Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The relationship between the body and material culture in the post-industrial world is defined through consumption. How one experiences the body, manages corporeal identity, participates in social rituals as an embodied subject is, to a great extent, commodified. Changes in perspectives on the body are intertwined with the advent of consumer culture and the concomitant development of mass media and advertising. The growth of production during the industrial era necessitated a corollary growth in consumption. Markets for the expanding array of goods and services being produced were constructed through the attachment of meaning to consumer goods. The growth of markets driven by advertising profits resulted. The appropriation of meanings for advertising promotes what is termed the “floating signifier” effect ( Baudrillard 1975 ) or the shift in the use value attached to objects such that any meaning or quality can be associated with any object. The body acts as both a carrier of these multiple and shifting meanings and a means for expression as the body becomes what Featherstone (1991) refers to as the “visible carrier of the self.” No longer subject to the dangers of sin so prevalent in nineteenth-century Victorian imagery, the body in twentieth-century consumer culture becomes central to the project of the self as the main focus shifts from the soul to the surface of the body. ... log in or subscribe to read full text