If the Shoe Fits: Sex and the City and the Rearticulation of Commodity Feminism

by Jonathan Key

Student Number: s1715224 Course Title: The Idea of American Culture: Consumer Nation Course Code: LAX008B10 Credits: 4 Instructor: Ms. Laura Basu Date of Submission: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 Number of Words: 2,713

Key 2 Desperate for a change of scenery after a torrid affair with Mr. Big spells the end of her relationship with Aidan, Carrie Bradshaw, the uncontested (anti)heroine of HBOs critically acclaimed Sex and the City (1998-2004), flees New York in an escapist attempt to distance herself from the emotional wreckage. With her best friends Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte in tow (who double as each others emotional support system), Carrie sets her sights on the seemingly uncomplicated haven of Los Angeles. Yet, despite her best intentions, she soon finds herself back on the streets of Manhattan, recreated on a Hollywood movie studio backlot. Although she traveled from coast to coast hoping to avoid the repercussions of her actions, the past reasserts itself with a vengeance by virtue of the self-same scenery she had been intent on leaving behind. Stranded on a fake set of New York, Carrie is finally forced to come to terms with her old issues, which, bouncing off the mock New York edifices, felt more real than ever. In her trademark rhetorical style, Carrie recaps: I couldnt help but wonder, no matter how far you travel or how much you run from it, can you ever really escape your past? (Escape from New York). Trapped in a tangible manifestation of French philosopher Jean Baudrillards simulacrum, Carrie unwittingly offers up a definition of his related notion of hyperreality, being a constellation of hollow images and signifiers that provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, and have the effect of [being] more real than real (Kellner, Jean Baudrillard 11). Acting out Baudrillards postmodern scenario, Carrie has [fled] from the desert of the real for the ecstasies of hyperreality (ibid.) but, crucially, she does not devolve into Baudrillards pure screen of pure absorption (qtd. in ibid.) as an ineluctable consequence. Throughout the series, Carrie subverts the Baudrillardian paradigm by adopting Baudrillards concept of commodity sign value, and infusing it with a postfeminist ethos that supersedes the confines of personal, local, and immediate resistance (Koch and Elmore 573) by drawing on the ideological potential of television to effect an extradiegetic meta-narrative (qtd. in ibid.) that animates and bespeaks a new postfeminist subject. Commodity fetishism is thus reincarnated as commodity feminism, which serves as a vehicle for female solidarity and financial autonomy, and a defense of staying single (and fabulous) in the face of patriarchal heteronormativity and its attendant social perquisites, which is amply illustrated in the season-four episode Ring a Ding Ding. To this day, critical analysis of television remains haunted by the ghost of television as the bad object. When the medium was first introduced, it was easily subsumed under the definition of mass culture propagated by leading members of the Frankfurt School, who dismiss it out of hand as a leading example of the crystallizations of authoritarian ideology that populate the mass-cultural spectrum (Gitlin 252). In keeping with classical Marxist theories of culture, television lulls the

Key 3 mass audience into passive inaction, priming them for a process of indoctrination that inevitably instills the belief system, the ideology, of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie into the minds of the unsuspecting cultural dupes on the other end of the screen, who buy it wholesale (White 164-165). Any avenues of resistance are prematurely closed off by the conventionality of the [television] form, which is too deeply implicated in the economic and cultural imperatives of the culture industries to serve as a site of opposition or critique (Fiske, Television Culture 38-39). Buoyed by Louis Althussers renewed understanding of ideology, as well as Antonio Gramscis formulation of hegemony, such a monolithic reading of television proved untenable. Ridding ideology of the classical Marxist notion of false consciousness as a fixed set of illusory ideas, and instead defining it as an individuals imaginary, but lived, relationship to society (Althusser 294), Althusser reveals ideology to be reliant on a dynamic process constantly reproduced and reconstituted in practice (Fiske, Culture, Ideology, and Interpellation 306). Meanwhile, Gramscis alternative theory of hegemony restores resistance by postulating that societies maintain control over their subjects by soliciting their consent, whereby the formers ideological domination is countervailed by a multitude of resistances, resulting in an ever-shifting and continuously precarious balance (Fiske, Television Culture 40-41). Taken together, televisions key role of relay[ing] and reproduc[ing] and process[ing] and packag[ing] and focus[ing] ideology (Gitlin 253) in the Althusserian model, as well as the dawning realization that [television] texts have the potential to criticize and challenge the status quo by disseminating views that are alternately in and out of sync with dominant ideology (White 167), paved the way for television to be resurrected as a cultural forum ideally suited to express[ing] and work[ing] out the ideological fault lines that riddle society (Newcomb and Hirsch 569). But not everyone is convinced. The ascendancy of postmodernism, which is principally concerned with chronicling the deleterious side-effects of the proliferation of signs and their endless circulation (Collins, Television and Postmodernism 331), means that some cannot suppress the reflex to put television, as the quintessence of postmodern culture (Collins, Television and Postmodernism 327), back into the box. Frederic Jameson leads the charge when he laments that that home appliance called television ... articulates nothing, but rather implodes, taking with it the viewers access to history, whose older realities have been refracted by Jamesons titular logic of late capitalism into mere television images (Jameson, Postmodernism 79, 85). Seconding Jim Collinss (sarcastic) rendering of postmodernism as whats left of culture after television has gotten through with it (Watching Ourselves 261) is Jean Baudrillard, whose interrelated concepts of simulation, the simulacrum, and the hyperreal seem tailor-made for taking

