Ladies Shopping for Signs

A little Mitchell, anyone? In Shopping for Signs: The Cultural Geography of the Mall, D. Mitchell says: "Suburban landscapes mix public and private spaces in particular and peculiar ways. They create a stage on which gender is performed in a never-ending production. Likewise, shopping malls use peculiar mizes of public and private to create a different sort of stage, a stage for not only the production of identity, but its consumption, too.

Yesterday on Salon.com (Broadsheet), Kate Harding examined a recent study done by a real estate developer on what landscape women want to see in malls.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/09/05/woman_friendly_mall/index.html
Harding explained that women "make 80 percent of all consumer purchases", so their input should count. She comments: "So, what do women want in a new mall? The answers include green space, nice washrooms, a variety of safe parking options, heel- and stroller-friendly walking surfaces, child play areas and an outdoor firepit.(Really?) It also turns out that women don't care how snazzy-looking the buildings are (but do care about landscaping). It "definitely wasn't about painting the buildings in pastels. It wasn't about making the buildings look feminine, it was about making the place more friendly to the women who use it," says Montesi. No! Nobody voted for a pink Pottery Barn? Get out!"

It all relates back to The Feminine Mystique for me. After World War II, the machine of capital has to figure out a way to get all of those laborers (women) out of the pool so that men returning from war will be able to get a job. This snowballs into an intentional conversion of women from intellectuals and laborers into housewives, using biological determinism to support capitalist logic. How do these women now disempowered by their exclusion from the production side of capital exercise some amount of participation? Consumption.

Friedan poses the question: "Why is it never said that the really critical function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of femininity and woman's role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of the housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business" (206-7).

For more on women and consumerism, I like The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf: "And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries- the $33 billion a year diet industry, the $20 billion cosmetics industry, the $300 million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry- have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties [...]" (17).

So basically what I am trying to say is that it is particularly important to examine the specific relationships between capital and gender, especially when we consider that capital shapes the physical/geographical landscape, and the physical/ corporeal landscape of the human body.
-Lucy