FASHION MYTHS: THE GENDERING OF CONSUMPTION IN BELIZE IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY
Richard Wilk
Anthropology
Indiana University
Note: This is a reading draft for presentation at the 2000 meetings of the AAA in
San Francisco. References are not included, and can be obtained from the author.

Abstract: For the last two hundred years, western modernism has gendered the
boundary between production and consumption through historical narrative,
marketing technology, and influence over bodily practice and daily domestic
routine. Of course the ideology of gendered production and consumption has
always had a tendentious and imperfect relationship to behavior. The gap between
ideology and practice is especially clear in the colonial context. In this paper I
draw on historical data on changing consumption and production practices in
colonial Belize, to show how this gap between behavior and ideology was
maintained. These devices include redefinition (so womens work is redefined as
consumption), ontogenism (so womens work is seen as a stage in the development
of the normal state), and distraction (so attention to womens consumption
overshadows and conceals mens consumption).

In Belize, as in the United States, urban and educated people share a historical
narrative about gender and consumption, which links modern times and the
emergence of woman-as-consumer. We find the same history repeated often in
academia, where it is often traced back to Thorstein Veblen:
Once men and women both worked, and gender identity was rooted in labor both
within and outside the home. With the emergence of the bourgeois household
however, as a mark of social status and wealth, women stopped producing and
became specialists in consumption. A modern economy emerged that was divided
into a male sector of corporate ownership, administration and production, and a
female household sector of consumption, driven by fashion and display of taste in
new forms of social competition. Men worked derived their social identity from
work, women consumed in the private realm of the home.
This story is bolstered also, in Belize as elsewhere, by advertising and marketing
practices that continually depict women as consumers and men as producers
(advertisement overheads). In public discourse, for example in discussions of food
safety and import policy, consumption is almost always linked to the household,
and the household is identified with women, completing the link from consumption
to women. And when consumption becomes a political issue, for example when
nationalists complain about the import of foreign media and goods to Belize,

women are implicitly blamed, for they are the ones buying imported cosmetics and
clothes, feeding their families pizza instead of rice and beans.
In the USA, the historical narrative is usually a prologue to a millennial tale of how
and why this is all changing completely; through the restructuring of work and
family, the arrival of new media and communications, postmodern gender
consciousness, or the convergence of mens and womens consumer practices
(advertising overhead). There is a nice symmetry, in fact, to the a story that once
we all worked, then one gender created consumer society, and now we all
consume.
Of course, many of us know that factually, the Veblen story is simply untrue. Both
production and consumption have always been gendered in practice, nor have the
boundaries between domestic and public, or even production and consumption ever
been fixed, impermeable, or immutable. So should we then conclude that the story
of woman the consumer has been disproven and will disappear now that it has
been refuted?
My main goal in this paper is to suggest that this evolutionary story is still
important for understanding the present phase of global capitalist growth. The
story of how consumption became a female specialty is fundamental, not as a
description of history, or an accurate portrayal of the role of women in the global
economy. Instead it is important because the myth is remarkably durable and
resistant to change, not only in the academy, but in its escaped feral form in the
wild, in the world itself. Social scientists report hearing variations of the myth
from all around the globe; and hear the story that economic modernization leads to
1. the movement of women from primarily productive roles to consumption and
2. the emergence of a consumer sector driven by female taste for luxury and
fashion creating
3. a global beauty and fashion system.
These ideas are widespread and largely uncontested, in the sense that people may
think the trends are good or bad, and may fight against them. But they still agree
that they exist.
The story is also turned on its head so that the emergence of a local fashion
industry become a public sign that a modern economy is developing, that a country
has arrived in the global marketplace. So fashion and female beauty become
emblematic of consumption and modernity; discourse about consumption becomes
gendered, and turns into a debate about shopping, fashion, and beauty. In this way,
through the medium of gender, modernity is inextricably linked to progress and
the growth of consumerism. Alternative ideas about the future are harder to
imagine, since growth and prosperity are unquestionable values.
I now see that this is why when I went to Belize to study consumer culture in 1990,
I ended up studying beauty pageants and the local fashion and beauty industry.

