Wilk Fashion Myths

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FASHION MYTHS: THE GENDERING OF CONSUMPTION IN BELIZE IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

Richard Wilk

Anthropology

Indiana University

Note: This is a reading draft for presentation at the 2000 meetings of the AAA in

San Francisco. References are not included, and can be obtained from the author.

Abstract: For the last two hundred years, western modernism has gendered the

boundary between production and consumption through historical narrative,

marketing technology, and influence over bodily practice and daily domestic

routine. Of course the ideology of gendered production and consumption has

always had a tendentious and imperfect relationship to behavior. The gap between

ideology and practice is especially clear in the colonial context. In this paper I

draw on historical data on changing consumption and production practices incolonial Belize, to show how this gap between behavior and ideology was

maintained. These devices include redefinition (so women’s work is redefined as

consumption), ontogenism (so women’s work is seen as a stage in the development

of the “normal” state), and distraction (so attention to women’s consumption

overshadows and conceals men’s consumption).

In Belize, as in the United States, urban and educated people share a historical

narrative about gender and consumption, which links modern times and the

emergence of woman-as-consumer. We find the same history repeated often inacademia, where it is often traced back to Thorstein Veblen:

Once men and women both worked, and gender identity was rooted in labor both

within and outside the home. With the emergence of the bourgeois household

however, as a mark of social status and wealth, women stopped producing and

became specialists in consumption. A modern economy emerged that was divided

into a male sector of corporate ownership, administration and production, and a

female household sector of consumption, driven by fashion and display of taste in

new forms of social competition. Men worked derived their social identity from

work, women consumed in the private realm of the home.

This story is bolstered also, in Belize as elsewhere, by advertising and marketingpractices that continually depict women as consumers and men as producers

(advertisement overheads). In public discourse, for example in discussions of food

safety and import policy, consumption is almost always linked to the household,

and the household is identified with women, completing the link from consumption

to women. And when consumption becomes a political issue, for example when

nationalists complain about the import of foreign media and goods to Belize,


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women are implicitly blamed, for they are the ones buying imported cosmetics and

clothes, feeding their families pizza instead of rice and beans.

In the USA, the historical narrative is usually a prologue to a millennial tale of how

and why this is all changing completely; through the restructuring of work and

family, the arrival of new media and communications, postmodern genderconsciousness, or the convergence of men’s and women’s consumer practices

(advertising overhead). There is a nice symmetry, in fact, to the a story that once

we all worked, then one gender created consumer society, and now we all

consume.

Of course, many of us know that factually, the Veblen story is simply untrue. Both

production and consumption have always been gendered in practice, nor have the

boundaries between domestic and public, or even production and consumption ever

been fixed, impermeable, or immutable. So should we then conclude that the story

of ‘woman the consumer’ has been disproven and will disappear now that it has

been refuted?

My main goal in this paper is to suggest that this evolutionary story is still

important for understanding the present phase of global capitalist growth. The

story of how consumption became a female specialty is fundamental, not as a

description of history, or an accurate portrayal of the role of women in the global

economy. Instead it is important because the myth is remarkably durable and

resistant to change, not only in the academy, but in its escaped feral form in the

wild, in the world itself. Social scientists report hearing variations of the myth

from all around the globe; and hear the story that economic modernization leads to

1. the movement of women from primarily productive roles to consumption and2. the emergence of a consumer sector driven by female taste for luxury and

fashion creating

3. a global beauty and fashion system.

These ideas are widespread and largely uncontested, in the sense that people may

think the trends are good or bad, and may fight against them. But they still agree

that they exist.

The story is also turned on its head so that the emergence of a local fashion

industry become a public sign that a modern economy is developing, that a country

has arrived in the global marketplace. So fashion and female beauty become

emblematic of consumption and modernity; discourse about consumption becomesgendered, and turns into a debate about shopping, fashion, and beauty. In this way,

through the medium of gender, modernity is inextricably linked to progress and

the growth of consumerism. Alternative ideas about the future are harder to

imagine, since growth and prosperity are unquestionable values.

I now see that this is why when I went to Belize to study consumer culture in 1990,

I ended up studying beauty pageants and the local fashion and beauty industry.


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Despite the fact that both men and women in Belize are consumers – and from my

surveys I know that men and women in Belize have remarkably similar tastes in

food, movies, music and many kinds of consumer goods – when I talked to both

men and women about how consumption was changing in Belize, they raised the

issue of fashion and beauty. Moral debates about modern wastefulness and

overconsumption focused on women’s shopping and display. While women oftenaccuse men of laziness, or wasting money on drinking and partying, this kind of

spending is traditional, not modern.

