A glamorous feminism by design?

ABSTRACT

Glamour is often understood as a capitalist technology of allure and as a device with which women are objectified. The consumption glamour has also been theorized as representing a refusal to be imprisoned by the norms of gender, class, and race, as well as a form of escape from everyday life. In this article, I explore the attractiveness of glamour both as a technique of feminine performance and as a technique of capitalism. By defining and historicizing the aesthetic, I consider if, and how, glamour could be utilized to strengthen a feminist politics. I argue that glamour has become more salient in a contemporary context in which the myth of natural beauty has generally been debunked, and in which the performance of femininity constantly refers to its own artifice. Through analysis of examples of the material practices of glamour, such as putting on lipstick, wearing high-heel shoes, and drinking cocktails, I suggest that glamour works as an imaginative resource by both triggering a sense of the already enjoyed and provoking idealized visions of the future. I document how everyday experiences of glamour involve the acknowledgement of artifice, fantasies of ‘the good life’, and inevitable failure. I argue that these qualities make glamour a powerful existing resource that can be used to explore how femininity functions and to speculate about the future of feminism. Just as feminist discourses have been incorporated and reterritorialized by capitalism, I suggest that feminism could incorporate and reterritorialize the material practices of glamour in order to counter capitalist neoliberal imperatives. I explore how speculative design could allow feminists to use existing optimistic attachments, such as glamour, to think beyond capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Glamour
• consumption
• speculative design
• feminism
• femininity
• aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Sarah Elsie Baker is a Senior Lecturer at Media Design School, Auckland. Her research interests are focused on design and consumer culture, particularly in relation to social equality, value and sustainability. Sarah’s recent work includes her monograph Retro style: class, gender and design in the home published by Bloomsbury; and the Moodbank, an interactive critical design project, funded by Victoria University of Wellington and Wellington City Council.

Notes

1. In the last few years, aligning oneself with feminism seems to have become more popular, exemplified by young female celebrities such as Lena Dunham and Emma Watson.

2. Hopefully, this encounter has become more common due to the publication of popular books such as Bad feminist (Gay 2014) and Fifty shades of feminism (Appignanesi et al. 2013).