Refusing to be an Advertisement: Enacting Disruptive Performative Identities against the Religious Dimensions of Advertising

Abstract

When Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, he introduced the term “conspicuous consumption” into the general vocabulary and began a lively debate concerning the relationship of individuals and their ownership and display of objects. Since then, historians of culture such as Stephen Fox, William Leach, Jackson Lears, Roland Marchand, and R. Laurence Moore have provided the field of cultural history with richly detailed histories of advertising and consumerism. Some of these scholars have argued (most notably Leach and Lears) that as Americans moved into the twentieth century, the old agrarian way of life faded into urbanization. Cultural relativism, the erosion of the extended economic family, and the advent of a new leisure time began to permeate public and private life. As traditional institutions lost their influence, the need for meaning grew and advertisers developed ways in which their products could fill that desire.

Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality. Even in the worst circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.

—bell hooks