Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security - Paperback

by Robin Truth Goodman (Author)

Gender has become a commodity. Today's economy trades in symbols and narratives as much as in objects. As such, gender can be bought and sold, produced as an object, and demands constant work. What makes the commodity object seem alien, mysterious, and even threatening, Marx tells us, is that the worker's social relations - his subjectivity - are taken away from him and stamped into the object which then appears to have a life of its own, disassociated and threatening. Gender Commodity argues that gender is a social relation made into such an alienated object. In today's situation of radical insecurity, people are reaching out and identifying with objects - including symbolic ones - that promise quite falsely that they grant stability, duration, and fulfillment, and gender has been made into one of those.

Gender Commodity is an interdisciplinary study that brings literary studies into dialogue with the surrounding mediascape around issues of gender, culture, and economy. It also asks how the symbolic production of gender commodity at home informs an imagination of gender policy as it reaches out globally. As it criticizes gender-affirmative feminism for participating in the culture of the commodity, Gender Commodity also looks to feminism to imagine gender otherwise.

Author Biography

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Feminism as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023), Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).