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Jagger, E. Consumer Bodies. In: P. Hancock et al. ,
The body, culture, and society : an introduction.
Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000,
pp. 45-63.

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CHAPTER 3

Consumer bodies

ELIZABETH JAGGER

Introduction

One of the broad social changes that has brought the body into pro­
minence in sociology has been the growth of a 'consumer culture'.
Although the origins of 'modern consumption' practices have a longer
history in different locations (Miller et ill. (998), several major social
transformations taking place throughout the twentieth century had
firmly established the foundations of a 'consumer culture' by the post­
war period. These include the rise of the media and advertising (Ewen
1976; Ewen and Ewen 1982), the decline of heavy manufacturing
industries and the growth in service sector industries. Such changes
have been associated with the decline of the traditional worker,
together with the growing salience of lifestyles based on leisure and
consumption activities (Turner 1991). According to Turner (1991),
the shortening of the working week, compulsory retirement and the
valorization of sport and recreation have meant that conventional
wisdom concerning the virtues of hard work have now been over­
shadowed by an emphasis on consumption, hedonism and play. In
effect, the work ethic has been replaced by a consumption ethic
(Bell 1976; Bauman 1998). Such transformations have brought ques­
tions of the self to the forefront of the political, economic and social
stage. According to Tomlinson (1990), sources of identity and a sense
of self are derived less from work and production than from consump­
tion and leisure. As Rose (1989: 102) has pointed out:

The primary economic image offered to the modern citizen is not

that of the producer but of the consumer. Through consumption
46 Elizabeth Jagger

we are urged to shape our lives by the use of our purchasing power.
We are obliged to make our lives meaningful by selecting our
personal lifestyle from those offered to us in advertising, soap
operas, and films, to make sense of our existence by exercising
our freedom to choose in a market in which one simultaneously
purchases products and services, and assembles, manages, and
markets oneself.

Moreover, it can be argued that in consumer culture the self is

inextricably bound up with the body. According to Shilling (1993),
with the decline of religious authority and its certainties, the progres­
sive privatization of meaning and a loss of faith in grand political
narratives, the physical body seems to provide a firm foundation for
the construction and affirmation of identity. In Featherstone's (1991a)
phrase, the body has become the 'visible carrier of the self'.
This chapter argues that the body plays a mediating role between
consumer activities and the cultural constitution of the self. For the
body not only acts as a medium through which messages about self­
identity are transmitted but is also a key site for the marking of dif­
ference (Shilling 1993). The development of this argument, however,
requires some explanation of the concepts it deploys.
'Consumption' is used throughout the chapter to refer to the purchase
and use of goods, leisure activities and services such as shopping for
clothes, dining out and engaging in fitness regimes or other bodily
projects. Consumption is motivated by consumerism - the ideology
pervading modern capitalism that prioritizes the production, sale and
acquisition of consumer goods and services. The term 'consumer cul­
ture', however, refers to the norms and values of a consumer society and
points not only to the importance of cultural goods as commodities
but also to the way in which most cultural activities are now mediated
through consumption (Featherstone 1991 b). Specifically, it draws atten­
tion to the symbolic aspect of goods and the way in which they are
used as communicators (Featherstone 1991b). In short, cultural goods
are consumed not merely for their use-value (their material utility),
but for their sign value (for what they signify). Importantly, symbolic
consumption is fundamental to the process by which modern indi­
viduals create and display their identities. By 'identity' is meant a sense
of who we are, and how we relate to others and to the cultural and
social context in which we live. 'Identity', according to Woodward
(1997), is concerned with the extent to which we are the same as or
different from others. Cultural goods are of salience here because they
are deployed in strategies of social distinction (Bourdieu 1984). That is,
commodities are used not only to convey messages about the self, but
also to establish communality with some individuals or groups and to
demarcate difference from others.
The main theme of the chapter is thus to explore the intercon­
nections between consumption, identity and the body, drawing on
the work of commentators who, in diverse ways, have addressed these
 Consumer bodies 47

links. Although most authors agree that symbolic consumption is

central to the constitution of self-identity, there are some theoretical
disagreements between writers as to how this link can be explained
and understood. For example, writers such as Bourdieu (1984) con­
tinue to emphasize rigidly defined class-based identities whereas post­
modern writers see identities as being dynamiC, plural and derived
from a multiplicity of sources. Thus, whereas for Bourdieu we consume
according to who we are (consumer choices are inscribed on the body
establishing social differences), for postmodern theorists we become
what we consume (the body is saturated with cultural signs with no
fixed referents, producing multiple, shifting identities) (Jameson 1985;
Baudrillard 1988b).
It can be argued, however, that most of those theorists mentioned
above have frequently paid insufficient attention to gender in their
discussions of identity formation and re-formation. Given that access
to cultural resources is not equally available to men and women in
consumer culture, it has been argued that reflexive self-fashioning
(Giddens] 991) is more problematic for women (Lury ] 996). Women,
for instance, experience a relative lack of 'control in terms of self­
definition. Thus the constraints and insecurities women confront in
claiming ownership of their feminine subjectivity are explored and
exemplified here through a discussion of a specific bodily project ­
body building. As Benson (1997) has pOinted out, this is one arena in
which women seek to rewrite the self by rewriting the body, engaging
in a conscious process of bodily transformation.
Before this argument is elaborated on in any detail, however, sec­
tion one of the chapter outlines briefly the historical emergence of
consumer culture and its contemporary salient features; section two
discusses the work of authors who have sought to explain the links
between consumption and identity; and this is followed by an exten­
sion of their arguments in relation to the body in section three.
Section four considers the contributions of feminists to these debates;
and finally the chapter ends with a discussion of body building.