My questions about the way Belizean culture was affected by imported consumer

goods often led directly to the topic of female beauty and the conflict between local

and foreign standards in beauty pageants. Many Belizeans, like people in other

parts of the world, feel that local culture is being swamped by imports, that Belize

is becoming thoroughly Americanized, and that local ideas about fashion and

beauty are subject to the cultural imperialism of the Barbie ideal. (beauty pageant

overhead)

Children and teenagers are also frequently blamed for overconsumption, for giving

in to the seduction of television advertising, wasting money on overpriced tennis

shoes or computer games. But, unlike women, youthful offenders are given a good

deal of license because they are expected to be irresponsible.

High Anxiety

Why is all this attention, moral approbation and cultural panic, focused on

women’s consumption, and particularly on fashion? Why is the myth of the

emergence of “woman the consumer” so important at this particular time? I have

several suggestions, but first I have to give you some historical background onBelize, a small ethnically mixed country that achieved independence from England

only in 1981. I have been working there in various ways since 1972.

Of course women have always worked in Belize, but until quite recently the highly

visible public waged jobs have been dominated by men. Agriculture and logging,

the major export industries were male enclaves. Women did a lot of poorly paid

work in the colonial era; most jobs were extensions of domestic work - cooking,

cleaning, washing, childcare, and vending. The few wage jobs open to women – as

secretaries, nurses, teachers, shop and bank clerks – were similarly seen as

nonproductive work.

A lot of employment was determined by ethnicity, color, locality, and

class/education. In the colonial regime these were all blurred together into a

ranking system that placed lighter skinned, educated, urban women of mixed

African and European ancestry at the very top, and darker skinned, uneducated,

rural women of Mayan or Hispanic ancestry at the bottom.


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Was consumption gendered in the colonial era? Of course it was; in ways that are

completely recognizable today (see Counihan & Kaplan 1998 on ways consumption

is highly gendered in pre-colonial societies). The few documents we have from the

early 19th century (consumption advertisement) include lists of imports, showing

that the elites participated fully in the empire’s status consumption system, in the

fields of food, drink, and clothing. Contemporary accounts indicate that the samefields of distinction were important among the local creole middle class, as well as

to a lesser extent among the slaves and other rural people.

By the end of the 19th century, soaps and various cosmetic products become

important. Kathy Peiss has written about the history of cosmetics in the US, and

Richard Burke on the marketing of soap in colonial Zimbabwe; in both cases the

products became popular at the same time that women’s work was changing

rapidly. They both find that attention to appearance was closely tied to anxieties

about ethnic and class boundaries (purity- cuticura). In Belize, as in Zimbabwe, the

prevailing colonial discourse about class, cleanliness, and health (the lower classes

are unclean and are sources of contagion; the colonial regime interferes in everyaspect of the life of ‘natives’ in the name of health) provided an entry for early

multinational companies. Soap was initially presented as a health product, and

beauty was a benefit of health (overhead - cuticura), and finally appearance

becomes the key appeal (late soap advertisement).

So if consumption has been a highly gendered field for more than 100 years in

Belize, why is it such a public issue now? Why does female beauty and fashion play

such an important role in the way Belizeans think about their nation and its place

in the global economy?

Explanations

First, there is simply the fact that over the last 40 years the scope of consumer

culture in Belize has grown enormously. Food imports, for example have gone from

25 dollars per person per year in 1960, to over 200 dollars in 1990. While volume

of consumer imports has been doubling every ten years, the variety of goods is

increasing even faster, as American-style supermarkets and dry-goods retailers

extend throughout the country. And a larger proportion of the population now has

the cash to buy consumer goods as well, so they are more widely consumed in

different classes, ethnic groups, and regions.

My analysis of customs records of imports shows that while the volume and varietyof goods like jewelry, shampoo, and cosmetics has increased dramatically in the

last 40 years, they haven’t been increasing any faster than goods like motor oil,

house paint, dog food, or sport fishing tackle. They just get more attention.

[I was wondering if this is true on an international scale as well. I was able to find

a few statistics on the size of the global sales of cosmetics. Despite my impression


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that they are exploding – I didn’t find any evidence that they were. Global trade in

dog food is growing much more quickly.]

A second explanation is grounded in changes in the labor market in Belize. There

have been more professional job opportunities for women, as well as in some

lower-waged portions of the expanding tourist industry. Since the early 1980s,several offshore clothing assembly plants have taken advantage of the Caribbean

Basin initiative, hiring large numbers of young women. As in the garment industry

elsewhere in the Caribbean (piecework wages), wages are low and working

conditions are terrible. This particular aspect of globalization, along with the

growth of export agriculture, has actually expanded and strengthened the

gendering of work for the poor majority of the population.

Some have argued that simply having a higher percentage of the women in waged

labor gives women more disposable income. Young working women, for example,

have been singled out as the vanguard of new forms of consumption in late 19th

century France. And Barbara Mills’ work in Thailand finds that young factorywomen do experiment with new kinds of consumption, holding back some of their

income from their families.

In contrast, Belizean women say that their obligations and responsibilities to their

families grow right along with their income. The way the Belizean family system

works, men often cut their contribution to the household, or to child support when

a woman gets a job (Mclauren 1996). The result is summarized by a Belizean

woman who said simply, a man’s earnings is his own, but the woman’s is for her

children and the house.

