Erica Carter - Young Women and their Relationship to...

Erica Carter Erica Carter teaches Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Recently, she published How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the consuming Woman (1996), in which she explores how the development of a social market economy after 1949 gave a new centrality to consumers as key players in the economic life of the (German) nation and in that process gave women a new public significance. Carter argues that concepts of nationhood survived in the rhetorics of public policy and in popular culture of the period. Carters (1984) interesting argument regarding young women and their relationship to consumerism and the market owes much to early feminist critique. Carter insists that the image industries†¦show more content†¦Girls are written into youth cultural theory in the language of consumption--initially, as objects for consumption by men. At first, British cultural theorists thought of girls as an absence, a silence, a silence which could only be filled in some separate world of autonomous female culture. Feminist researchers turned to the family as the pivotal point. In following working-class girls into the closed arena of the family, researchers of female culture gained insight into the possibilities of specifically female cultural forms. In this way, they thought of so-called bedroom culture as analogous to male subcultures (p. 105). Searching for autonomous female cultural forms in the bedroom hideaways of teenage girls has been problematic--in terms of the creative, productive, and potentially subversive power of this mode of femininity. Researchers thought that studying teeny bopper culture was the key which would unlock the potentialities of specifically female forms. Subculture theory proved to be an inadequate starting point for studies of female culture. The spectacle of working-class subcultures erupted into a gap between class relations as they are lived by working-class youth and the classless categories according to which capitalist markets are structured. Ever since W.L. Warners (1960) classic study of social class in America, the marketing establishment has measured consumers against typological grids on