Page 196 - Consuming Media

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trying to articulate different counter-forces and blend them into successful alliances.
This may well be a fruitful and often necessary tactic, but there is a great danger that
this kind of thinking falls prey to what Stuart Hall once (referring to the ethnic
dimension) described as a combination of stereotypization and polarization. 23
Critical social and cultural studies need to be aware of the unruly intersections of
many different axes of power/resistance, each of which is also ridden with internal
ambivalences.
There are thus many different cultural front lines in media consumption. Let us
return to the flâneur. While Benjamin’s flâneur found the arcades exciting, the bour-
geois avant-garde of the early twenty-first century is less fond of shopping centres.
How much can this figure be bound to a particular classed and gendered position,
like the male bourgeois avant-garde? Janet Wolff and other feminist critics have
observed the obligatory maleness of this flâneur, while public women tended to be
24
identified with prostitutes. Women were active in public space, not least in depart-
ment stores and arcades, but dominating male discourses preferred to reserve critical
agency to men. Elizabeth Wilson and others have preferred to look for instances of
female flânerie, with resistant gazes and attentive walking movements. 25 Women
were certainly present and visible in the modern city, in several social roles, but this
induced defence reactions from male writers who tried to hide them away or
degraded them to objects of male lust.
Department stores were once built around the female consumer, who was the main
target for spatial design, marketing and choice of commodities for sale. Men were
supposed to shop fast and efficiently and thus got a separate entrance from the street,
much smaller than the ‘female’ main entrance. 26 Mica Nava and others have shown
how the earlier department stores targeted women and constructed a female
consumer paradise. 27 Women are still strongly present in shopping, but there has
been an historical change in its dominant gender regime. The shopping centres of the
late twentieth century have no clear gender-specific spatial outline, instead striving
for ‘accessibility for all’. And though there exist plenty of gendered marketing, for
instance in the strongly dichotomizing weekly magazines, the marketing produced by
Solna Centre does not specifically target women at all, but rather the heterosexual
nuclear family. According to statistics, women still tend to dominate family shop-
ping. Men spend as much money on shopping, but focus on larger and more expen-
sive products such as cars and machines, whereas women still take the main
responsibility for the time-consuming procurement of daily provisions like food and
clothes. Seventy per cent of Solna Centre’s visitors were women. 28 Comparable
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figures are reported in many countries, for instance by Daniel Miller in the UK. By
implication, the average customer cannot be the traditional nuclear family, but is
rather one solitary woman, or possibly a couple of women. The marketing focus on
the nuclear family was thus more a result of prevailing family ideals and norms than
a realistic mirror of who really makes the shopping. The realism instead lies in the
sociocultural dominance of the family as consumption unit. Miller asserts that even
though women make the daily purchases, they are made in a family context. The

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