The emergence of a consumer culture

The salient features and attributes of contemporary consumer culture

can be traced back to a range of developments that provided the
foundations for its emergence. In exploring these historical condi­
tions, different authors have identified diverse contexts over a long
period. Although authors such as Schama (1987) have traced its origins
to the seventeenth century in the Netherlands and McKendrick et al.
(1982) and Porter (1990) to the eighteenth century in England, other
writers such as Williams (1982) and Miller (1981) have located these
in the nineteenth century for France and the USA. Ewen (1976) and
Susman (1982), however, emphasize that it was not until the years
48 Elizabeth Jagger

between the First and Second World Wars in the USA and Britain that
consumer culture became fully established. Most writers agree, how­
ever, that it developed initially in the middle classes and gradually
spread to the working classes. According to Alt (1976), mass consump­
tion was the necessary 'other' of mass production. As McKendrick
et al. (1982) have pointed out, 'The consumer revolution was the neces­
sary analogue to the industrial revolution, the necessary convulsion
on the demand side of the equation to match the convulsion on
the supply side' (1982: 9). Productive capacities had been increased
dramatically in the late nineteenth century by the development of
scientific management and the introduction of assembly-line produc­
tion and Fordist techniques of work organization (see Chapter 6 of
this volume). Demand was stimulated by improvements in real wages,
the introduction of consumer credit and the instalment plan. Stand­
ardized goods became available to wider markets with the develop­
ment of fast and efficient railway networks (as well as sea and road
transport systems) linking large industrial cities. In particular, the new
era of consumer culture was inaugurated by, and institutionalized in,
the rise of the department store (Chaney 19K~) where ttle profusion of
goods on display offered new freedoms and opportunities for con­
sumer indulgence. City centres became places of extravagant enter­
tainment with their numerous eating places, bars and saloons, and
elaborate theatres (Chaney 1996). Customers were seduced by new
forms of display using plate glass windows, electric lighting and all
the resources of architectural spectacle in the transformation of public
space (Bronner 1989).
The new industrial situation with its proliferation of cheap mass­
produced goods, however, needed what Ewen (1976: 32) calls 'a con­
tinually responsive consumer market'. Whereas previously consumers
demanded reliable goods, now manufacturers needed reliable consumers
(Corrigan 1996). Hence, workers who had previously been socialized
into the puritan values of thrift, denial, hard work, sobriety and mod­
eration, had to be Ire-educated' to appreciate values that extolled
the virtues of unbridled consumption, to espouse a 'new discourse
centred around the hedonistic lifestyle entailing new needs and desires'
(Featherstone 1991a: 172). By the 19205, new ideals and norms of
behaviour were publicized by the nascent media of motion pictures,
mass spectator sport, the tabloid press, mass circulation magaZines,
radio, the fashion and cosmetic industries and, above all, through
advertising. AdvertiSing became one of the main conduits for convey­
ing cultural values, creating new markets for goods and stimulating
fresh buying habits. As Featherstone (1991a) has pointed out, advert­
ising became the guardian of the new morality, encouraging indivi­
duals to take part in the consumption of commodities previously
restricted to the upper classes, albeit in modified forms. Advertising
celebrated the new consumption ethic, advocating the values of self­
expression, living for the moment, the exotica of far-away places,
freedom from social obligations and the cultivation of style (Featherstone
Consumer bodies 49

1991a). It attached images of youth, beauty, lUxury and romance

to even the most mundane of products, making them desirable to
the general population. It did this by using what Baudrillard (1975)
has called the 'floating signifier' effect. For Baudrillard (1975) one of
the immanent features of consumer culture is the dominance of the
exchange-value of commodities (the price for which goods can be
sold in the marketplace), which has erased their original use-value
(their purpose or utility) to such an extent that they are now free
to take on any meaning depending on their position in a system of
signifiers that is self-referential. In other words, signifiers, like televi­
sion advertisements, 'float' freely with only ttle loosest connection to
actual objects. Wittl the advent of the commodity as sign, consumer
goods became attractive for their symbolism - for the imagery sur­
rounding them and what tl1is might 'say' about the person who buys
or uses tl1em. It is,the difference between buying designer jeans and
a chain store version; the former would be bought in preference to
the latter because of the style or social status associated with them.
A focus on the allure of goods, however, was not the only strategy
that advertising deployed in generating demand and inducing COI1­
sumers to buy. It also aimed to produce a specific kind of consumer
one who would be particularly receptive to its message. One way it
did this was to present individuals as the object of continual scrutiny
by others (Ewen 1976). According to Ewen (1976), the intention was
that the consumer's critical functions should be turned away from
the product and towards him or her self. Advertisements were often
designed to make people feel ashamed of themselves and inadequate.
As Featherstone (1991a) has pointed out, they created a climate in
which individuals were made to feel emotionally vulnerable and so
were encouraged to monitor tllemselves constantly for any imperfec­
tions that could no longer be construed as natural or unavoidable.
The message was, therefore, that there was always room for self­
improvement through the purchase and use of a vast array of consumer
goods (Featherstone 1991a).
Consumer culture was firmly established by the end of the Second
World War, since wtlen it has drawn more and more people into
a hectic and ever-expanding cycle of consumption. The common
assumption of the 19205 that mass production would lead to a parallel
growth in free time or leisure has proved to be largely illusory (Cross
\993). Instead, it has led to the creation of a 'harried leisure class' of
consumers (Cross 1993). As Featherstone (1991 a) has pointed out, the
progreSSive expansion of the market has brought increasing areas of
social life within its trajectory, advocating the need for commodities
not only in the domestic sphere but also in leisure activities. As hobbies
have become increasingly dependent on the purchase of commodities,
they reqUire systematic planning and an ever-increasing expenditure
of time on their organization. Consumer durables themselves need
continual maintenance which leads invariably to the need for fur­
ther purchases, shopping for which takes time and organization, thus
50 Elizabeth Jagger

