Preliminary Programme

Wed 22 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Thu 23 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Fri 24 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Sat 25 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

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Wednesday 22 March 2006 10:45
H-2 CUL02 Consumer Culture
Room H
Network: Culture Chair: Marsha Siefert
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Tina Dingel : "A respite from fashion (Urlaub von der Mode)“ – Fashion and gender in German men’s everyday lives from the 1920s to the 1950s
The history of everyday life for the most part concentrates on women as agents. This is a welcome contrast and supplement to the more traditional histories which focus on men on the public stages of politics or business. This focus on everyday experiences of women, however, leads to an absence ... (Show more)
The history of everyday life for the most part concentrates on women as agents. This is a welcome contrast and supplement to the more traditional histories which focus on men on the public stages of politics or business. This focus on everyday experiences of women, however, leads to an absence of men from the histories of everyday life. The resulting imbalance is particularly obvious when one surveys the existing literature on the history of consumption in 19th an 20th century Europe. The amount and richness of the literature on women and possession seems to suggest that the history of gender and consumption in the modern period is mainly a history of women’s experiences.

Covering the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s in Germany, my paper will therefore attempt to somewhat remedy the above mentioned imbalance by tracing public discourses about male consumption and men’s actual consumption practices. I will concentrate on one aspect of male consumption by investigating the meaning of fashion, clothing, and its consumption for contemporary German men. Assuming that the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s are one discreet period in German social and cultural history, I will challenge the common assumption that during these decades, men were either relieved of having to dress fashionably as this had become an exclusively female task which women performed excessively or had turned away from fashion as they were convinced of its demerit by a social doctrine which intertwined fashionability with feminine vanity. Within the narrow limits of men’s fashion which were understood to be the result of an apparently natural male simplicity there existed in fact a multitude of inconspicuous dress variations which constituted a rich code used daily by men for social communication.

Analysing the editorial content of and advertisements contained in contemporary men’s magazines and reports by fashion executives and market researchers, I will show that the denial of men’s adherence to fashion was in fact only a façade. It obscured the centrality of men to a public debate about fashion and modern everyday life and their participation in its wider cultural implications. (Show less)

Marija Grujic : Reconstructing the Consumer Identity: Memories of Popular music consumption in Serbia in the Nineties
The aim of the paper is to outline some problems in conducting ethnographic research into popular music consumption in Serbia in the period after 1991. The paper is based on the analysis of data gained through interviewing consumers of popular music from January 2005 till April 2005. The informants were ... (Show more)
The aim of the paper is to outline some problems in conducting ethnographic research into popular music consumption in Serbia in the period after 1991. The paper is based on the analysis of data gained through interviewing consumers of popular music from January 2005 till April 2005. The informants were between 30-40 years old, inhabiting mostly the territory of Belgrade. They were encouraged (through interviews) to testify about their personal preferences and behaviour with regard to the consumption of popular music in the first years after the fall of communism. The main objective of this research is to: explore the points of intersection between public narratives and individual experiences of the process of popular culture consumption. In addition, I explore how public and main stream discourses interact with one’s personal memory and process of telling, as well as the constructedness nature of the entire communication process between the interviewer and interviewees.

More precisely, my paper discusses the ways in which the social and cultural context of mass culture shapes the dialogue between the researcher and the informant, and, subsequently, constructs the terms under which this communication is being performed, as well as genre characteristics of memory telling. In particular, drawing on this research, I argue that recreating personal memories of popular music consumption, which is usually classified as belonging to the sphere of the private and profane in human life, constructs a particular political, ideological, aesthetic and ethnic identity of both the researcher and the informant. At the same time, I consider the memory narration to be one of the main scientific tools in constructing the cultural and political history of popular entertainment in Serbia in the nineties. (Show less)

Hanna Kuusi : Domesticating Design – Male Designers and Female Consumers in the 1950s’ Finland
The 1950s has been characterized as the golden years of the Finnish design. The purpose of my paper is to examine how the appreciated modernist industrial design became part of the daily life of Finnish consumers in the form of tableware. How did the taste of consumers develope and how ... (Show more)
The 1950s has been characterized as the golden years of the Finnish design. The purpose of my paper is to examine how the appreciated modernist industrial design became part of the daily life of Finnish consumers in the form of tableware. How did the taste of consumers develope and how it was moulded, and what this meant in terms of gender, class and age?

The breakthrough of the modern form language into Finnish households cannot be taken for granted. Significant resistance was met. The functionalist puritanism of the designers claimed plain and simple, monochrome objects with no frills or decorations. Frequently, the manufacturers had different opinions. The concept and practice of ‘everydayness’ of the designers and the consumers did not overlap. Plain and grey was not always preferred by the consumers, even though it also meant more economic production and lower prices.

The gender aspect on the dynamics of the processes of design, marketing and consuming is interesting. Firstly, many of the top designers were male and the consumers predominantly female. The Finnish fields of industrial design in ceramics and glass were gendered: men were designing, women were decorating. Furthermore, masculine and feminine attributes can be given to the forms of design themselves. Potentially, the taste considered ‘kitsch’ or ‘bad taste’ can be interpreted in terms of femininity. For example a heated discussion around Olga Osol’s decorative Myrna tableware and Kaj Franck’s “revolutionary” Kilta, both products of the Arabia Company, offers a fruitful example. (Show less)



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