Despite the fact that both men and women in Belize are consumers and from my
surveys I know that men and women in Belize have remarkably similar tastes in
food, movies, music and many kinds of consumer goods when I talked to both
men and women about how consumption was changing in Belize, they raised the
issue of fashion and beauty. Moral debates about modern wastefulness and
overconsumption focused on womens shopping and display. While women often
accuse men of laziness, or wasting money on drinking and partying, this kind of
spending is traditional, not modern.
My questions about the way Belizean culture was affected by imported consumer
goods often led directly to the topic of female beauty and the conflict between local
and foreign standards in beauty pageants. Many Belizeans, like people in other
parts of the world, feel that local culture is being swamped by imports, that Belize
is becoming thoroughly Americanized, and that local ideas about fashion and
beauty are subject to the cultural imperialism of the Barbie ideal. (beauty pageant
overhead)
Children and teenagers are also frequently blamed for overconsumption, for giving
in to the seduction of television advertising, wasting money on overpriced tennis
shoes or computer games. But, unlike women, youthful offenders are given a good
deal of license because they are expected to be irresponsible.
High Anxiety
Why is all this attention, moral approbation and cultural panic, focused on
womens consumption, and particularly on fashion? Why is the myth of the
emergence of woman the consumer so important at this particular time? I have
several suggestions, but first I have to give you some historical background on
Belize, a small ethnically mixed country that achieved independence from England
only in 1981. I have been working there in various ways since 1972.
Of course women have always worked in Belize, but until quite recently the highly
visible public waged jobs have been dominated by men. Agriculture and logging,
the major export industries were male enclaves. Women did a lot of poorly paid
work in the colonial era; most jobs were extensions of domestic work - cooking,
cleaning, washing, childcare, and vending. The few wage jobs open to women as
secretaries, nurses, teachers, shop and bank clerks were similarly seen as
nonproductive work.
A lot of employment was determined by ethnicity, color, locality, and
class/education. In the colonial regime these were all blurred together into a
ranking system that placed lighter skinned, educated, urban women of mixed
African and European ancestry at the very top, and darker skinned, uneducated,
rural women of Mayan or Hispanic ancestry at the bottom.

Was consumption gendered in the colonial era? Of course it was; in ways that are
completely recognizable today (see Counihan & Kaplan 1998 on ways consumption
is highly gendered in pre-colonial societies). The few documents we have from the
early 19th century (consumption advertisement) include lists of imports, showing
that the elites participated fully in the empires status consumption system, in the
fields of food, drink, and clothing. Contemporary accounts indicate that the same
fields of distinction were important among the local creole middle class, as well as
to a lesser extent among the slaves and other rural people.
By the end of the 19th century, soaps and various cosmetic products become
important. Kathy Peiss has written about the history of cosmetics in the US, and
Richard Burke on the marketing of soap in colonial Zimbabwe; in both cases the
products became popular at the same time that womens work was changing
rapidly. They both find that attention to appearance was closely tied to anxieties
about ethnic and class boundaries (purity- cuticura). In Belize, as in Zimbabwe, the
prevailing colonial discourse about class, cleanliness, and health (the lower classes
are unclean and are sources of contagion; the colonial regime interferes in every
aspect of the life of natives in the name of health) provided an entry for early
multinational companies. Soap was initially presented as a health product, and
beauty was a benefit of health (overhead - cuticura), and finally appearance
becomes the key appeal (late soap advertisement).
So if consumption has been a highly gendered field for more than 100 years in
Belize, why is it such a public issue now? Why does female beauty and fashion play
such an important role in the way Belizeans think about their nation and its place
in the global economy?
Explanations
First, there is simply the fact that over the last 40 years the scope of consumer
culture in Belize has grown enormously. Food imports, for example have gone from
25 dollars per person per year in 1960, to over 200 dollars in 1990. While volume
of consumer imports has been doubling every ten years, the variety of goods is
increasing even faster, as American-style supermarkets and dry-goods retailers
extend throughout the country. And a larger proportion of the population now has
the cash to buy consumer goods as well, so they are more widely consumed in
different classes, ethnic groups, and regions.
My analysis of customs records of imports shows that while the volume and variety
of goods like jewelry, shampoo, and cosmetics has increased dramatically in the
last 40 years, they havent been increasing any faster than goods like motor oil,
house paint, dog food, or sport fishing tackle. They just get more attention.
[I was wondering if this is true on an international scale as well. I was able to find
a few statistics on the size of the global sales of cosmetics. Despite my impression

that they are exploding I didnt find any evidence that they were. Global trade in
dog food is growing much more quickly.]
A second explanation is grounded in changes in the labor market in Belize. There
have been more professional job opportunities for women, as well as in some
lower-waged portions of the expanding tourist industry. Since the early 1980s,
several offshore clothing assembly plants have taken advantage of the Caribbean
Basin initiative, hiring large numbers of young women. As in the garment industry
elsewhere in the Caribbean (piecework wages), wages are low and working
conditions are terrible. This particular aspect of globalization, along with the
growth of export agriculture, has actually expanded and strengthened the
gendering of work for the poor majority of the population.
Some have argued that simply having a higher percentage of the women in waged
labor gives women more disposable income. Young working women, for example,
have been singled out as the vanguard of new forms of consumption in late 19 th
century France. And Barbara Mills work in Thailand finds that young factory
women do experiment with new kinds of consumption, holding back some of their
income from their families.
In contrast, Belizean women say that their obligations and responsibilities to their
families grow right along with their income. The way the Belizean family system
works, men often cut their contribution to the household, or to child support when
a woman gets a job (Mclauren 1996). The result is summarized by a Belizean
woman who said simply, a mans earnings is his own, but the womans is for her
children and the house.
Only in this light contextualized in the pattern of capitalist development in
Belize, and in the structures of gender and power within the household what
Folbre calls structures of constraint can we start to approach the problem of
the public volatility of beauty culture and female consumerism, and see why the
beauty industry is anomalous and difficult.
Ambiguity
Here I want to make a quick transition from talking about social and economic
realities, to stories and representations about those realities, with the goal of
showing how they contradict each other.
In reality the beauty and fashion industry is problematic for the mythic and
cultural order because it constantly crosses the boundaries between domination
and resistance. For example, in Belize beauty queens are both criticized for selling
out, and praised for facing up to power. On one hand they are living up to foreign
gender stereotypes in a system dominated by two multinational media
corporations, on the other hand they assert local and national pride, as well as
their rights to political voice and careers. Is Denny Mendez, born in the Dominican

