Women as Consumers and the Consumed (II)

To sum up my previous post about women as they are consumed, specifically as their bodies are objectified and commodified within the fiscal economy. My main assumptions apparent in that post, as well as the assumptions that link together all my posting about women and the way femininity is constructed in Korea, draws a link between the low overall status of women (as reified by the UN Gender Empowerment Measure), the relatively high degree of fetishized commodification in everyday life, and the surprisingly (for a country with Korea's level of economic and social development) large role that sex work still plays in the formal economy. I am not arguing that these things are somehow causal, but rather that they reflect different parts of the big picture regarding how women function in Korean society.

That having been clarified, I want to try and talk about how women exercise their considerable economic power as consumers, and how this relates to how women consume monetarily in order to participate in a cultural economy in which they are objects of aesthetic consumption – this brings us back to the "gaze" in both its male and female forms. For those of you who've been paying attention to my posts, now you might be able to kind of put it all together, understanding my opining about sex work and its relationship to the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), my photoessay focusing on the piecemeal fetishization of the female body, women as both consumer and the consumed – all within a larger argument.

So, I hope we can agree that one major social activity, one of the most common ways of participating in the cultural economy, one of the biggest venues for human interaction in a largely developed Korea – is that of consumption. Economists tend to think of this form of social activity in a purely functional sense, but alternatively, anthropologsists and sociologists understand consumption as a major mode of social interaction. Since humans have decided to live in close quarters with one another (urbanization) and define ourselves mainly in terms of our financial earning power, the economy itself has become a major conduit of social interaction and has come to partially define aspects of our individual identities.

Marx might argue that the commodification of the body as consumed object in itself is logical in a market society in which everything is commodified. And this commodification is importantly not just limited to objects, but abstract things that include our actions, abilities, and even ways of thinking. Beyond talking about how our labor, which in a previous "mode of production" – such as in the times of agrarian self-subsistence – was a way of producing food for oneselves and those around us, now we are talking about items becoming monetarily valuable as they become cultural valuable as objects with which to adorn and mark ourselves in purely aesthetic ways. These objects, items of clothing, or materials with which to mark our bodies all become a part of our social, sexual, and even political identities. They become a part of how we define ourselves in the world, determining the ways others regard us. In this way, they become materially important.