Page 304 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 293
Chapter 17
Sexuality for sale
1Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin 1973), p. 94.
2Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin 1976), p. 165.
3 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (Boyars 1978), p. 13.
4Marx, Grundrisse, p. 89.
5 Judith Williamson takes the concept of ‘exchange values’ from Marx’s use of it as
an economic definition: the value of commodities in terms of the embodiment of
one identical social substance—human labour—which allows them to be
exchanged with each other, irrespective of their use value, their individual bodily
forms (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1). But Williamson shifts its use to an ideological
level (cf. Mauss’s and Lévi-Strauss’s ‘symbolic exchange’). Thus it is used
analogously rather than identically but always retains its relation to the commodity
form: ‘The ad translates these “thing” statements/use values to us as human
statements; they are given a humanly symbolic “exchange value”’ (Decoding
Advertisements, p. 12).
6 For more on this work of beautification in women’s and girls’ magazines, see
A.McRobbie, ‘Working-class girls and the culture of femininity’ (unpublished MA
thesis, University of Birmingham, 1977); J.Winship, ‘A woman’s world: Woman—
an ideology of femininity’, in Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue (CCCS/
Hutchinson 1978), and ‘Woman becomes an “individual”: femininity and
consumption in women’s magazines 1954–69’, in Sociological Review monograph
(1979). For more on the work of domesticity, see A. Oakley, The Sociology of
Housework (Martin Robertson 1974), and A.Oakley, Housewife (Allen Lane
1974).
7 Rosalind Coward, ‘Sexual liberation and the family’, in M/F, no. 1 (1978).
8 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in On Sexuality (Penguin 1977).
9 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin 1972); H.Butcher, R.Coward et al., ‘Images
in the media’, CCCS Stencilled Paper, no. 31 (1974).
10 For Freud’s discussion, in psychoanalytic terms, of scopophilia and exhibitionism,
see ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ (1915), in Complete Psychological Works
(Standard Edition, Hogarth), vol. 14.
11 Williamson defines a ‘referent system’ as a ‘hollowed-out system of meaning’
(Decoding Advertisements, p. 168), which refers to a reality but is ‘lifted from the
materiality of our lives’ (ibid., p. 74).
12 Griselda Pollock, ‘What’s wrong with images of women?’, Screen Education, no.
24 (Autumn 1977), p. 29.
13 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 165.
14 ibid., pp. 164–5.
15 Freud, ‘Fetishism’.

Chapter 18
Literature/society: mapping the field

1 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Secker and Warburg 1972).
2 Frye’s ‘The social context of literary criticism’ is reprinted in Tom and Elizabeth
Burns (eds.), The Sociology of Literature and Drama (Penguin 1973); Leavis’s