Republic but voted Miss Italy for 1996, the winner of a triumph over racism, or a
victim of the fashion system. ( from Transition - figure 9)
Pamela Wright, working on the Miss Garifuna pageant in Belize, shows how the
event is reinterpreted and reappropriated locally to emphasize ethnic distinction.
So instead of selecting Miss Garifuna on the basis of some idealized notion of
physical beauty, the winner excels in Garifuna dance, use of the Garifuna language,
and knowledge of history and culture. She asserts the resistant status of ethnic
identity within the nation; the pageant format is effectively reappropriated, or to
use de Certeau's terminology, "poached" and turned into a local event for the
purposes of exalting the local and ethnic over the global and national. But others
argue that the very idea of a beauty contest is a form of domination; in South
Africa for example, some anti-apartheid activists criticized the first black Miss
South Africa as a sell-out or a token, while others praised her as a symbol of Black
resurgence and equality (Russell 1997).
The other reason beauty and fashion industries attract attention is because they
challenge the boundaries between production and consumption. Is the beauty
queen a consumer or producer? The consumer is also the product.
As Leora Auslander (1996) has argued, the boundary between consumption and
production has been the dynamic arena, the site of gender struggle in the
developed countries for centuries. In Belize this boundary moved in the last
century when the serious work of keeping clean, healthy and dressed became
instead the frivolous consumption of cosmetics and fashion. In this century
Belizean women have fought for recognition that their domestic chores are a form
of productive labor.
In Belize the boundary between production and consumption also challenged by
more active participation by Belizean men and women in beauty culture. In the
growing number of small beauty shops, health clubs, and hair parlors,
entrepreneurs turn their skills as consumers, often gained abroad, into business
and eventually capital. Rather than being simply the consumption of foreign
products and images, many of these women assert, fashion and beauty should be a
vehicle for the development of national and ethnic consciousness. By serving local
consumers, they seek to play a serious part in the production of the nation, and
challenge dependence on global media and multinational corporations.
Conclusions
The evolutionary story about a transition from woman the producer to woman the
consumer, and back again is empirically wrong. Yet on another level, people widely
believe it to be true, and the globalized beauty and fashion industries have become
emblematic of the myth. A closer look at those industries shows that in many ways
they actually destabilize categories of consumption and production, and challenge
the caricature of the dominated woman. But they also seem to make an essential

and important connection between the reality and the myth, serving as icons and
symbols. And the story itself persists as public rhetoric, as a popular model of
economic history, and as an ideology of development.
Elsewhere I have argued that globalization is not producing either the economic or
cultural uniformity that so many have predicted. Instead this period of rapid
globalization thrives on differences and disparities, inequality and discrimination;
while it frees capital and markets, it increasingly binds people to their localities,
identities, and economies. But along with these harsh realities are those spaces of
the imaginary which Appadurai calls scapes, where ideas and narratives
circulate. In this mythosphere, we can identify common threads of discourse about
consumption. Globalization of consumption then appears as a set of common
discourses, stories, debates, based on some common concepts, rather than simply
the spread of a bunch of practices, or tastes, or gendered practices. But sharing
stories, needless to say, does not have the power to make us all the same, and it
certainly does not make us all equal.
[Of course we are not going to become alike because we all eat big macs. But if we
all believe that we are all going someday to be eating big macs, and this will make
us alike, does THAT make us alike? Only in some very limited ways. ]
A draft of this paper was presented at the conference The Transnational Politics of
Gender and Consumption at the University of California, Berkeley October 8-9,
1999. I appreciate the comments of participants in that conference.
1. Dirlik (1996:31) lists the following as accepted trends in global capitalism:
a. global motions of peoples
b. weakening of boundaries, between societies and social categories
c. internal replication of inequalities once seen as colonial
d. homogenization and fragmentation within and across societies
e. interpenetration of global and local; multiculturalism and
cosmopolitanism
f. concentration of power in the hands of capital
g. manipulation of people to make them more responsive to the operations of
capital