A Return to Adorno

Following upon last week's readings, which questioned the validity of monolithic racial and ethnic identities, this week's readings further complicates the notion of identity. While the emphasis is on gender and sexuality, the works of Dyer, Modleski and McRobbie also raise questions about the definition of class and its relationship to gender and sexuality.

At the beginning of his survey of stereotyping, Dyer notes that he expands “traditional concept of class to include race, gender and sex caste” (p. 298). This is an interesting acknowledgment that attempts to explain away the critiques about Marxism's failure to address gender and sexuality. By this inclusion, Dyer, in a way, legitimizes the use of Marxist vocabulary and framework for understanding stereotypes. Modleski also mentions Orthodox Marxism's current acceptance of women and other marginalized groups along with the working class as possible agents of resistance, but at the same time depicts Marxism's reproduction of traditional representation of women via her analysis of Kiss of the Spider Woman (p. 48, 50).

However, Marxism's failure to address gender and sexuality is later mirrored by feminism's failure to include consumerism as a parameter for studying hegemony and domination. In that context, McRobbie maps Birmingham School's Gramscian tendencies that treat the popular culture as an area for struggle and resistance against hegemony (p. 536). After revisiting the commodity fetishism wrapped in feminist discourse, McRobbie calls for a return to Adorno's critique of the popular.

McRobbie's analysis explains how women's magazines, Sex and the City and similar magazines/shows targeting younger audiences encourage consumption while creating an illusion of female empowerment. Then, being a woman is defined through consumption and women's freedom is reduced to “freedom to buy.” Resulting identity is problematic not just because consumerism lies at the heart of it, but because that core element is veiled by feminist discourse of liberation. In a way reminiscent of the false consciousness of working classes explored by Marxist critiques, it becomes possible to talk about another form of false consciousness based on popular feminism. McRobbie also mentions how this new identity mostly revolves around white, heterosexual, middle class women (p. 540). While this hegemonic representation prioritizes a certain group of women, consumerism attached to it embraces every woman and encourages consumption regardless of class, race, gender and sex.

With her call for a return to Adorno, McRobbie indirectly addresses the political economy scholars' critique of cultural studies in way. While Gramscian tendencies of Birmingham School paves way to see multiple cultural spheres and accepts the popular as an area for contesting hegemony, political economy underlines that the necessity to sell is present in all spheres. Therefore, the culture of consumption or consumer culture attached to capitalism is the hegemony that needs to be contested and the content of the popular or even the marginalized cultural products are not relevant as long as they circulate in the capitalistic terms.

While her critique of popular feminism cannot be reduced to harsher critiques from the political economy camp, by exploring the transition of the emphasis from Adorno's theories to Gramsci's, McRobbie reminds us the importance of consumption. However, her take on popular feminism can be neither reduced to Adorno's exclusion of the popular as an area for contestation. Adorno's exclusion rather stems from his implicit reproduction of the Age of Enlightenment standards for evaluating art and his acceptance of leadership of a class of vanguards. Through their engagement in avant-garde art, these vanguards are to end the false consciousness of the masses, who are distracted by the popular.

However, McRobbie's critique of the popular feminism has more to do with Adorno's skepticism towards the Culture Industry than his dislike of the popular. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify what a return to Adorno entails in terms of understanding class, gender and sexuality as components of identity.