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Critical Cultural Communication
Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Buying (RED) products--from Gap T-shirts to Apple--to fight AIDS. Drinking a "Caring Cup" of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. All these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something.
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of "commodity activism." Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.
Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism
reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and
subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position
politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the
relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities,
arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded
commodity.
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of "commodity activism." Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.
Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism
reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and
subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position
politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the
relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities,
arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded
commodity.
314 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 24, 2012
Contemporary political discourses seem caught between two conflicting demands or presumptions; on the one hand there is a lamentation of decline of traditional politics – concern over voting rates, decline in community participation and so forth – while on the other hand there is a call to politics as consumption. We are encouraged to change the world by purchasing organic food or ensuring our clothes, coffee and all manner of other goods are fair trade. In all this, an effort to bring about change seems to be accompanied by an expectation of some immediate return, and not just an altruistic sense of doing good, making things better or even the delayed benefits of leaving the world a better place for our kids to grow up in (oh, there it is that pretentious, 1970s middle class justification for buying unleaded petrol and growing our own vegetables).
Shopping for a change has become much more sophisticated and much more mainstream in the intervening 35 years, much more intertwined in and acceptable to the dominant ideology and much more embedded in lifestyle politics. This is the very set of issues this very good collection of papers explores, unpacks and sets out to make sense of. The first section contains four papers looking at branding and the politics of everyday consumption, opening with a rich discussion of consumption that allows the consumers to brand themselves and in doing so claim an activist orientation to argue that there has been a growth of neo-liberal branding of the self that can be seen clearly in many forms of environmentalist ‘action’. Two of the papers explore aspects of branding of the self in extremely intimate ways – Sarah Banet-Weiser’s paper exploring the complexities of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign which she sees as, in part, shaping the social activist into a form of brand, and Jo Littler’s excellent analysis of discourses of ‘greenwashing’, ‘green governmentality’ and ‘social production’ (the latter two emerging as rich analytical tools) by looking at the politics of shopping for nappies/diapers (depending on which side of the Atlantic you are reading this on).
The next set of papers looks at celebrity activism, from the Brad Pitt fronted organisation setting out to help rebuild parts of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Katrina to Salma Hayek’s contradictory politics of race, ethnicity and gender in the politics of Latina identities in the USA to Angelina Jolie’s civic humanitarianism and Kanye West’s critique of blood diamonds and the complicity of hip hop bling in their market. These four papers, in their own ways, demonstrate a rich, complex and contradictory politics of celebrity activism that go well beyond profile building philanthropy (although Alison Trope’s excellent analysis of Jolie reads her through a long tradition of celebrity philanthropy to problematise both). The fifth paper in the section shifts focus away from celebrity a commodification of citizenship through the youth focussed organisation Invisible Children. Ironically, it is the apparent movement, Invisible Children, that seems the shallowest of these forms of activism, often focussed more on the performance of citizenship by young Anglo-Americans rather than autonomous or people-centred community development of professed.
The final section then continues this attention to movements. Two of these papers really stood out for me, in part because they are close to my professional work. Samantha King’s exceptional reading of Avon’s sponsorship of breast cancer walks as a form of civic fitness. Alongside the common discursive analysis King also looks at the micro-politics of power in the event highlighting the politics of race/ethnicity and poverty/class. The idea I especially liked here is her use of Robert Crawford’s notion of health as a form of ‘super-value’ carrying a range of other social and cultural associations but also leading to a sense of personal culpability for ill health. Alongside this paper, there is also Josée Johnston and Kate Cairn’s marvellous unpacking of the idea of eating for change and consumer food politics which they locate in the idea of an ethical foodscape; as with almost all the other paper this is neither condemnatory nor unremitting praise, but an exploration of complexity. Also in this section is Lynn Comella’s fantastic discussion of feminist sex-toy shops, fabulously titled ‘Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time’ – perhaps the best title I have read in an academic paper for an awfully long time.
The papers in this collection are theoretically sophisticated, testing and pushing our understandings of consumption and commodification as well as commodities in challenging ways to critically engage the neo-liberal politics of the self, demand not corporate social responsibility but corporate social accountability, to step beyond the labour theory of value to suggest that part of value, at least, must be linked to a surplus of consumer enjoyment (and although this is not pushed as far as it could – this seems to me to be both exchange and use value). This is not to say that all is well; the book has an almost exclusive focus on North America (Jo Littler’s essay is the only one that is not primarily North American focussed). This will limit is usefulness for many.