further eating into free time (Featherstone 1991a). In short, individuals

now have to work much harder at being consumers, in what Cross
(1993) has described as a 'work-and-spend' culture. In documenting
the qualities that consumer culture demands of its members, Bauman
(1998) points out that consumers are now required to be energetiC,
alert, impetuous, restive, excitable, sensation-seeking and passionate.
Although eager to make new choices from the panoply of goods dis­
played, they must also be equally susceptible to losing interest, for it
is the volatility of their engagement that matters. A new vocabulary of
consumption, displaying these novel attitudes, has entered everyday
discourse and is evident in phrases such as 'to die for', in magaZines
where 'must haves' now describes the latest articles for sale (for example
the Sunday Times magazine carries a regular column headed 'Most
Wanted: this week's object of desire'), and in the titles of television
programmes such as S/le's Cotta Have it. Consumption, then, is far
from being simply about the satisfaction of fixed needs; it is about
desires and dreams, albeit that no desire should be considered ultimate.
As Bauman (1998) has pointed out, in shortening the time and space
between desire and consummation, consumer culture has taken the
waiting out of wanting and the wanting out of waiting. Hence, endless
desire and longing as opposed to need and a utilitarian attitude now
fuels the consumer game. Importantly for the argument here, it is
desire for the sign, not the commodity itself, that links consumption
to the constitution of self-identity.

Consumption and identity

It was argued earlier that although it is generally acknowledged that

modern identities are constructed through symbolic consumption,
contemporary cultural theorists have different views on how this rela­
tionship can be explained. Bourdieu's (1984) interest in this is part of
his general concern with social reproduction and the reproduction
of class relations in particular. For Bourdieu identities are located in
relatively stable and fixed social class pOSitions which determine par­
ticular constellations of consumption preferences in any social field
such as art, sport, diet, furnishings, music and so forth. Thus, in his
view, taste in cultural goods operates as a marker of class identity.
Because consumption choices involve discriminatory judgements of
taste, they simultaneously render visible to others an individual's or
social group's own particular discriminatory capacities. As Bourdieu
has expressed it, taste classifies the classifier. To explain the social
determinants of taste that characterize a particular class or class fraction,
Bourdieu introduces the notion of 'habitus'. By 'habitus' Bourdieu is
referring to a set of unconscious dispositions that organize an indivi·
dual's capacity to act, to classify and to make sense of social experience.
It is manifest in an individual's taken-for-granted assumptions about
Consumer bodies 51

the appropriateness and validity of his or her taste in cultural goods

and practices. To put it simply, a person or group's 'habitus' is what
makes their good taste (or absence of it) seem to be 'natural'. The
application of this set of classificatory principles as distinctive modes
of cultural consumption is thus recognized as a sign of taste or the
lack of it. As Featherstone has pointed out:

The modern individual within consumer culture is made conscious

that he speaks not only with his clothes, but with his home,
furnishings, decoration, car and other activities which are to be
read and classified in terms of the presence and absence of taste.
(Featherstone 1991 b: 86)

Thus, according to Bourdieu (1984), symbolic consumption is an ideal

weapon in strategies of distinction. Cultural goods are deployed to
demarcate boundaries between some individuals or social groups and
to establish communality with others. In the general struggle for domin­
ance, different classes try to impose their own habitus on others, to
legitimate their own tastes. However, for Bourdieu (1984) it is not
merely the purchase of cultural goods that is important, but the manner
of using them. Given that different class groups have differing amounts
of, and access to, 'cultural capital' - the sedimented knowledge and
competence to make judgements of taste acqUired through expenditure
of time and money on such unproductive matters (Corrigan 1996) ­
each act of consumption reproduces social differences.
Rather than seeing identity as rigidly defined in terms of class, how­
ever, postmodern writers have tended to introduce notions of fluidity
and plurality into their formulations. From a post modern perspective,
identities are no longer received automatically through the rituals and
social practices of the traditional order, but are constituted through
individual marketplace decisions. As Bauman has pointed out in com­
menting on the cultural changes in forms and sources of identities
in the passage from a 'producer' to a 'consumer' society, 'The roads to
self-identity, to a place in society, to a life in a form recognizable as
that of meaningful living, all require daily visits to the market place'
(Bauman 1998: 26). In effect, it is argued, we become what we consume.
According to postmodern theorists, as the pace of life has accelerated
and as SOCiety has become more open, so releasing individuals from
the constraints of traditional social positions, identities have become
more unstable, fragile and subject to change. By providing a series of
'expert knowledges', for instance in relation to lifestyle, health, fashion
and beauty, consumer culture is understood from a postmodern per­
spective to have contributed to an increasingly reflexive understand­
ing of the self, an awareness that identity is chosen and constructed
(Giddens 1991; Kellner 1995). As Giddens (1991) has pointed out, the
self in 'late modernity' has become a reflexive project; it is created
(and re-created) through a plurality of consumer choices and lifestyle
decisions. In his view, individuals can now draw on a wide repertoire
S2 Elizabeth Jagger

