Abstract
In the ‘Style’ section of the New York Time Magazine an autobiographical vignette titled ‘True Romance’ recounting a young woman’s first date with a young man ends with the following statement: ‘It had been a grand and fulfilling success: a date with my dress’ (Schwartz, 1994, 63). This piece revolves around the memory not of the young man but of ‘the caress of the dress; satiny, clinging, transforming’. It embodies one of the current contradictions of feminine culture in which two narratives collide — in the first, feminine consumer culture operates in the service of a dominant heterosexist paradigm in which feminine agency is subjugated to masculine desire; in the second, feminine culture revolves around a narcissistic feminine subject for whom heterosexuality serves as a ‘cover’, the ‘alibi’ that legitimises its covert pleasures.2
This article is a revised version of material that has earlier been published in Hilary Radner, Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure Routledge, 1995, with the permission of the publisher.
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© 1997 Pekka Sulkunen, John Holmwood, Hilary Radner and Gerhard Schulze
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Radner, H. (1997). Producing the Body: Jane Fonda and the New Public Feminine. In: Sulkunen, P., Holmwood, J., Radner, H., Schulze, G., Campling, J. (eds) Constructing the New Consumer Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25337-1_6
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