Consumerism as Citizenship

Shade’s article provides a historicity of the commodification of girl community through corporate alliances, mergers, buyouts, advertising media, cross-promotional strategies, and more. Her article ties nicely to Harris’s article on “Jamming Girl Culture: Young Women and Consumer Citizenship” which discusses the “conflation of power with consumption” thus positioning “girls as powerful citizens only when they consume” (Harris 167). We see that this idea reinforces the old gender dichotomy where men are perceived as money makers and women are perceived as spenders, and consequently men are perceived as cultural producers and women as consumers. Postfeminist “Girl Power” advertising culture has not helped to break down this stereotype. It still positions women as “citizen consumers” with the added image of the empowered working girl who buys a lifestyle as a display of her success and independence (e.g. Carrie Bradshaw’s character on Sex and the City is a prime example of this).

Moreover, we see that Shades’s article on “Gender and the Commodification of Community” extends Harris’s arguments by tracing the feminization of the internet through Women.com and gURL.com’s unsettling history of commodifying girl identities. Such a tracing highlights the need to put girls in the driver’s seat as producers of culture who find creative ways to resist and subvert “Girl Power” advertising culture through culture jamming, zines, and the rewriting of cultural texts that produce and reproduce postfeminist views of consumerism as citizenship.