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LECTURE 2What does Willis mean by “gender as commodity”? Illustrate it with a
concrete example from your everyday life.
Gender as commodity: the commodity form is the negation of process and the
social relations of productions. When gender is assimilated to the commodity, it
is conceived to be something fixed and frozen: a number of sexually defined
attributes that denote either masculinity or femininity on the supermarket shelf
of gender possibilities. Our culture is a mass culture and there is a rigidly defined
separation of the sexes based on narrow nations of masculinity and femininity.
The commodity’s one-dimensional definition: it seizes one of the characteristics
people associate with gender, and turning this into a visible and controllable
aspect.
It is the process of turning gender into things or commodities for sale.
Why is “gender as commodity” problematic from Willis’s point of view?
The uncritical usage of the term gender relegated gender to a one-dimensional
conceptualization of men and women. It negates the possibility of seeing gender
socially and historically, and it promotes the essentialization of sex as the basis
for gender definition.
One can only free gender from the commodity if one starts seeing it as an
ongoing expression of how we live our sexuality, something that emerges out of
social relationships and in relation to larger forces.
It is problematic since it is a narrow conceptualization of gender at a macro level
and we are blind to the negative consequences of it. It is a binary representation
due to which we can’t see the social relationships embedded it toys, or the
production processes. It just teaches us how to play with it.
Commodity as fetishism is a tendency to attribute to commodities a power that
really inheres only in the labour expected the create it.
Explain what Willis means by the following sentence: “Everything
transforms but nothing changes. This is a fitting motto for late
twentieth-century capitalism, particularly as it is embodied in the mass
toy market” (p. 36).
The struggle to liberate gender does not aim to provide more genders, more
commodified forms to choose from, but to enable people to experience
gendering through human interaction and social practice. A young child’s notion
of change has largely to do with growing up and becoming an adult; and how
change then is focused on adolescence and articulated in relation to gender and
sexuality.
Yet can change occur in capitalism? Instead of change, capitalism is punctuated
by events. There are struggles for change, yet this can yield no more than
reform.
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LECTURE 2
, The Transformer toys for example, suggest the notion of transformation
regarding spontaneity and change, while the reality of the toy teaches program
and pre-programmed outcomes. Change is thus already inscribed in the
machine, defined as necessary and transformative. Such toys weld
transformation to consumption. They offer a notion of change in which program
and domination prevail. these supplant the possibility of change any other way.
The culture, and toys, express a desire for change and it’s control. Yet this is such
a contradiction, and displayed in mass culture as if they are normal. The icons of
the 20th century are all deeply infused with the desire for change.
Willis argues that the goal is to be able to recognize reciprocal social
relationships in the act of consumption (p. 34). How can this
recognition support transformation of gender relations? What
strategies do you suggest to realize this goal?
If one subscribes to the notion of gendering as a process, then we must confront
the fact that gender us bound up in commodity form. The problem posed is how
to define gender and other quality that marks the individual’s intersection with
society. There are 2 possible responses:
1. The separatist solution: both the genders represent a political choice, yet
neither is transformative of society as a whole. The problem here is it’s
marginality: it either is so different from the dominant culture that it has
no impact on the rest of society, or it includes points of attraction for
capitalism, in which case it is readily co-opted and assimilated. The most
to be gained from separatism is reform. Communities based on alternative
mode of production can promote an awareness of less exploitative
economies, yet these communities are not transformative of either
capitalist economics or its relationship to other areas
2. Develop a mode of criticism and practice. The goal is to recognize in all
our commodified practices and situations the fragmented and buries
manifestations of utopian social relationships. Often movements that
stand up against capitalism fail to transform the system instead of merely
reform it’s structures.
Transforming gender to see it as a process must help us to see the fragmented
and buried manifestations of utopian social relationship. We must free gender
from the binary form which produces negative consequences. One needs to see
gender as a ongoing expression emerging out of social relationships and in
relation to larger social forces.
How can consumption be a form of reciprocal social practice?
Consumption in advanced consumer society does not have to entail economic
exchange; we consume with our eyes. Children transform commodities into use
values and use these as means for articulating their social relationships.
Children’s play produces newly imagined social possibilities, where gender is no
longer the most essential attribute, but one quality among other human features.
Buying is an exchange, where the social interaction that defined older systems is
reduced to money.
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LECTURE 2
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