of symbolic goods with which to fashion and display their own iden­
tities. According to Featherstone (1991 a), the' new heroes' of consumer
culture display their individuality in the particular way they assemble
goods, clothes, practices and appearances and design them together
into a lifestyle.
However, whereas Giddens tends to see the self as a unitary, self­
regulated attainment (Turner 1992), other authors have suggested that
the self has a plurality of identities constituted in diverse contexts
and often dependent on consumer-defined figurations. Writers such
as Jameson (19HS) and Baudrillard (l9HHb), for example, have argued
that the self-constituting subject is now fragmentary and inherently
unstable. Indeed, Baudrillard (19HHb) has even gone so far as to argue
that the subject has now disappeared. As culture becomes increaSingly
fragmented, without depth, substantiality and coherence, an indi­
vidual's sense of identity is understood to break down, resulting in a
'decentred self'. The overload of information and the overproduction
of signs lead to the destabilization of identity. The surfeit of signs and
images produced by consumerism and television has erased the dis­
tinction between the real and the imaginary (Baudrillard 19K{). Hence
this silllulational world is understood to provide few fixed reference
pOints for self-constituting subjects. Instead, they engage in an endless,
superficial play with signs and images, producing multiple and shift­
ing identities. In other words, individuals use commodities and their
random, open-ended meanings to continually reinvent themselves.
Modern selves, then deligh ting in the notion that signs are opaque,
meaningless and thus cannot be decoded - reject or parody traditional
status games. From a postmodern perspective, in this context of
'cultural disorder' with its 'death of the social' and 'loss of the real'
{Baudrillard 19H31. the relatively stable sets of claSSificatory principles
(habitus) that are socially recognizable and function to demarcate
boundaries between groups are held to disappear (Featherstone 1991 b).
0Jo longer are there any universally agreed on criteria for judge­
ments of cultural taste; indeed, from a postlllodern perspective there
are understood to be no fixed status or age groups or social classes as
such.
For Jameson and Baudrillard, therefore, although identities are con­
structed through the COnslll1l ption of signs, they are not reducible to
class in the mallner indicated by BOllrdieu. Instead anyone can be
anyone - as long as they have the means to participate in conslIlllption.

Consumption, identity and the body

It was argued earlier that in consumer culture self-identity is inextric­

ably bound up with the body and its surfaces. Although most com­
mentators agree that the consurner self is an embodied self, there is
some variation between writers in the extent to which this notion
Consumer bodies 53

has been discussed in any detail. For instance, although Giddens (1991)
recognizes that the consumer body is implicated in modern identities,
because his main concern is with the reflexive self he does not deal
with the embodied self in any great depth. Similarly, the post modern
body, although conceptualized as a fragmented body untrammelled
by considerations of class, remains largely undeveloped in the theoret­
ical formulations of Jameson (1985) and Baudrillard (1983). According
to these authors, it is the image of the body rather than the body as
such that is central to identity. The body is seen as being saturated
with cultural signs or as becoming merely a series of cultural quotations.
Thus, in this view, modern individuals collapse into their images and
their self-identity becomes free floating. Indeed, Baudrillard (l988b)
goes so far as to argue that since signs have no referents and do
not signify anything outside themselves, rather than people using
objects to articulate differences between themselves, individuals have
become merely the vehicles for expressing differences between objects.
According to this view, not only do individual identities dissolve into
a 'glutinous mass', but the body itself disappears from the analysiS
(Frank 1991).
Hence, although it will be suggested that his account might be
problematic, it is nevertheless the work of Bourdieu that has made
one of the most significant contributions to an understanding of the
links between consumption, identity and the body. In contrast to
postmodern approaches where the body is in effect dematerialized,
for Bourdieu the body is the materialization of class taste. The body
bears the imprint of the consumption practices of various social classes.
As indicated earlier, these consumption choices are dependent on the
habitus of particular classes or class fractions. It should be pointed out
here, however, that habitus does not simply operate at the level of
everyday knowledgeability or competences, but, according to Bourdieu,
is embodied - literally. That is, it is made manifest in body size, shape
and weight, posture, demeanour, ways of walking, eating and drink­
ing, and sense of ease with one's body; even in the amount of social
space a person feels entitled to occupy. Each class or class fraction,
then, has a clearly identifiable relationship with its body, which results
in the production of distinct bodily forms. For instance, the working
class have an instrumental relationship with their body whereas the
middle class are more concerned with their body's appearance and
intrinsic functioning. Hence the former tend to engage in weight
lifting, producing bodies that exhibit strength, whereas the latter are
more likely to choose jogging, producing a fit, slim body. For Bourdieu,
the body is a form of physical capital that can also be converted to
attain other forms of capital - economic, social and cultural. The
possibilities for converSion, however, have differing degrees of oppor­
tunity and risk attached, based on class belonging. Importantly,
according to Bourdieu, some bodily forms are deemed to have a higher
symbolic value than others. The symbolic values attached to particu­
lar bodily forms thus have implications for an individual's sense of
S4 Elizabeth Jagger

identity and the way in which the body is a site of struggle in strat­
egies of distinction - a site for the marking of difference. Central to this
struggle for distinction is the capacity of the dominant group to define
their own bodies as superior, as 'valuable bodies'.
In contemporary consumer culture, however, there are potential
difficulties in the imposition of a single hegemonic classificatory scheme
throughout society (Shilling 1993). As Featherstone (1991 b) has pointed
out, the globalization and circulation of consumer 'lifestyle' com­
modities may threaten the readability of those signs deployed by the
dominant group to signal their elite physical capital. For instance, it
is not uncommon in contemporary society for working-class people
to save for and acquire designer clothes and household furnishings.
In Featherstone's view, even if it is still possible to read status differences
from bodily dispositions and consumption choices, it is obvious that
the game is much more complex now. It should be pOinted out, how­
ever, that although there has been some discussion of class in relation
to the body and consumption, most of these writers have tended to
neglect the significance of gender and hence the particularities of
women's embodied experiences.

