The Crooked Codes of the Luxury Handbag: Narratives of Empowered Feminine Consumption in Africa

Abstract

This article critiques discourses about women consumers of luxury goods in Africa. It does so through the example of the designer handbag, which presented as a key theme in interviews with people employed in luxury sectors in major African cities. The luxury handbag symbolizes an overarching idea of women’s success, though women are narrated as taking different routes to achieve it. Employing the spatial metaphor of the “crooked room,” this article shows how luxury handbag-talk reproduces taken-for-granted ideas about what successful feminine consumers look like. The “crooked codes” of the luxury handbag refer to skewed expectations, routes, and rationales for the wealth-oriented consumption practices of African women. Luxury handbags thus symbolize the ways in which neoliberal ideology limits African women’s quest for economic inclusion. This article argues that this consumption distorts African women’s feminist goals while claiming liberation.

HIGHLIGHTS

• The luxury handbag is viewed as a symbol of African women’s economic success.

• This understanding obscures the realities of access to economic equality for most women living in African contexts.

• Luxury consumption privileges wealth and does not offer alternatives for women’s economic empowerment.

• As evidence of women’s achievement, the luxury handbag reveals the limits of neoliberal views for women’s empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Luxury
• handbag
• consumption
• empowerment
• women
• Africa

JEL Codes:

• D01
• D12
• E21

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Tessa Hellberg, Hlonepho Phakoe, Jessie Schultz, and Vicky Amupulo for research assistance, my participants for sharing their views, Simidele Dosekun and Srila Roy for feedback on early versions of this paper, and the reviewers for helping me to sharpen my argument.

Notes

1 A rich area for future research is to explore in more detail the interface between luxury cultures and urban studies in key African cities. My research project did not have the scope to do so due to the focus on the discourses deployed by those working in the luxury sector. More work is certainly needed on urban development, architecture, and spatial ethnographies of luxury spaces in African cities.

2 All personal information that would allow the identification of any person(s) described in the article has been removed.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an African Humanities Programme grant, a South African National Research Foundation grant, and the Governing Intimacies Project at Wits University.

Notes on contributors

Mehita Iqani

Mehita Iqani is Research Chair in Science Communication at Stellenbosch University. She is the author of Garbage in Popular Culture: Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste (2020) and the co-editor of Media Studies: Critical African and Decolonial Approaches (2019) and African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (2019).