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184 Consuming Media

goods bought are generally not for individual use by the women, but for family use.
The family is thus a basic unit of consumption – though not its main agent.
The older department stores’ explicit focus on the female consumer was an
acknowledgement of her economic power and cultural taste, and of her right to a
social space in a public world otherwise dominated by men. In comparison, today’s
shopping centre tends to push her back again, in spite of the fact that she remains its
most frequent visitor and customer. The step from gender-split department stores to
bi-gendered shopping centres implies a kind of heterosexualization of commercial
space. 30 Vernacular buying, managed by women, has been confined to supermarkets
and stores in housing areas, whereas leisure-oriented shopping is concentrated either
on city centres (particularly in Europe) or spectacular shopping malls on the fringes
of the city, far from housing estates. Their emphasis on leisure, pleasure and desire,
far from the unsexy, boring everyday with its diapers and recycling, is meant to attract
both genders to increased consumption. And today’s marketing is either aimed at the
family, or trying to attract the heterosexual male gaze, as exemplified not least around
Christmas when posters are regularly filled with glamorous models in minimal
underwear.
There can thus be discerned in the organization and marketing of shopping sites
an historical displacement from the dimension of gender to the dimension of sexu-
ality, corresponding to trends in the media. This amounts to a restructuring of domi-
nant identity orders and their relative hierarchies. There are also strong age, class and
ethnic regimes of power in the centre, some of which have been touched upon in
previous chapters. All these also point to the existence of lines of power and resist-
ance cutting through civil society itself. The identity orders constructed by the centre
are not only imposed from above, but also in most cases shared by a majority of its
visitors. It is a matter of hegemonic social structures, rather than of external manip-
ulation.
The contradictions between different citizen groups are of several kinds. There are
for instance taste gaps that may induce fierce debates and even hate between different
customers in the media shops. A hip-hop aficionado may despise a typical lover of
mainstream pop, jazz or opera, and a young feminist in the video rental store may
want to protest loudly against those middle-aged men that drool at its porno shelves.
Another example is when different social movements sometimes collide, for instance
racists versus anti-racists, or fundamentalists versus freedom rights movements. A
series of intersectional relations between orders of identity and difference makes room
for complex front lines in civil society. However, the shopping centre is a strictly regu-
lated environment that tends to minimize the open expression of such conflicts.
Explicit anti-commercial critique is pushed outside its confines, as are the activities
of subcultures and counter movements. This makes the internal tensions between
civil society interests less visible there than elsewhere in the city.
There are also tensions between visitors/citizens and political/administrative state
institutions, and these may as well relate to issues of media and communication.
One example is when there is dissatisfaction with public broadcasting, or popular