McRobbie, A. (2008). Young women and consumer culture: An intervention. Cultural studies, 22(5), 531-550.
McRobbie's "Young Women and Consumer Culture: An Intervention" is a journal article published by Routledge as part of the Cultural Studies journal, volume 22, issue 5. The article is divided into four sections: ‘The perils of ‘commodity feminism,’ ‘Feminism and consumer culture,’ ‘Feminism and Sex in the City,’ and ‘Pole dancing for pre-teens?’. The first section entitled ‘The perils of ‘commodity feminism’ is presented as an introduction, in which McRobbie lists the main topics she intends to deal with and her three objectives.
The first objective of the McRobbie’s article is dealt with in the section entitled ‘Feminism and consumer culture’. In it, she provides a critical review of the general features of feminists’ responses to consumer culture, with a particular focus on her works. Focusing on television and magazines, the authors criticizes feminist writings in the last decade as being focused more on feminine pleasures than on the commodification of femininity. More problematic according to her is the fact that feminist critics became complacent as they noticed feminism becoming part of the media. After that, McRobbie moves on to self-critique her own response to feminism in relation to consumer culture during the 1990s. In particular, the author criticizes the failure of her writings to consider the "elements of patriarchal power or the heterosexual matrix … [that were] quickly able to exploit, and duly benefit from, the emerging post-feminist language of personal choice, freedom and independence which the magazines of the 1990s endorsed." Apart from this, McRobbie criticizes how her writings overlooked the restrictions put on feminist editors working in media institutions. She also admits her inattentiveness to "the brutality of racial and sexual exclusions" in favor of white, heterosexual identities. Finally, she summarizes her critique of feminist studies in the last decade, including her own, in the idea of the failure to apply academic scholarship to the social and cultural world.
Having critically reviewed previous feminist writings on consumer culture, including her own, McRobbie moves in the next section, entitled ‘Feminism and Sex in the City,’ to review and comment on feminist writings on the US television series Sex in the City. The main purpose of this section is to critique the obsessive consumption this television series promotes and feminists' inattentiveness to this problematic. McRobbie refers to the latter as 'complicitous critique', a pro-capitalist attitude to the series, one that positions feminist critics as fans of the series rather than as critical of it, making them overlook, intentionally or unintentionally, “the perils of commodity feminism.” More specifically, McRobbie argues, through a close analysis of the series, that Sex in the City, which was largely endorsed by feminists, leads to the undoing rather than the promotion of feminist ideals, to “gender retrenchment and the undoing of feminism,” to use McRobbie’s words. Specifically, the author argues that consumer culture is provided as a way to come to terms with, or escape from, the excess of femininity in the post-feminist era, and that “popular entertainment […] re-vitalize[s] existing patriarchal relations of power and domination by securing anew the consent of women to existing social and political arrangements.”
The third objective of McRobbie’s article, which is dealt with in the last section entitled ‘Pole dancing for pre-teens?’, is to draw attention to the way consumer culture extends the requirement of normative post-feminist femininity to pre-teen girls. Media and consumer culture, argues McRobbie, treats the child not as a child but as a girl only to make them aspire to the ideal femininity, a subject position that can only be attained through the kind of consumer behavior promoted, making them very important, current and future, consumers par excellence. McRobbie also brings to her discussion an opposing voice, that of Sarah Banet-Weiser, which welcomes the appropriation of feminism by media and thinks of it as ‘not a problem’. McRobbie criticizes this attitude in that it overlooks the fact that media gives voice only to (neo)liberal, pro-capitalist feminism, the kind of feminism that tends to tolerate consumer culture and overlook its perils. McRobbie ends this section as well as the article by restating her main objective behind this paper, which is “to re-activate the terms of feminist critiques of consumer culture so as to address the increasingly powerful role played by these forces for young women, for girls, and also for pre-teen girls.” Such objective, adds McRobbie, cannot be achieved without the resuscitation of feminist anti-capitalism coupled with psychoanalytical thinking.
To conclude, in this article, McRobbie attempts to draw attention to the danger consumer culture poses to feminist ideals, namely that of gender retrenchment and the undoing of feminism, taking the US television series Sex in the City as a case study. McRobbie develops this argument through three parts: first, a critique of feminists’ responses to consumer culture including her own, second, a critique of feminists’ writings on Sex in the City and a comment on its promotion of compulsive consumerism, and, third, a critique of involving pre-teens in this post-feminist consumer culture.
