reading post: Disarticulations

Today's readings go some distance toward disarticulating patriarchy from consumer capitalism.

Berry, keen to make the point about consumerism's egalitarian potential, references a shift in the early part of the twentieth century from a notion of one's "character" as something organicized and engrained, to a sense of "personality" as performative and of class as a coded representation mimetically reproducible at the fantasy level, at least, of the cinematic screen.

Doane's sloppily monolithic conflation in a 1989 article--her mode of thinking redolent of a conspiracy theorist--of patriarchy with capitalism, making a monolith that univocally bespeaks domination of women, is challenged and "complicated" by Stacey, who pays attention to the cultural specificity of the uptake of "dominant discourses of consumption" by female consumers in a particular era and place.  Whereas Doane had made the subjectivity-effect produced in female spectators-consumers by 1930s Hollywood cinema synonymous with their subjection and self-commodification, relying on a Foucaultian vision of the self as carceral, Stacey clears some space for the agency of female consumers, noting that self-commodification on the blueprint of Hollywood stars could even be perceived as culturally transgressive of feminine decorum in austerity-era Britain.  (We see here the potential of fashion to oscillate, paradoxically, between opposing registers of difference and conformity.)

Stacey notes that the very subjection of women (selling them the means of marketing themselves as objects of exchange) has the unintentional consequence of forging a means of alliance among women along lines of a shared perception of feminine "competencies" and "unwritten rules" of proper femininity.  The esotericism and coterie-quality of feminine shop-talk, baffling to many males, disconnects the identity-group of women from men in the very act of the former's alleged self-commodification in the name of attracting the latter to them.  Such female solidarity, I would go so far (following Stacey), potentially disarticulates the project of femininity, as a production/performance, from the male gaze which is its alleged recipient.  Stacey teases out the sense in which women look at other women as ideals, and the potential homoeroticism that may attend the intense emotionality, the "intimacy" (a recurring word in Stacey's discourse), of such bonding as goes on between star and spectator and between fan and fellow fan.