Retail, Consumption, and Gender

The relation between retail, gender, and consumption must be addressed thought the theoretical background of the sexual division of labour, in which our society has been divided into a public sphere, linked to productive and income-generating work that has been traditionally associated with men, and into a private sphere, where women have been linked be the responsible of reproductive, domestic chores and care work. Modern retail spaces have been addressed as ‘third places’ that suggest a defragmentation of the binarily public/private dichotomy, by bringing consumption, and not only production, as the main productive force of capital. This entry will analyze the physical construction of the public consumer spaces for women in modernity since the French Revolution, a pivotal process that was started by the revolt of women who could not buy food in the market for their children due to inflation and speculation of prices. This event was the precursor moment for the publicitarization of domesticity by bringing the conflict of the sexual division of labour to the public space. Following the ideas of Benjamin, Habermas, and Arendt, the chapter will continue to address the birth of the nineteenth-century public market as a regulatory space for gender, initially male-dominated, where negotiations of civility, political participation, and agency could be embodied in the modern idea of egalitarianism. The public markets and the galleries of early modernity opened the gate to renegotiate the domestic enclosure of women as private consumers for reproductive aims, bringing them to a whole new urban, public activity: the window shopping for the flâneuse. By looking into window shopping as an emancipatory act for women in the city first, later in the suburbs, and nowadays in the virtual space of e-commerce, the chapter offers a reflection on how retail spaces and conspicuous consumption embodied the symbolic revaluation of post-war consumer idle, by bringing consumption as a productive force.