An essay on shopping malls and the power struggles going...

An essay on shopping malls and the power struggles going on within them. In this essay, I have given a critical analysis of Fiske s Shopping for Pleasure, from Reading The Popular. In this analysis, I will be examining the main points in this chapter and discussing Fiske s explanation for including each one. I will also be examining counter arguments from other sources on his theories. There are five distinctive sections within this chapter: malls, power and resistance , consuming women , commodities and women , conspicuous consumption , and progress and the new. I intend to look at each section separately, finally connecting the whole chapter at the end of my analysis. The first section from this chapter is titled†¦show more content†¦In this section the author reminds us that buying and ownership offers a sense of control and forms the main means of achieving this. ( Williamson : 1986) However ownership is not the only sense of control available to the consumer - the moment of choice is also an empowered moment. Fiske demonstrates this by including a paragraph describing a woman taking her daughter shopping and the daughter recalls the sense of power her mother felt over the shop assistant. De Certeau describes this as tactical raids ; the empowerment felt by the girl s mother was in the consumer versus distributor relationship. However, the author feels that there can be another explanation: the girl s mother was traditionally middle-class , so her actions could be explained as mistress-servant relationship, which is seen as less politically acceptable than tactical raids upon the system. Fiske suggests that in light of this produc tion may be essentially proletarian and consumption bourgeois. On the other hand, however consumption is more than a bourgeois act and appears to strengthen rather than menace the values of the bourgeois and forges social allegiances. The point is made that shopping itself can t be radical as commodities are produced by the capitalists, so can t as a product be radical, but the way they are consumed as items can be. Stedman-Jones (1982) points out that