US: "Where once consumption was deemed relevant only to the history of popular culture,..it is now seen as intertwined with the central themes of American history, touching as it does on economics, politics, race relations, gender, the environment and other important topics." There is ample evidence for Glickman's thesis, judging from the array of fascinating and innovative historical work produced in this field of late, not to speak of the number of edited anthologies, including Glickman's own Consumer Society in American History: A Reader and Victoria de Grazia's The Sex of Things, to name only two.A recent addition to this literature is Jennifer Scanlon's The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. Scanlon, who teaches Women's Studies at SUNY-Plattsburgh and whose own Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture is excerpted, has pulled together nineteen texts (plus some archival materials) in a fine anthology geared primarily to the undergraduate classroom. The book is organized into four sections, each introduced by Scanlon, and each developing a central theme in the scholarship on consumption: the home and the boundaries of the domestic; consumption and the construction of sexual, gender and "racial" identities; the "message makers" (advertisers, magazines, retailers); and the articulation of power, pleasure and resistance through consumption. The book explores consumption through commercial sites (from department stores to dancehalls), objects of desire (from zoot suits to pin-ups) as well as through processes of consumer work as diverse as shoplifting and lesbian readings of fashion magazines.While billed as an anthology within cultural studies, the overwhelming majority of contributions are from the social history of consumption and/or sexuality -- two fields that have overlapped, partly because of the role of consumption in the constitution of sexual identities and communities in the twentieth century. All of the readings have been published elsewhere. Readers familiar with American social history will recognize the work of key pioneers in the history of sexuality such as George Chauncey (Gay New York), Lillian Faderman (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers), and Kathy Peiss (Cheap Amusements) -- all of whom are represented in this anthology through excerpts from these books. Similarly, some well-known scholarship in the history of consumption is represented, including an excerpt from Elaine S. Abelson's book on the construction of middle-class theft as kleptomania, When Ladies Go A-Thieving; a contribution from Andrew Heinze's work on Jewish immigrants and American commercial culture, Adapting to Abundance; and an article by Lizabeth Cohen on post-WWII shopping centres in the American northeast. Scholars working in media studies, including Susan Douglas (Where the Girls Are) and Danae Clark, whose work on "Commodity Lesbianism" is reprinted in this reader, are among those contributing analyses of contemporary commercial culture.In recent years, American historians have produced some terrific work on race, ethnicity and consumption in the United States, uncovering what Glickman refers to as "the ways popular culture served to reinforce both the whiteness of the 'new immigrants' from Eastern and Southern Europe...and the otherness of Asian and Latino immigrants." Robert Weems, Jr., whose book Desegregating the Dollar is among the few full-length treatments of African-Americans and consumption, is represented in this collection by an article on Black women in/and the beauty industry. Stuart Cosgrove probes the meanings of zoot-suit "style warfare" for African American and Latino men in the US during the 40s, a period in which they acutely felt their exclusion from a nation at war for "freedom" and "democracy. …