Key 4 television to task. Baudrillards postmodern landscape is characterized by simulacra: empty signifiers churned out by a late-capitalist economy which has collapsed all value [in]to the single dimension of reproducibility (Koch and Elmore 562). In the wake of ceaseless simulation, the categories of the social, the political, or even reality buckle and give way to a hyperreality that obliterates any and all antecedents, replacing them with simulations that are purely self-referential, while tearing asunder the possibility of all potential opposition in the process (Kellner, Jean Baudrillard 12). If America represents the vanishing point of meaning and reality (Baudrillard 10), then television emerges as its closest ally. [F]unctioning like an hallucination, television is an indifferent platform for images and messages that are ultimately addressed to no one at all, and whose fictional content can barely be discerned from the accompanying advertisements; in Baudrillards final analysis, both are dedicated to canoniz[ing] the way of life through images, working in tandem to recast the real as the televisual (Baudrillard 50, 101). Problematizing such claims that television amounts to nothing but pure commodification and mere simulacrum, Collins posits his two-fold theory of hyperconsciousness, arguing that, on the one hand, the medium itself demonstrate[s] an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the conditions of [its] production, which leaves room for a self-reflexive stance vis--vis its economic exigencies and ideological potential (Collins, Watching Ourselves 262; Collins, Television and Postmodernism 332-335). The postmodern (television) subject, on the other hand, has developed coping mechanisms commensurate with the Baudrillardian bombardment of signs, which allow it to act as a postmodern bricoleur who appropriat[es] and recombin[es] television images and content to suit its personal need[s] (Collins, Television and Postmodernism 337). Collins is careful to emphasize that this subject is neither a dup[e] inside the system nor a free meaning-making agent, but rather acts as well as [it is] being acted upon, (italics in the original) by finding meaning in television texts that are ideologically circumscribed, and transmitted via a medium that, first and foremost, interpellates them as consumers (Collins, Watching Ourselves 264; 273-274). Viewers thus engage in a process of actively abducting [the] signs of the television text to reconfigure it as a site of resistance at one moment (Collins, Watching Ourselves 272), while simultaneously falling victim to the mediums all-pervasive appeals to consumerism the next (Collins, Television and Postmodernism 339). On the surface, no television series better exemplifies this perennial tug-of-war than Sex and the City, the half-hour comedic drama that ran for six seasons on the premier American cable channel Home Box Office (HBO). Based on the eponymous column by Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City was brought to television by Darren Star, who explicitly set out to create a show that would

