The Consumer Society Reader Quotes

“Consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society—one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other. This”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“In 1984, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explored the social patterning of consumption and taste in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu found that family socialization processes and educational experiences are the primary determinants of taste for a wide range of cultural goods, including food, dress, and home decor.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“Currently, the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“It is within the commercial realm of advertising that the drama of Otherness finds expression. Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“What confirms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e., in the direct relation between the thing and man, while, inversely, its value is realized only in exchange, i.e., in a social process. Who”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which produces them.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader

“Even feminists who never wore a skirt or make-up went crazy about Kickers, or wore beautifully hand-painted boots in rainbow colors; they adorned themselves with rings and long, bright earrings made of feathers, beads or metal—drawing attention with all these, and with their brightly flashed hair, away from the body and toward its periphery.”
― Juliet Schor, The Consumer Society Reader