Only in this light – contextualized in the pattern of capitalist development inBelize, and in the structures of gender and power within the household – what

Folbre calls “structures of constraint” – can we start to approach the problem of

the public volatility of beauty culture and female consumerism, and see why the

beauty industry is anomalous and difficult.

Ambiguity

Here I want to make a quick transition from talking about social and economic

realities, to stories and representations about those realities, with the goal of

showing how they contradict each other.

In reality the beauty and fashion industry is problematic for the mythic andcultural order because it constantly crosses the boundaries between domination

and resistance. For example, in Belize beauty queens are both criticized for selling

out, and praised for facing up to power. On one hand they are living up to foreign

gender stereotypes in a system dominated by two multinational media

corporations, on the other hand they assert local and national pride, as well as

their rights to political voice and careers. Is Denny Mendez, born in the Dominican


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Republic but voted Miss Italy for 1996, the winner of a triumph over racism, or a

victim of the fashion system. ( from Transition - figure 9)

Pamela Wright, working on the Miss Garifuna pageant in Belize, shows how the

event is reinterpreted and reappropriated locally to emphasize ethnic distinction.

So instead of selecting Miss Garifuna on the basis of some idealized notion ofphysical beauty, the winner excels in Garifuna dance, use of the Garifuna language,

and knowledge of history and culture. She asserts the resistant status of ethnic

identity within the nation; the pageant format is effectively reappropriated, or to

use de Certeau's terminology, "poached" and turned into a local event for the

purposes of exalting the local and ethnic over the global and national. But others

argue that the very idea of a beauty contest is a form of domination; in South

Africa for example, some anti-apartheid activists criticized the first black Miss

South Africa as a sell-out or a token, while others praised her as a symbol of Black

resurgence and equality (Russell 1997).

The other reason beauty and fashion industries attract attention is because theychallenge the boundaries between production and consumption. Is the beauty

queen a consumer or producer? The consumer is also the product.

As Leora Auslander (1996) has argued, the boundary between consumption and

production has been the dynamic arena, the site of gender struggle in the

developed countries for centuries. In Belize this boundary moved in the last

century when the serious work of keeping clean, healthy and dressed became

instead the frivolous consumption of cosmetics and fashion. In this century

Belizean women have fought for recognition that their domestic chores are a form

of productive labor.

In Belize the boundary between production and consumption also challenged by

more active participation by Belizean men and women in beauty culture. In the

growing number of small beauty shops, health clubs, and hair parlors,

entrepreneurs turn their skills as consumers, often gained abroad, into business

and eventually capital. Rather than being simply the consumption of foreign

products and images, many of these women assert, fashion and beauty should be a

vehicle for the development of national and ethnic consciousness. By serving local

consumers, they seek to play a serious part in the production of the nation, and

challenge dependence on global media and multinational corporations.

Conclusions

The evolutionary story about a transition from woman the producer to woman the

consumer, and back again is empirically wrong. Yet on another level, people widely

believe it to be true, and the globalized beauty and fashion industries have become

emblematic of the myth. A closer look at those industries shows that in many ways

they actually destabilize categories of consumption and production, and challenge

the caricature of the dominated woman. But they also seem to make an essential


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and important connection between the reality and the myth, serving as icons and

symbols. And the story itself persists as public rhetoric, as a popular model of

economic history, and as an ideology of development.

Elsewhere I have argued that globalization is not producing either the economic or

cultural uniformity that so many have predicted. Instead this period of rapidglobalization thrives on differences and disparities, inequality and discrimination;

while it frees capital and markets, it increasingly binds people to their localities,

identities, and economies. But along with these harsh realities are those spaces of

the imaginary which Appadurai calls ‘scapes,” where ideas and narratives

circulate. In this mythosphere, we can identify common threads of discourse about

consumption. Globalization of consumption then appears as a set of common

discourses, stories, debates, based on some common concepts, rather than simply

the spread of a bunch of practices, or tastes, or gendered practices. But sharing

stories, needless to say, does not have the power to make us all the same, and it

certainly does not make us all equal.

[Of course we are not going to become alike because we all eat big macs. But if we

all believe that we are all going someday to be eating big macs, and this will make

us alike, does THAT make us alike? Only in some very limited ways. ]

A draft of this paper was presented at the conference “The Transnational Politics of

Gender and Consumption” at the University of California, Berkeley October 8-9,

1999. I appreciate the comments of participants in that conference.

1. Dirlik (1996:31) lists the following as accepted trends in global capitalism:

a. global motions of peoples

b. weakening of boundaries, between societies and social categoriesc. internal replication of inequalities once seen as colonial

d. homogenization and fragmentation within and across societies

e. interpenetration of global and local; multiculturalism and

cosmopolitanism

f. concentration of power in the hands of capital

g. manipulation of people to make them more responsive to the operations of

capital

Wilk Fashion Myths

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