Key 5 [push] the boundaries of how womens personal preoccupations [were] depicted on television, with an upfront and honest portrayal of female sexuality driving the narrative (Creeber 140; Sohn 14). The series centers on the lives of Carrie Bradshaw, a newspaper columnist, and her three best friends: Charlotte York, an art gallery owner; Miranda Hobbes, a lawyer; and Samantha Jones, a public relations executive. Each episode is framed around one of Carries columns, in which she distills her and her friends romantic and sexual ordeals at hand into pithy rhetorical questions such as: Can women have sex like men? (Sex and the City), Do women just want to be rescued? (Where Theres Smoke...), Can we have it all? (All or Nothing), and [D]o we really want these things [marriage, babies]? Or are we just programmed? (Change of a Dress). Some of these questions touch on long-standing feminist concerns, which the tightly-knit foursome tackles over morning breakfasts, afternoon shopping sprees, and late-night bar-hopping sessions that are akin to the consciousness-raising efforts of second-wave feminism in their reliance on uncensored womens talk to disrupt confining gender constructions on screen and off (Gerhard 45). Although the show has consequently been lauded for destabiliz[ing] some of the most pernicious mythologizing of contemporary female experience (Negra 4), its feminist credentials are far from unchallenged, with many critics citing the four womens rampant consumerism (as well as their unwavering commitment to heterosexual relationships) as deeply problematic, and illustrative of a postfeminist agenda that seeks to portray the feminine mystique as more desirable than the feminist mystique (Busch 95, italics in the original). Carrie et al.s frequent and glamorized acts of consumption (from Carries penchant for Manolo Blahnik stilettos to Mirandas chocolate cravings, and Samanthas voracious sexual appetite) bear the brunt of (feminist) criticism, with one commentator going as far as accusing the show of naturalizing commodity fetishism as the environment in which women live by nature (Bignell 220). In much the same way that televisions economic underpinnings would supposedly disqualify it from operating as Horace and Newcombs cultural forum, Sex and the Citys unabashed celebrat[ion] [of] female consumption (Creeber 146) flies in the face of one of the principal tenets of second-wave feminism; that consumption create[s] a tidy prison for women by presenting itself as a means of securing an identity that may seem subversive, when the parameters of that identity are in fact set by patriarchy (Goldberg 2). When commodity fetishism fuses with feminism in this fashion, it gives rise to a commodity feminism that obscures the social conditions that keep women subjugated, and stifles feminisms chief goal of exposing these mechanisms by funneling its potentially alternative ideological force ... through the commodity form, which declaws feminism by relegating it to a mere signifier that is easily co-opted by patriarchal capitalism (Goldman, Heath,

Key 6 and Smith 336). Even though the commodity in question is proffered as an agent of progressive social transformation, its acquisition by the individual marks the end point of feminist critique, which elides and forestalls the collective action advocated by feminism by insinuating that the battle has already been won on the individual level (Goldman, Heath, and Smith 347-348). Sex and the City draws on commodity fetishism, which is itself rooted in Baudrillards theory of sign value, but expands its premise by inscribing it with a postfeminist sensibility that allows Carrie and her friends to interrogate heteronormativity and its seductive interpellation of woman as (financially) dependent on, and ultimately belonging with, a man. In Ring a Ding Ding, Carrie faces eviction when her relationship with Aidan proves unsalvageable, and he moves out of the apartment he and Carrie were renovating, terminating their joint lease in the process. Carrie has a window of thirty days in which to buy back her original apartment, but during a visit to the bank (where it is revealed that her entire savings amount to a less than impressive nine-hundred and fifty-seven dollars), she is told she is not a desirable candidate for a loan. Although Aidan wanted Carrie to keep her engagement ring, she declines his offer, arguing that it would break [her] heart to even so much as look at it. With her back pressed against the wall, Carrie wonders: Where did all my money go? I know Ive made some. Miranda reminds Carrie that her burgeoning designer shoe collection could easily command the money she needs for her down payment, and Carrie is forced to entertain the prospect of literally be[coming] the old woman who lived in her shoes. Although there can be no question that the female protagonists of Sex and the City regularly tap into consumerisms potential to produce selfreflexive, nomadic identities that are not bound by traditional gendered expectations (Arthurs 320), in this scene (and others) the show also cautions against the disempowerment [inherent] in its unstable oscillations (Arthurs 327). With time running out, Carrie turns to Mr. Big for advice, and he cuts her a check for thirty-thousand dollars, adding that she is worth a million bucks. When she informs her friends, Miranda points out that [w]hen a man gives you money, you give him control, an assertion that would surely resonate with second-wave feminists, who would be eager to cite Carries love of shoes as her downfall, vindicating their belief that high-heeled stilettos and other consumer items that promote a particular view of femininity are thinly-veiled instruments of patriarchy designed to dress women for the part of male sexual object (Creeber 145-146). Carrie sides with Miranda, and tears up the check. A few days later, her financial wellbeing (and female autonomy) are safeguarded by Charlotte, who slides her wedding ring across the table. Recently divorced, she loved what the ring represented, but now that it is dislodged from its intended signifier (i.e. her marriage and the heterosexual union it signified), she invests the ring