Gender, consumption and the body

The relationship between gender, the body and consumer culture

has received relatively little attention in sociology. Although many of
the 'new body theorists' acknowledge the influence of feminism as a
political movement on the emergence of the body as a topic, actual
feminist scholarship on the body is notably absent from their accounts
(Shilling 1993 and 1997 are exceptions). Similarly, writers on consumer
culture have assumed that modern selves in search of their identity
projects experience this culture in a homogeneous and universal man­
ner without any consideration being given to gender or other socially
constructed differences. These writers thus tend to imply that men
and women have the same capacities to define and constitute their
own embodied identities. For example, authors such as Giddens and
Featherstone frequently assume that cultural resources are equally avail­
able to men and women when reflexively fashioning their own ident­
ities. But as Lury (1996) has pointed out, women in general do not
necessarily have the same capacities to claim ownership of their ident­
ities as men, given that these are typically more a ret1ection of male
fantasies and expectations than an expression of their own sense of
self. According to Tyler and Abbott (1998), Giddens' understanding
of the body as an integral element of 'the reflexive project of the self'
(Giddens 1991: 219) seriously underestimates the extent to which
women's bodies as 'projects' continue to be more ret1ective of patri­
archal norms and instrumentally imposed aesthetic codes of 'femininity'
than expressions of a self-determined individuality.
Consumer bodies 55

It can b'e argued therefore that a feminist scholarship on the body in

consumer society is a welcome corrective to the masculinist character
of these approaches. In feminist writings on the consumer body, how·
ever, two separate, and potentially opposing, strands are identifiable.
In the first strand, women are located as the objects of consumption
and consumerism; the relationship between femininity, consumption
and the body is seen as oppressive to women. In the second strand, by
contrast, women are situated as the subjects of consumption and con·
sumerism, with authors suggesting that women are well able to resist,
challenge or reappropriate cultural goods and practices in order to
fashion their own subjectivity. However, as will be suggested, women's
relationship to consumer culture is more complex than either of these
perspectives imply, to the extent that women are simultaneously the
objects and subjects of consumption.
As K. Davis (1997a) has pointed out, feminists have taken domina­
tion, difference and subversion as their starting pOint for understand­
ing the conditions and experiences of embodiment in consumer culture.
Initially, however, feminist work on the body invariably linked women's
embodied experiences to practices of power. Women were seen as
the victims of an oppressive patriarchal social order. From a variety of
feminist perspectives, several authors examined how the female body
was regulated, normalized, fetishized and commodified in a range of
consumerist discourses (Dyer 1982; Winship 1983; Kilbourne 1995).
Early feminist research on women's magazines of the mid-1970s, for
example, drew attention to the fact that consumer representations of
the female body - on the cover or in features - routinely normalized
women by portraying them as glamorous, sexual, domestic and usu­
ally white (Winship 1983). Similarly, other feminist scholars pointed
out that in discourses of advertising and fashion, the female body
was consistently the reference point for the persuasion to consume
(Kilbourne 1995; McRobbie 1996). Fragmented, sexualized and com·
modified, women's bodies were merely the objects of consumption,
the signs of representations, rather than resources to be deployed in
practices of self·fashioning.
Some feminists, however, have argued that a narrow focus on the
domination and objectification of women in contemporary consumer
culture obscures women's active engagement with their bodies. They
have suggested that a view of women as the passive accomplices in
their own objectification is overly pessimistic. Hence, attempts have
been made at a theoretical level to conceptualize agency and the
female body and examine the way in which consumer culture may
have provided women with important resources to become embodied
subjects. From their research on women's and girls' magazines, for
example, Winship (1983) and McRobbie (1994b) have shown that
consumption practices have become an increasingly important source
for the creation of an individualized feminine self. Women are now
exhorted to engage in the 'work of femininity' by purchasing mass­
produced commodities and transforming these into expressions of
S6 Elizabeth Jagger

their own unique identity. Based on the idea that beauty is not natu­
rally given but achievable by all through the correct application of
diverse products, women are encouraged to work on their bodies,
labouring to perfect an ever-increasing number of zones. Mouth, hair,
legs, eyes, teeth and other bodily parts must all be subiect to scrutiny
in order to ach\eve their \dea\ tem\nine <,e\t ~W'm"h\p \Cjll,!,) . .I\CCOiO­
ing to this view, women become active agents of their own self­
fashioning. Similarly, Smith (1990) has introduced the idea of women
as 'secret agents' behind gendered discourses of femininity. In her
view, when women confront consumer discourses that inform them
that their body is inferior, a gap is created between the body as defici­
ent and the body as an object to be remedied. Dissatisfaction becomes
an energizing process - the motivation for women to engage with
their bodies as an object for work, for 'doing femininity'. Feminist
critics have argued therefore that the view of women as merely recipients
and unquestioning transmitters of cultural meanings of femininity is
too limited. They have suggested that, rather than simply adopting
versions of femininity that they are invited to emulate, women actively
seek to redefine and rearticulate the meaning of these femininities
(Lury 1996; McRobbie 1996). They may resist or subvert normative
discourses of femininity and exploit them in new ways. They are active
subjects who can take pleasure in specifically female modes of con­
suming. For instance, Cixous (1994), taking difference as a starting
point for exploring the specific features of feminine embodiment, has
pointed to the pleasures of fashion, arguing that it can materialize the
most intimate sensations. The fashion garment is not simply an object
but a sensibility that constitutes a woman's aesthetic inclinations.
Fashion does not merely reshape the body but becomes continuous
with it. It is a new way of speaking with the body, liberating it from
silence. Fusing identity with appearance, the inside with the outSide,
fashion can be a form of self-expression. According to Cixous, then,
desires and subjectivity can be enunciated through consuming fashion.
By providing insights into the materiality of feminine embodiment,
Cixous suggests that it is not simply oppressive but that it can be
empowering as well.
The concepts of masquerade and narcissism have also been deployed
in analyses seeking to identify a distinctively feminine relation to
consumer culture. Lury (1996), for instance, has suggested that women
have subverted the idea that beauty is something that can be achieved
and have developed ways of seeing femininity as a masquerade. In her
view, this enables women to play with their personal identity and
take pleasure in the adoption of diverse roles and masks. Similarly,
Evans and Thornton (1989) have argued that fashion is one of the
many costumes of the 'masquerade of femininity' and can enable
women to manipulate their social position. As they have pointed out,
with every change of style or appearance 'the body can be made
through dress, to play the part it desires as gender coding is displaced
from the body on to dress' (Evans and Thornton 1989: 62). In their
Consumer bodies 57

