Consumption and the Body Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The relationship between the body and material culture in the post-industrial world is defined through consumption. How one experiences the body, manages corporeal identity, and participates in social rituals as an embodied subject is, to a great extent, commodified. Changes in perspectives on the body are intertwined with the advent of consumer culture and the concomitant development of mass media and advertising. The appropriation of meanings for advertising promotes what is termed the ”floating signifier effect (Baudrillard 1975) or the shift in the use value attached to objects such that any meaning or quality can be associated with any object. The body acts as both a carrier of these multiple and shifting meanings and a means for expression as the body becomes what Featherstone (1991) refers to as the ”visible carrier of the self.

Bourdieu (1984) notes that the body is not simply a surface to be read, but is a three-dimensional expression of social relations that take the form of corporeal or mental schema, referred to as habitus. Through the process of routine symbolic consumption, identity is constructed and embodied. The literal embodiment of class manifests in size, shape, weight, posture, demeanor, tastes, preference, and movement through social space. Other authors have applied similar principles to studying other facets of identity such as gender and/or race. Scholars note that the politics of cultural legitimation and the cultural capital conferred by one s taste reveal relations of power and privilege. Consumers who occupy different social locations may appropriate the symbols of other groups and thereby use such signifiers as a route to mobility. Some theorists argue that global consumer culture and the circulation of ”lifestyle commodities undermine the stability of embodied signifiers.

Scholarship on bodies and identity is diverse and varied. Two important trends appear as to how the body is viewed in consumer culture: (1) the dominated body and (2) the expressive body. In the first case, many theories have focused on the tyranny of the marketplace and its objectification and alienation of bodies. In the second case, opportunities for bodies to use consumer culture for expressive purposes provide a context for resistance and social change.

First, the body is viewed as subject to domination through commodification. Drawing on Marxist perspectives, the fetishization of bodies ultimately leads to the reproduction of socially unequal bodies. The bodies of the privileged are legitimated and idealized through participation in rituals of consumption. The individual is then subject to the tyranny of the market regardless of relative position. He or she is not tyrannized by an outsider, but becomes engaged in endless rituals of self-surveillance guided by idealized marketplace images conveyed through the mass media. Critiques of the dominated body approach focus on the cultural manufacture of meanings and identities. Baudrillard (1975) notes that individual desires are disguised expressions of social differences in a system of cultural meanings that is produced through commodities. For Baudrillard, the commodified body still acts as a marker of social distinction, but not a permanent one. This leads to the second way in which bodies are understood as sites of contestable meaning. The expressive body has the ability to participate in what Giddens (1991) terms ”reflexive self-fashioning.” Through participation in consumer culture, awareness that identity can be self-consciously constructed is generated.

Bibliography:

Baudrillard, J. (1975) The Mirror of Production. Teleos Press, St. Louis.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Featherstone, M. (1991) The body in consumer culture. In: Featherstone, M., Hepworth, M., & Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge.