Preliminary Programme

Tue 13 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Wed 14 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Thu 15 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Fri 16 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

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Tuesday 13 April 2010 8.30
C-1 MAT02 Life Stories of Consumption
Kraakhuis, muziekcentrum
Network: Material and Consumer Culture Chair: Lewis Siegelbaum
Organizers: - Discussant: Lewis Siegelbaum
Matleena Frisk : New consumer goods, adolescent identities and embodied gender in mid 20th century Finland
After Second World War, new consumer goods and changing living standards enabled new ways to create a gendered self-image and identity, to perform gender, and to discoursively negotiate normative categories of men and women. What kind of material preconditions did the changes in embodied genders have? This paper contrasts the ... (Show more)
After Second World War, new consumer goods and changing living standards enabled new ways to create a gendered self-image and identity, to perform gender, and to discoursively negotiate normative categories of men and women. What kind of material preconditions did the changes in embodied genders have? This paper contrasts the material conditions to the changes in the discourses of embodied gender, however without making claims about the direction of causality.

This research concentrates in adolescents: The changing body almost forces the adolescent to commit on an interpretation of gender, however unconscious the choice is. Consumer goods bought by the adolescent can have a substantial role in the process of building a gendered identity. After Second World War, Finland was still a predominantly agrarian country. It seems quite unlikely that identities and self-understanding would have remained the same when the living conditions were rapidly changing as the Finnish society went through a structural change and living standards were rising. Commercial youth culture set a gendered demand to be up-to-date. New were heavily advertised, which at the same time meant marketing certain interpretations of genders, but also very basic changes took place: Possibility to maintain higher standards of hygiene in a bathroom instead of a weekly bath in a sauna, was a precondition to paying more attention to smells.

As a methodological starting point, I use Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking, but instead of discussing class, I study how gender is created and maintained in personal behaviour. I concentrate in practice and embodiment, ways to use space, to be in space, manners, voice. The field in which distinctions are made, is an objective situation, but it is not a structure, it is a social arena. Both the objective and the subjective are important and need to be taken seriously.

The research is based on using several different sources. Popular culture magazines for young people show renegotiation of the normative limits of masculine and feminine, for example deodorant was first described to make a man slimy and somehow foreign, too non-masculine. Also visual material and existing memory collections are used, and later also interviews will be conducted.

During the 1960’s, sexuality became more visible in society. In the early years of the decade sexuality was represented as something that should be covert and controlled. By the end of the decade, hiding sexuality could be seen as hypocrite or even harmful to one’s personality. When talking about gender in the context of 1960’s, the sexual revolution is often referred to. Earlier research however indicates that the 1960’s were not the key moment of change in sexual behaviour: it looks like sexual revolution was foremost a discoursive change. Gender history written from the perspective of disposable sanitary pads, deodorant, running water and underwear together with silhouette, smells, gestures or facial expressions can be contrasted to competing discoursive interpretations of adolescent females and males of this period during which sexual revolution took place. (Show less)

Joeri Januarius : Keeping Up Appearances? Clothing, Haircuts, and Material Culture of Mineworkers’ Families in the 1950s
Within contemporary historical research, questions about the meaning of consumption have gained more attention during the last years (Betts & Pence 2008; Veenis 2008). Why do people buy certain consumer durables? How do consumers appropriate these goods, and what is the meaning of these objects, particularly in terms of one’s ... (Show more)
Within contemporary historical research, questions about the meaning of consumption have gained more attention during the last years (Betts & Pence 2008; Veenis 2008). Why do people buy certain consumer durables? How do consumers appropriate these goods, and what is the meaning of these objects, particularly in terms of one’s identity? Such questions may shed another light on the wave of consumption that struck Europe from the 1950s onwards, beyond the mere quantitative approach. By starting from the perspective of microhistory (and the impulses of the Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life) (Bergerson et al., 2008), this paper analyses, through different cases, the experiences of mineworkers on personal appearance in the garden city of Eisden (Campine basin, Belgium) in the 1950s. Different enquiries show indeed an increase of workers’ expenditures on clothing and haircuts, due to, among other things, an increase of real wages. The consumer experience and the forms of appropriation (acceptance, imitation, etc.) are crucial elements in grasping the societal dynamics of the 1950s. Furthermore, the paper also sheds a light on a heterogeneous mining community, where gender and the position of newcomers are two central aspects of analysis (Beyers, 2007; De Certeau 1990). On the one hand, photographs from private collections will be used as source material. They offer insights that traditional written sources can’t give to the historian. On the other hand, interviews of mineworkers who lived in the garden city in the 1950s, will be used.

References

Betts (P.) and Pence (K.) Katherine (eds.). Socialist modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Beyers (L.). Iedereen zwart. Het samenleven van nieuwkomers en gevestigden in de mijncité Zwartberg, 1930-1990. Amsterdam, Aksant, 2007.
De Certeau (M.). L’invention du quotidien. Paris, Gallimard, 1990 (nouvelle édition)
Bergerson (A.) and Maureen Healy (M.), and Steege (P.) and Swett (P.E.). “The history of everyday life: a second chapter”, The Journal of Modern History, 2008, 80(2), 358-378.
Veenis, Milena. Dromen van: Oost-Duitse fantasieën over de westerse consumptiemaatschappij. Unpublished Ph.D. (Universiteit van Amsterdam), 2008. (Show less)

Lesley Whitworth : The American Notebooks: Natasha Kroll's 1948 US retail research trip
On 15 October 1948 Natasha Kroll (1912 - 2004) set off on a journey from London to Los Angeles, that would over subsequent weeks take in San Francisco, Dallas, Washington and New York. The Stateside trip was undertaken to further her knowledge and thinking around display techniques and design in ... (Show more)
On 15 October 1948 Natasha Kroll (1912 - 2004) set off on a journey from London to Los Angeles, that would over subsequent weeks take in San Francisco, Dallas, Washington and New York. The Stateside trip was undertaken to further her knowledge and thinking around display techniques and design in a retail context. Trained at the Reimann School in Berlin, and a member of its teaching staff from its inception in London in 1936, Kroll had been appointed display manager at Simpson (Piccadilly) Ltd in 1942. The visit was therefore the enterprise of a mature and respected practitioner in her field. The notebooks containing Kroll’s diarised observations on the trip are held with her papers at the University of Brighton Design Archives. The Archives also hold the papers of Joseph Emberton, modernist architect of the iconic Simpsons of Piccadilly store.

This paper will consider the lure of America to a woman display designer in a British context, in the years immediately following the Second World War. It seeks to contribute to a relatively under-researched area of material and consumer culture studies, that is the training and practice of those responsible for creating and perpetually modifying the retail environments within which many of the performative aspects of shopping activity then typically took place.

The research is principally but not exclusively archivally-driven. The notebooks will be considered as the practical results of an endeavour to record professionally valuable information, but also with a sensitivity to the construction of personal narrative. They will be regarded in the light of current interest in the historiography of consumer behaviour; cultural geography; and contemporaneous (1940s) sociological studies of shopping.

Kroll’s visit and her findings will be contextualised by reference to prevailing industry standards; training norms; and existing texts; as well as the possibilities of professional development. Kroll published her own contribution, Window Display (Studio, London) in 1954. She was elected to the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry in 1966, having by that point transposed her practice into production design for television and film.

The paper therefore responds to the following themes:
• material culture and global networks • brand culture
• the performativity of objects • the performativity of technologies (Show less)



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