Rewriting Domestic Consumption (Reading Response)

The teleological narrative of entertainment programming’s collusion with practices of consumption reads, to me, like a history of surveillance more than anything else. Between creating a desire for celebrity soap-opera weddings and then delivering them in full spectacle (Rabinovitz) and providing a free personal fashion consultant, the panopticon looms. Of course, my suspicions are only exacerbated with Sarah Berry’s article on online micromarketing.

Although I’m not convinced that the extensive contrasts between Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best were any more than just amusing (are these the kinds of differences that make a difference?), Haralovich’s piece seems a good establishment of the social context in which TV crystallized the marriage between gendered domesticity and consumption. The next natural step, it seems, would be to examine how these same images are now nostalgically deployed to assert the kind of homogeneous, nationalist past that early TV and radio originally worked towards. Now sold as kitsch and as a sort of ironic hyper-history in Technicolor, these representations are still doing the cultural work of nationhood – their revival re-imagines and effectively, rewrites a collective past, sanctioning a move into the future, a move severed and therefore untroubled by histories of heterosexism, racism, and gender binaries. The whole notion of “fragmenting demand” (Berry), as assumingly conducive to our fluid, fragmented identities (as we’re constantly told anyway), just begs for a mention of Frederic Jameson and his (albeit incredibly pessimistic) definition of postmodernity. This fragmentation, fueled by capitalist consumption and its twin promises of cultural innovation (Jameson says it’s really all pastiche) and personalization undermine coalition and progressive social change. Berry cites the Dell computer website to suggest that some product customization can sometimes be beneficial for consumers. Sure, but at what cost? What no one in the readings seems to consider are the double-bind illusions of choice and empowerment that niche marketing seamlessly accomplishes and the bearing this state of content has on political work.

Haralovich does a good job of situating the suburban home and reducing it to all of its consumable parts. Since white flight was so instrumental in making the Cleavers’ dream a reality, I think it would be a worthwhile project to study how the marketing of gendered domesticity is responding to the current reversal of white flight. There were several articles this summer that boldly proclaimed the “end to white flight,” citing the kind of population shifts across major cosmopolitan areas across the U.S. that would make even the eager supporter of gentrification cringe.

Regarding customer management, Berry notes that “the most basic classifications of women began with three 'fundamental' types (dramatic, ingénue, and athletic).” It would be interesting to catalogue the current “fundamental types” and see to what an extent each of these categories has become more overtly sexualized. In other words, what type of sexual subjectivity has been attributed to “types” in light of third-wave and post-feminism’s (doomed, in my opinion) reclaiming of the body as a space for agency and the right to raunchiness. Is the athlete really the sexy athlete with the panty endorsement deal and is the ingénue more of a self-aware and strategic Lolita?