scholarly journals Gender and consumerism in Nickolas Muray's photography for McCall's magazine, 1933-1945

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Roze

This thesis examines aspects of gender and consumer culture in Nickolas Muray's photographs for McCall's magazine from 1933 to 1945. It emphasizes the fluidity of meaning from image content to magazine context and includes two image indexes of Muray's images for McCall's from 1933 to 1945. One features original photographs and the other, published images. McCall's was a mass circulating women's magazine designed for the middle class homemaker. Muray's photographs for McCall's had the dual responsibility of representing the magazine's identity and the reader's idealizations. His images reflected expectations and perpetuated stereotypes of the American woman. At times, her role embodied traditional female values and at other times, it embraced modem womanhood and consumer culture. The latter was continuously amplified by the context of the magazine. These aspects of her role did not conflict. Rather, they complemented one another and characterized the diversity and limitations of her identity.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Roze

This thesis examines aspects of gender and consumer culture in Nickolas Muray's photographs for McCall's magazine from 1933 to 1945. It emphasizes the fluidity of meaning from image content to magazine context and includes two image indexes of Muray's images for McCall's from 1933 to 1945. One features original photographs and the other, published images. McCall's was a mass circulating women's magazine designed for the middle class homemaker. Muray's photographs for McCall's had the dual responsibility of representing the magazine's identity and the reader's idealizations. His images reflected expectations and perpetuated stereotypes of the American woman. At times, her role embodied traditional female values and at other times, it embraced modem womanhood and consumer culture. The latter was continuously amplified by the context of the magazine. These aspects of her role did not conflict. Rather, they complemented one another and characterized the diversity and limitations of her identity.


Author(s):  
Braden P. L. Hutchinson

Prior to the First World War much of Canada’s toy supply came from Germany. When the guns of August sounded in 1914, Canadian consumers found themselves in the midst of a shortage of mass produced toys, dubbed the ‘toy famine’ in the popular press. Two incompatible solutions ultimately arose to deal with this problem of consumer demand and industrial supply. Middle class women, drawing on their work over the preceding decades distributing and producing toys for philanthropic means and the discourse of the conditioned child, turned to craft production using the labour of returned soldiers to refurbish second hand playthings and produce new ones as artisans. Canadian manufacturers, with the support of the state, pursued a policy designed to industrialize toy production in Canada for competition at home and abroad. In some cases, one group openly resisted the efforts of the other. Ultimately, these two visions made possible a debate about modernity and the role of industrial technology in Canadian family life and consumer culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dr. Indu Goyal

Marriage is an important thing in the life of a woman. The importance that our society attaches to marriage is reflected in our literature and it is the central concern of Shashi Deshpade’s novels. In our society where girl learns early that she is ‘Paraya Dhan’, and she is her parents’ responsibility till the day she is handed over to her rightful owners. What a girl makes of her life, how she shapes herself as an individual, what profession she takes up is not as important as whom she marries. Marriage is the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This paper attempts to probe into the problems of marriage through the protagonists of her novels where one enjoys the freedom of marriage and the other accepts the traditional marriage. Shashi Deshpade highlights the problems of marriage faced by middle-class people in finding suitable grooms for their daughters. This problem is well-illustrated through the characters of her novels. Since the girl’s mind over her childhood is tuned that she is another’s property, she tries to attach a lot of importance to it. it is indeed a tragedy that even in the modern age, Indian females echo the same sentiment where it was marriage which mattered most of them but not to the men. It is a beginning of females sacrifices in life that marriage brings to her. Shashi Deshpande encourages her female protagonists to rise in rebellion against the males in the family matters, instead she wants to build a harmonious relationship between man and woman in a mood of compromise and reconciliation.  


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Vikram Patel

hetan Bhagat is one of the most influential fiction writers of contemporary Indian English literature. Postmodern subjects like youth aspirations, love, sex, marriage, urban middle class sensibilities, and issues related to corruption, politics, education and their impact on the contemporary Indian society are recurrently reflected thematic concerns in his fictions. In all his fictions, he has mostly depicted the contemporary urban social milieu of Indian society. Though the fictions of Chetan Bhagat are romantic in nature, contemporary Indian society and its major issues are the chief of the concerns of all his fictions. He has focused on the contemporary issues of middle class family in his fictional works. All of the chief protagonists of his works are sensitive youth and they do not compromise with the prevalent situations of society. Most of the characters are like caricatures that represent one or the other vice or virtue of the contemporary Indian society. The author has a mastery to convince the reader about the prevalent condition of society so that one can easily reproduce in mind, a clear cut image of contemporary Indian society. The present article is a sincere endeavor to present the detailed literary analysis of the select fictions of Chetan Bhagat keeping in mind how the contemporary Indian society has been replicated in the fictions.


1971 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1048-1062 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Q. Wilson ◽  
Edward C. Banfield

An effort to test the existence and correlates of the “unitarist” and “individualist” political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels “middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos” and “immigrant ethos”) in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of attitudes. In general, the respondents displaying each attitude or two or more attitudes in the predicted combinations have the predicted ethnic, religious, income, and educational attributes. Jewish voters, however, are less likely than predicted to have the good government attitude, whereas Irish and Polish respondents are more likely to have it. Upper-income Yankees were strongly unitarist as defined by all three attitudes.


1863 ◽  
Vol 8 (44) ◽  
pp. 465-482
Author(s):  
C. L. Robertson

The subject which I am permitted to-night to bring before this Society is one I have long had at heart, and one which the daily experience of my practice at Hayward's Heath prevents my passing by merely on account of the difficulties which evidently attend the realisation of my hopes, should such an issue be granted to them. I refer to the want in our county of an asylum for the care and treatment of the insane of the middle class–a class with which, while separated by education and calling, we, in our profession, are, on the other hand, too often linked by the cominoli bond of narrow means and pressing daily cares.


2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 523-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
michel hockx ◽  
julia strauss

this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-54
Author(s):  
Zuzana Bártová

Abstract This paper contributes to the sociological theorization of religious lifestyles in consumer culture, analyzing one of its most important identity markers: style. Based on a three-year comparative ethnographic research project into five convert Buddhist organizations in France and the Czech Republic, it finds that style is expressed through aesthetics with its adornment practices apparent in everyday life materializations of Buddhist symbols. The stylistic dimension is also found in practitioners’ attitudes towards Buddhism, as they may use the discourse of taste. Moreover, Buddhist style stands for the collective, coherent, and systematic emotional patterns expressed in Buddhist symbols, individual and collective experiences, and the ethics and behavior they display in everyday life. The paper also explores how this style is adapted to the educated, middle-class, city-dweller practitioners and how it respects dynamics of consumer culture with its emphasis on identity, style, and values of well-being, authenticity, and personal development.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomila V. Lankina

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.


Author(s):  
Andrew C. Willford ◽  
S. Nagarajan

This chapter focuses on the professionals of the Tamil population. A cultural displacement, as experienced by the Indian middle class, has produced its own narrative that was subsequently hijacked by Malay “extremists.” This sense of betrayal among the Indian middle class is important because their narrative of victimization takes cohesive ideological shape in a form that disseminates to the working class through the work of activists, politicians, writers, NGOs, and lawyers. Through this, one sees an important class dialectic within the Indian community that is divisive, as well as signs that recent legal decisions and events have exacerbated a sense of insecurity. Ultimately, a deep sense of political betrayal within this elite class is producing nostalgia for a nonracialized Malaysia on the one hand, and a consolidation of Indianness on the other.


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