This collection is mainly aimed at academics but seems to me to offer a lot to social entrepreneurs, in part because it help problematise the field in a way that many of the motivational and how texts and speakers do not, not because it attacks but because it points to tensions, antagonisms and contradictions – always the most important things to be aware of when assessing change. Equally importantly, it gets beyond a romanticisation of resistance as well as a condemnation of commerce while maintaining a critical view of activism’s appropriation by the market. All in all, this is stimulating and challenging, and several papers will be revisited several times.
Shopping for a change has become much more sophisticated and much more mainstream in the intervening 35 years, much more intertwined in and acceptable to the dominant ideology and much more embedded in lifestyle politics. This is the very set of issues this very good collection of papers explores, unpacks and sets out to make sense of. The first section contains four papers looking at branding and the politics of everyday consumption, opening with a rich discussion of consumption that allows the consumers to brand themselves and in doing so claim an activist orientation to argue that there has been a growth of neo-liberal branding of the self that can be seen clearly in many forms of environmentalist ‘action’. Two of the papers explore aspects of branding of the self in extremely intimate ways – Sarah Banet-Weiser’s paper exploring the complexities of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign which she sees as, in part, shaping the social activist into a form of brand, and Jo Littler’s excellent analysis of discourses of ‘greenwashing’, ‘green governmentality’ and ‘social production’ (the latter two emerging as rich analytical tools) by looking at the politics of shopping for nappies/diapers (depending on which side of the Atlantic you are reading this on).
The next set of papers looks at celebrity activism, from the Brad Pitt fronted organisation setting out to help rebuild parts of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Katrina to Salma Hayek’s contradictory politics of race, ethnicity and gender in the politics of Latina identities in the USA to Angelina Jolie’s civic humanitarianism and Kanye West’s critique of blood diamonds and the complicity of hip hop bling in their market. These four papers, in their own ways, demonstrate a rich, complex and contradictory politics of celebrity activism that go well beyond profile building philanthropy (although Alison Trope’s excellent analysis of Jolie reads her through a long tradition of celebrity philanthropy to problematise both). The fifth paper in the section shifts focus away from celebrity a commodification of citizenship through the youth focussed organisation Invisible Children. Ironically, it is the apparent movement, Invisible Children, that seems the shallowest of these forms of activism, often focussed more on the performance of citizenship by young Anglo-Americans rather than autonomous or people-centred community development of professed.
The final section then continues this attention to movements. Two of these papers really stood out for me, in part because they are close to my professional work. Samantha King’s exceptional reading of Avon’s sponsorship of breast cancer walks as a form of civic fitness. Alongside the common discursive analysis King also looks at the micro-politics of power in the event highlighting the politics of race/ethnicity and poverty/class. The idea I especially liked here is her use of Robert Crawford’s notion of health as a form of ‘super-value’ carrying a range of other social and cultural associations but also leading to a sense of personal culpability for ill health. Alongside this paper, there is also Josée Johnston and Kate Cairn’s marvellous unpacking of the idea of eating for change and consumer food politics which they locate in the idea of an ethical foodscape; as with almost all the other paper this is neither condemnatory nor unremitting praise, but an exploration of complexity. Also in this section is Lynn Comella’s fantastic discussion of feminist sex-toy shops, fabulously titled ‘Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time’ – perhaps the best title I have read in an academic paper for an awfully long time.
The papers in this collection are theoretically sophisticated, testing and pushing our understandings of consumption and commodification as well as commodities in challenging ways to critically engage the neo-liberal politics of the self, demand not corporate social responsibility but corporate social accountability, to step beyond the labour theory of value to suggest that part of value, at least, must be linked to a surplus of consumer enjoyment (and although this is not pushed as far as it could – this seems to me to be both exchange and use value). This is not to say that all is well; the book has an almost exclusive focus on North America (Jo Littler’s essay is the only one that is not primarily North American focussed). This will limit is usefulness for many.
This collection is mainly aimed at academics but seems to me to offer a lot to social entrepreneurs, in part because it help problematise the field in a way that many of the motivational and how texts and speakers do not, not because it attacks but because it points to tensions, antagonisms and contradictions – always the most important things to be aware of when assessing change. Equally importantly, it gets beyond a romanticisation of resistance as well as a condemnation of commerce while maintaining a critical view of activism’s appropriation by the market. All in all, this is stimulating and challenging, and several papers will be revisited several times.
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