facilegestures

by John McMahon

Last week, Sadie Stein at Jezebel highlighted an effort to quasi-blame the weak economy on…women:

A report from Commonweath Bank finds, according to Smart Company, that women “are far more pessimistic about the economic outlook, with just 21% of women surveyed prepared to say the economy was “strong” (compared to 38% of men) and 24% of women claiming the economy was “going downhill” (compared with 21% of men).” And since women account for most household spending — not to mention our flibberdigibbit shopaholic ways — this downer attitude (which sounds fairly practical) has had a major impact on retail. Says one analyst, “It appears the [Global Financial Crisis] made women much more careful about spending, while men saw it as an opportunity to get some great bargains.”

Obviously, as Stein satirizes, this relies heavily on cultural discourses about the way in which women are supposed to be unable to resist the dazzling spectacle of shopping and buying. This also, though, reminded me of something else. In the US after September 11, 2001, the dominant narrative of public femininity centered on calls for good (women) Americans to go out and spend money to stimulate – pun intended – the economy. In her excellent 2006 article in The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Laura J. Shepherd describes the constructed image of the “Happy Shopper” as the most acceptable form of feminine agency deployed in post-September 11 discourse, while the men were supposed to support the hyper-masculine Bush administration in its crusade. They are silenced as they are slotted into a traditional gender role.

Granted, a study from a bank quasi-blaming women for continued economic recession is not quite equivalent to the discourse of US policymakers. However, it participates in and reinforces a stereotypical narrative about women: it deploys the idea that the best thing women can do at the moment is not to participate in government, but to stay in the private sphere, where it is suggested they belong. Relegating women to shopping robs them of agency to dissent and to influence policy. Their only agency is in being ‘feminine,’ and in doing so, reproduce the capitalist economy. In both cases (the response to September 11, 2001 or to economic recession), traditionalist discourses set up as men as the ones charged with solving the problems and taking action (being optimistic and taking risks, in the Bank study). Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be silent, passive supporters, exercising their feminine desire to shop.