소비문화의 ‘여성화’와 메리 울스턴크래프트의 젠더정치학
The Feminization of Consumer Culture and Gender Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft
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This essay presents an analytical reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatment of the consumer culture in the historical context of the long eighteenth-century cultural drive of feminization. Interpreting Wollstonecraft’s main prose works such as two Vindications with a focus on a cluster of topics related with commerce, consumption and luxury, this paper demonstrates the ways in which her critique of consumer culture negotiates with, rather than subscribes to, the long-standing patriarchal norm of gender binary that tends to promote male privilege and female subordination. Her negotiation, this paper attempts to show, reveals complexity, subtlety and rigor as well, manifesting thorny difficulties and dilemmas inherent in the emerging modern feminist thoughts straddling both virtue-oriented republicanism and rights-oriented liberalism. The initiating observation is that commerce, consumption and luxury are relentlessly feminized; consumer culture facilitates the system of polite manners, and the proliferation of manners accelerates feminization. Wollstonecraft offers a penetrating critique of the whole mechanism of feminization and its pathology of effeminacy in particular. Although pathetic male effeminacy suffers downright condemnation in her criticism, what seems to concern Wollstonecraft most in terms of her gender politics is the deceptive erasure of women along with the representational crisis of femininity. Feminization suffocates not only women for the demand of feminine manners but also the discursive space of femininity itself. Wollstonecraft’s nuanced and yet daring strategy can be understood as suggesting that current gender norms should be rethought in a way that problematizes the stability of the gender system, urging us to activate our imagination of equality, right, and virtue.
Abstract
This essay presents an analytical reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatment of the consumer culture in the historical context of the long eighteenth-century cultural drive of feminization. Interpreting Wollstonecraft’s main prose works such as two Vindications with a focus on a cluster of topics related with commerce, consumption and luxury, this paper demonstrates the ways in which her critique of consumer culture negotiates with, rather than subscribes to, the long-standing patriarchal norm of gender binary that tends to promote male privilege and female subordination. Her negotiation, this paper attempts to show, reveals complexity, subtlety and rigor as well, manifesting thorny difficulties and dilemmas inherent in the emerging modern feminist thoughts straddling both virtue-oriented republicanism and rights-oriented liberalism. The initiating observation is that commerce, consumption and luxury are relentlessly feminized; consumer culture facilitates the system of polite manners, and the proliferation of manners accelerates feminization. Wollstonecraft offers a penetrating critique of the whole mechanism of feminization and its pathology of effeminacy in particular. Although pathetic male effeminacy suffers downright condemnation in her criticism, what seems to concern Wollstonecraft most in terms of her gender politics is the deceptive erasure of women along with the representational crisis of femininity. Feminization suffocates not only women for the demand of feminine manners but also the discursive space of femininity itself. Wollstonecraft’s nuanced and yet daring strategy can be understood as suggesting that current gender norms should be rethought in a way that problematizes the stability of the gender system, urging us to activate our imagination of equality, right, and virtue.
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