view, costumes can be worn on the street as 'semiotic battledress' (Evans

and Thornton 1989: 14).
From this perspective, the process of masquerade or the 'simulation
of femininity' has a liberatory potential in the creation (and subversion)
of diverse female subjectivities and enables temporary resistances
to impositions of power, including the operation of the male gaze.
According to Lury (1996), this more active understanding of women's
participation in consumption practices can be used to explain the
emergence of the ironic and self-conscious manipulation of style that
characterizes contemporary consumer culture. A similar point has been
made by McRobbie (1996), who suggests that, in a range of commer­
cial discourses and cultural forms, women are constituted as 'knowing'
consumers, well able to recognize how they are being persuaded to
consume. In her view, the mocking humour, irony, parody and refusal
of feminine naivety in consumer-led discourses provides a space for a
degree of retlexivity anll critique by women of the normative practices
of femininity.
Other writers have made lise of the concept of narcissism and re­
evaluated it positively as a source of specifically feminine pleasure.
Partington (1991), for example, has argued that, historically, for women
to invite the male gaze they have had to become skilled in discrimin­
ating between objects and using them to adorn themselves and their
environment. These skills of looking have become the basis of women's
shared knowledges and pleasures. In her view, 'Female subjectivity is
acquired through learning-to-Iook as well as learning-to-he-Iooked-at'
(Partington 1991: 54). Hence, to exercise such skills in judgements
or expressions of taste, women have become subjects of a (female)
voyeuristic gaze while at the same time identifying narciSSistically
with commodities because they themselves are constituted as o/Jjects
of the male gaze. In this view, a specific female subjectivity provides
the basis for the emergence of an aestheticized mode of using objects
and creating one's own identity. Similarly, authors such as Lipovetsky
(1994) have discussed the narcissistic pleasures of transforming oneself,
'feeling like - and becoming someone else, by using cosmetics and
changing the way one dresses' (Lipovetsky 1994: 79).
Although the above perspectives identify women as subjects of a
gaze, active in the construction and display of a simulated feminine
identity, women are still not in a position to refuse the male gaze.
As Lury (1996) has pointed out, although women may now adopt a
playful, imitative attitude to self-presentation, this cannot be construed
as a strategy of resistance in situations where women do not have the
power directly to avoid the male gaze. They may simply sidestep its
force by using it for their own ends. In her view, it is a compensatory
practice, a relation of displacement, in which the subjects and objects
of consumer culture are confused. According to Lury (1996), then,
cultural resources for the creatioll of the modern self are not equally
available to all. A feminine identity call not be realized as cultural
capital nor legitimated as symbolic capital nor exchanged as economic
58 Elizabeth Jagger

capital. Women are constrained in the construction of identity because

their consumption practices tend to be carried out in relations of
power and under material circumstances that limit their ability for
self-fashioning (Lury 1996). Similarly, Winship (1983) and McRobbie
(1994a) have also suggested that despite the language of 'choice', the
'work of femininity' can be seen as the imposition and enactment
of a cultural ideal of feminine beauty. Women are still expected to
adhere to the perfect body shape and thereby seek approval of the
male gaze. A similar point has been made by Rabine (1994) in rela­
tion to fashion when she argues that the fashion-conscious woman is
encouraged to become a self-producing subject. By putting on clothes
and using cosmetics, she is encouraged to enact the fantasies of fash­
ion magazines on her body. These daily rituals are pleasurable, not
only because they are 'erotically charged', but because they make the
body seem changeable, thus satisfying desires for control and novelty.
The contradiction is that, at the very moment when women are
portrayed as self-producing, what they are frequently constructing is
the normative and subjugated image of the heterosexually desirable
female (Rabine 1994). As Lury (1996) has pointed out, if women con­
tinue to subscribe to male-defined cultural ideals of feminine beauty,
if they cannot exercise ownership of their own selves, then they cannot
easily acquire other forms of cultural capital either.
However, in exploring the tensions in cultural discourses of feminine
beauty and fashion, these authors have developed an understanding
of consumption practices as both an expression of the objectification
of women and an opportunity to become an embodied subject. Indeed,
the contradictory nature of consumption for women has been well
described by Myers (1986), who sees it as verging on a form of canni·
balism. She argues that women are defined as both the consumers of
products and as consumers of themselves as commodities, 'as images
to be "consumed" by the gaze of men' (Myers 1986: 137). Women
are, therefore, simultaneously the consumers and the consumed - the
subjects and objects of consumption.
An examination of a particular consumption activity - body building
- exemplifies the complexities of women's relationship to consumer
culture and the way in which women negotiate their contradictory
positioning when attempting to assert their own subjectivity.