Key 7 with a new meaning: Carries symbolic autonomy, (Gerhard 46) which springs from a female world of love and ritual (Rosenberg, qtd. in Gerhard 44) that more than holds its own against the heteronormativity demanded by society at large. Charlotte thus puts Baudrillards notion of sign value into practice, by hierarchically ordering among commodities and assigning a sign value to her wedding ring that overshadows its use and exchange value by having it signify a particular rank, social position and status to its owner instead (Kellner, Jean Baudrillard 21-23). At the same time, however, Sex and the City frees the commodity from Baudrillards logic of equivalence that dictates that commodities have equivalent uses, values and purposes for all consumers, while also subverting the charge that fetishism hangs like a fog over the entire system of ... differentiation (Kellner, Jean Baudrillard 24, 22). Instead of alienating Charlotte and Carrie from their conditions of existence (as women belonging to a patriarchal society), Charlottes wedding band is recuperated as a ringing example of commodity feminisms potential to underscore (and remedy) the iniquities produced by patriarchy, while Sex and the City in turn reflects the postfeminist viewpoint that consumerism, feminism, and romantic idealism should no longer be seen as mutually exclusive (Creeber 150). When Sex and the City went off the air in 2004, its reruns in syndication, as well as its international success, bode well for a big-screen adaptation. When the first Sex and the City movie premiered in 2008, it hewed close to the formula of the television series, but by the time Sex and the City 2 hit the movie theaters in 2010, the spell was broken. When the fabulous foursome trade up from New York to Abu Dhabi, they quickly devolve into caricatures of their former selves, exhibiting a crass materialism and an unbridled commodity fetishism (Scott) that are wholly divorced from its earlier feminist inflections. When Carrie, who has by now tied the knot with Mr. Big, cheats on him with her old boyfriend Aidan, the former repays her for her infidelity with a diamond ring, in the hopes that it will serve as a check on Carries behavior, and will finally tie her down to the institution of marriage. Whereas a ring is hard-won in Ring a Ding Ding, and signifies the costs as well as the benefits of living in a post-feminist consumer culture (Arthurs 328), its meaning is rerouted in the film according to a Baudrillardian code, whereby patriarchy now makes things communicate ... through the control of meaning (Baudrillard, qtd. in Kellner, Jean Baudrillard 23), and reinscribes the ring with a patriarchal mandate. Fortunately, the television series endures, as does the medium, with the latter more dedicated than ever to exploring the complexity of ... female representations (Lotz 115), and living up to its (counter-)ideological potential as a cultural forum, and the former forever an inspiring case study.

Key 8 Works Cited Arthurs, Jane. Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama. Feminist Media Studies 3.1 (2003): 81-96. Bignell, Jonathan. Gender Representations: Sex and the City. An Introduction to Television Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. 216-220. Collins, Jim. Television and Postmodernism. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Allen. London: Routledge, 1992. 327-353. ---. Watching Ourselves Watch Television, or Whos Your Agent? Cultural Studies 3.3 (1989): 261-281. Creeber, Glen. Sex and the City. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. 140-155. Fiske, John. Television Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2010. Gerhard, Jane. Sex and the City: Carrie Bradshaws Queer Postfeminism. Feminist Media Studies 5.1 (2005): 37-49. Goldman, Robert, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L. Smith. Commodity Feminism. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (1991): 333-351. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989. ---. Jean Baudrillard. Douglas Kellner, George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair, UCLA. University of California, Los Angeles. n.d. Web. 1-26. Koch, Andrew M., and Rick Elmore. Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillards Augmentation of Marxs Theory of Value. Politics & Policy 34.3 (2006): 556-575. Negra, Diane. Quality Postfeminism?: Sex and the Single Girl on HBO. Genders 39 (2004): 1-15. Newcomb, Horace, and Paul M. Hirsch. Television as a Cultural Forum. Television: The Critical View. 6th ed. Ed. Horace Newcomb. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2000. 561-573. Ring a Ding Ding. Scott, A.O. Operation Desert Togs. New York Times on the Web. 27 May 2010. 7 June 2011. White, Mimi. Ideological Analysis and Television. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Allen. London: Routledge, 1992. 161-202.