"Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth‑Century England" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Material women, 1750-1950: consuming desires and collecting practices
Choice Reviews Online, 2010
Eye. focusing mainly on the role of women as heritage actors andor as heritage contributors. It has of this volume provide concrete examples of womens material practices and therefore. The first one, Consuming desires previous sections discuss display, collecting and consumption and argue that display techniques.
The Problem of Chinese Porcelain and Female Consuming Desire
This essay looks at female objectification through literary depictions of Chinese porcelain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examining how porcelain was used as a literary motif for women's suppression and was simultaneously used to fight back: 'European importation of Chinese porcelain begun in the sixteenth century, but truly flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Happening alongside this economic trend was the establishment of women as economic players in the market; as Alexandra Shepard argues, ‘women in England have […] been acknowledged as significant creditors of the economic growth that is discernible from the mid seventeenth century if not earlier.’ Women were appraising and buying wares, and many flocked to the fashionable New Exchange (built 1609), the main site of the Chinahouses. It is not surprising, then, that Chinese porcelain became a symbol of women’s position as a consumer and the problems that meant for male economic, sexual and domestic authority. This foreign object, brought into the domestic sphere, served as a metonym for effect that being consumers had on women.'
2008
This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive 'look' for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women's accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the 'civilized' Britons from the 'uncivilized' tanned colonial peoples. iii Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians.
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.