Body building and female subjectivity

Practices such as body building make visible questions of identity and

embodiment; how contemporary identities are constructed through
and in the body. The body builder (male and female) seeks to rewrite
the self by rewriting the physical body. She or he seeks to construct
and negotiate her or his identity through 'body work' and trans·
formation (Benson 1997). In this section, however, we are concerned
Consumer bodies 59

specifically with female body builders. For it can be argued that the
issue of body building raises questions concerning what is an accept­
able female body shape and image. More importantly, it is a bodily
practice that illustrates the contingent and insecure conditions under
which women attempt to assert their subjectivity through reflexively
fashioning their own identities.
To elaborate, body building is a purposive activity whereby women
aim to produce a particular bodily form, a body that fulfils certain
criteria in terms of muscle size, shape, definition and tone. To this
extent, it is an explicit and conscious process of self-transformation.
Women body builders speak of their bodies with pleasure. They enjoy
feelings of empowerment and the fruits of exerting extreme self-control
and mastery of the body (Johnston 1996). This is hardly surprising,
for, as Bordo (1993) has pOinted out, contemporary cultural discourses
valorize control of the body as indicative of one's moral worth. For
many women body builders, then, engaging in this activity is a way of
asserting their female subjectivity. As one woman expressed,

The beauty of body building is you can change your appearance.

By your own efforts you can add or substract pounds of body
weight. You can build your arms, shoulders, legs, chest, back, and
in so doing, you can get pleasure from training you might never
have dreamed possible.
(From Female Body Building, July 1989: 4;
quoted in Mansfield and McGinn 1993: 65)

However, although body building suggests the correct management

of desire (Bordo 1993) through regimens of self-management, there
are problems for women. Women body builders, according to Kuhn
(1988), pose a twofold challenge to the natural order. This is because
the body functions as an 'irreducible sign of the natural, the given,
the unquestionable' (Kuhn 1988: 16) and, simultaneously, as a signifier
of sexual difference. In other words, the body is assumed to be the
fixed biological determinant of human subjectivity. Other cultural
assumptions about what it means to be 'female' and 'male' derive
from this a priori 'natural' difference. Thus, when women enter the
arena of body building and deliberately sculpt their bodies through
purposive activity, not only are notions of the naturalness of the body
disrupted but also binary notions of femininity and masculinity - the
bodily-centred meanings of sexual difference. As Kuhn (1988) has
pointed out, muscles carry a great deal of cultural meaning in relation
to the 'naturalness' of sexual difference and, significantly, in contem­
porary consumer culture muscularity is coded as masculine. Thus, in
Kuhn's view, there is a double transgression involved in female body
building: INot only is the naturalness of the body called into question
by its inscription within a certain kind of performancei but when
women have muscles, the natural order of gender is under threat as
well' (Kuhn 1988: 17). The female body builder is therefore seen as a
60 Elizabeth Jagger

deviant and dangerous figure who offers a threat bottl to the femininE'
and the masculine. When muscularity has the possibility of being
equated with femininity and of becoming an expression of female
subjectivity, then the relationship between masculinity and muscu­
larity is also caJled into question.
Anxieties about female strength have provoked controversies in the
body building industry. In discussing the diverse ways in which the
industry has responded to tllis perceived threat, Mansfield and McGinn
(1993), adopting a FOllcauldian framework, have examined a number
of interlocking discourses and discursive practices that together pro­
vide the conditions tinder which women body builders attempt to
negotiate their self-identities. They have examined the way in which
the body building community - by which they mean the judges and
the sponsors of contests, the body building magazines and the regu­
lating bodies - attempt to police acceptable femininity and 'make
safe' for social, cultural and economic consumption the figure of the
woman body builder. For example, an examination of body building
magazines suggests that discourses around the use of steroids are sex­
specific. Whereas stories about steroid lIse among male body builders
concentrate on the health risks and rarely focus on the emasculating
consequences of excessive lise, those about women body builders con­
centrate on their 'loss of femininity'. One article they cite by Ferguson
(1990) mentions the problems of an 'enlarged clitoris, increased or
decreased libido, decreased breast size, diminished menstruation, in­
creased aggressiveness' (Ferguson 1990: 57; qLIoted in Mansfield and
lv1cGinn (1993: 60)). Thus, for women, it is the threat that the use of
steroids poses to their 'feminine' identity that is seen as undesirable.
Similarly, Mansfield and McGinn point out that judges of contests
operate with a notion of a correct female body. Thus, those women
who 'go too far' beyond the bounds of acceptable femininity by
becoming 'too muscular' or 'too vascular' are unlikely to win contests.
The judging of contests is therefore one of the major sites where
ambivalences about women and muscularity are rendered visible.
But more importantly for contestants, these judges are in a pOSition
of power to enforce their notions of acceptable femininity. Women's
attempts to assert their subjectivity through body building are con­
tingent on their evaluations and decisions. In terms of the sponsors,
Mansfield and McGinn cite an instance ill 1990 where Reebok refused
to sponsor a women's body building contest on the grounds that
they were unhappy with the appearance of several competitors. Such
discourses and discursive practices, they argue, shape and constrain
women's attempts at self-fashioning, particularly since many women
see competitions as an important part of body building (Mansfield
and McGinn 1993: 51). If, through bodily practices, they 'stray too
far' from acceptable notions of femininity, their identities as 'real'
women are rendered insecure.
How, then, do competitors respond? One response to this situation
is for competitors to engage in 'compensatory practices'. According to
 Consumer bodies 61

Mansfield and McGinn (1993), they try to walk the line between
muscularity and acceptable femininity by adopting traditional signifiers
of femininity in order to counter-balance their musculature. They
adopt the blonde 'Barbie doll' look of the hyper-feminine, use lipstick,
make-up and nail polish and adopt a posing style that emphasizes
their grace and creativity (Mansfield and McGinn 199:{j. In other
words, adopting the caricature features of femininity and elements
of parodic excess is one way in which women body builders fashion
their bodies to fulfil the constraints of aesthetically safe femininity.
These physical practices are 'reiterative and citationaJ practices' (Butler
1993) that evoke and reproduce normative, cultural images of femininity.
While this parodic enactment of femininity reveals the 'masquer­
ade' of 'real' femininity, at the same time it exposes the discursive
and institutional constraints that impinge on women body builders
when constructing their identities. Although contemporary female
identities are constructed in and through the body, there is a tension
between the capacity for self-fashioning and the constraints of the
locations of their enactment. The self-reflexive fashioning of female
subjectivity therefore frequently operates within sets of power rela­
tions and material and social contexts that constrain women to act in
certain ways. Female body builders, however, are a potential source of
'gender trouble' (Butler 1989) precisely because they upset normative
conceptions of the appropriate female body. Although body building
may confirm and support stereotypical notions of femininity and is
not always empowering for those who engage in it, it does create a
symbolic space that offers new possibilities for experimenting with
alternative identities.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the extent to which the body plays
a mediating role between consumption and self-identity and has
become a key site for the marking of difference. It has suggested
that COllSumer culture provides embodied subjects with many of the
cultural, symbolic resources for reflexive self-fashioning (Featherstone
1991a; Giddens 1991) which can be used in strategies of distinction
(Bourdieu 1984). However, it has been suggested that there is some
dispute between authors with regard to the nature of the links be­
tween consumption, identity and the body. For Bourdieu we consume
according to our social class position; consumption choices become
imprinted on the body, establishing social differences. The prescriptive
determinism of his concept of habitus, however, does not allow for
the possibility that social subjects may adopt a playful and ironic
approach to their identities. Although Bourdieu's model is not entirely
static, he does not suggest theoretically how people may break free
from the corporeal trajectories assigned to them by class location
62 Elizabeth Jagger

(Shilling 1993). Whereas for Bourdieu, however, the body remains a

real entity, a materialization of class taste, for postmodern theorists
such as Jameson (1985) and Baudrillard (1983) the body becomes
merely the bearer of the endless reduplication of signs. Although these
theorists allow for identities that are fluid and subject to change
depending on consumption preferences, bodies defy readability in their
formulations. Hence, from a post modern perspective, it is difficult
to see how judgements of taste or status strategies of distinction
are possible. Although it has been suggested that the overproduction
of goods, images and information leads to problems of misreading
signs (Featherstone 1991b, 1995), nevertheless social inequalities do
persist. Importantly, approaches that focus narrowly on class or that
even ignore social differences cannot account for the particularities of
women's embodied experiences. Hence, it has been left to feminists to
redress this imbalance.
Given that access to cultural resources for reflexive self-fashioning
is not equally available to men and women, feminists have pointed
to the problematic and often contradictory position that women are
in. By exploring women's negotiations of cultural discourses of appro­
priate femininity they have developed a framework for understanding
bodily practices as both an expression of the objectification of women's
bodies and an opportunity for them to become embodied subjects
(K. Davis 1997b). Analyses deploying concepts of masquerade and
narcissism have shown that women have a distinctive relationship
to consumer culture - one that is playful, pleasurable, parodic, even
potentially empowering. Nevertheless, to the extent that men still have
the power to judge how women look, their claims to self-definition,
to be self-producing, are frequently on shaky ground (Lury 1996).
Hence, until women themselves can be socially recognized as 'cultural
intermediaries' and thereby the instigators of cultural change, the pos­
sibility of an alternative body politics is limited. Signs that this may be
happening, however, can perhaps be seen in the work of artists such
as Jenny Savage, Alison Watts and the photographer Cindy Sherman,
who are exploring the possibilities of producing not merely transgressive
images of women, but wider transformations in bodily aesthetics.

Further reading

A good introduction to work on consumption is Bocock, Consumption

(1993), which analyses the main postwar features of consumer society,
its historical development and various theoretical approaches such as
Marxist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and postmodern perspectives.
A more general collection of work on consumption and identity is
Mackay (ed.) (1997) Consumption and Everyday Life, which focuses on
how individuals appropriate and make sense of various cultural forms
in routine, everyday settings. For an empirical study of the relationship
Consumer bodies 63

between consumption practices and self· identity, see Lunt and Living·
stone (1992), Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic
Experience. An overview of the centrality of the body in sociological
thought is provided by Shilling (1993) The Body and Social Theory. In
particular, he provides an excellent and detailed review of Bourdieu's
work on the body, class and identity. Given the centrality of feminism
to debates about the body, identity and consumption, several texts
can be noted as being useful. These include K. Davis ~ed.) (1997a),
Embodied Practices, which contains various articles examining the role
of the body as socially shaped territory and as the site of individual
women's struggles for autonomy and self·determination; Wilson and
Ash (1992), Chic Thrills, which examines links between fashionable
bodies and modern identities from a postmodern perspective; Bordo
(1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism! Western Culture! and tile Body,
which explores how domination is enacted on and through female
bodies in consumer culture; and, for an alternative View, Radner (1995),
Shopping Around: Feminine Culture ami the Pursuit or Pleasure, which
draws on Freud's concepts of narcissism to explore specifically female
pleasures in consumption. For further reading on body building, which
includes an empirical study of participants' perceptions, see Johnston
(1996), 'Flexing femininity: female body-builders refiguring lithe body" ,
in Gender, Place and Culture. Since negotiations of racial and ethnic
identities in consumer culture remain unexplored in this chapter, a
useful text for further consultation is Gilroy (1993), Tile Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Conscioll.'mess.