By Eva Illouz
To what volume are our such a lot romantic moments made up our minds via the portrayal of affection in movie and on television? Is a stroll on a moonlit seashore a second of excellent romance or just a simulation of the well-known excellent noticeable time and again on billboards and film monitors? In her particular research of yankee love within the 20th century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of pictures that outline our principles of affection and romance, revealing that the event of "true" love is deeply embedded within the adventure of buyer capitalism. Illouz stories how person conceptions of affection overlap with the realm of clichés and photographs she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives within the collective mind's eye of the kingdom and is outfitted on photographs that unite amorous and monetary actions within the rituals of courting, lovemaking, and marriage.
Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the acquisition of good looks items, activities autos, vitamin beverages, and snack meals to good fortune in love and happiness. Illouz unearths that, eventually, each cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen pink roses—is developed via ads and media pictures that hold forth a democratic ethos of intake: fabric items and happiness can be found to all.
Engaging and witty, Illouz's examine starts with readings of advertisements, songs, movies, and different public representations of romance and concludes with person interviews with a view to research the ways that mass messages are internalized. Combining wide old study, interviews, and postmodern social thought, Illouz brings a powerful scholarship to her interesting portrait of affection in America.
Review:
"Illouz creates a map of the tricky courting among love and economics in American society. In an analytical type akin to that of Daniel Bell in its scope and highbrow ambition, she argues that romantic love captures our minds and hearts by way of promising transgression via intake of relaxation and nature."—Michelle Lamont, writer of cash, Morals, and Manners
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Extra info for Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Sample text
These background activities lend support to the explicit promotion of products as diverse as shampoo, beauty creams, cars, motor oil, and cereals and are acts of consumption, albeit presented obliquely. That is, the objects of oblique consumption are never referred to directly as objects of consumption but are insinuated into a scene as part of what makes it "naturally" romantic. For example, the ad for "Mobiloil" showing a couple sitting in a movie theater encourages readers to consume this rather unromantic product by implying that by so doing 38 When Romance Met the Market they will intensify the romance in their lives (the couple was able to get to the movie theater by car in winter; hence Mobiloil helps maintain the romance provided by going to the movies).
The nascent movie industry, then, exploited the themes of love, marriage, and happiness in terms of consumption, leisure, and fun, and it collaborated with the burgeoning advertising industry to make these ideas widely available to a public eager to learn and adopt new standards of romantic and sexual behavior. LOVE ON SALE The emerging national advertising system associated romance not merely with consumption, leisure, and physical attractiveness, but also with a host of attendant values. 40 During the 1920s, the advertising agency changed from brokering space in newspapers to serving the interests of the giant corporations, and this shift helped raise the agencies to the status of economic and cultural tastemakers.
Media texts draw from the meanings of everyday life, while everyday life uses and appropriates symbols codified in mass media organizations. 43 The methodological problem then is to devise strategies that can grasp the dense entanglement of everyday life with media texts and to understand when culture operates as background and when it has an efficacy of its own. ) The accent of my cultural analysis is primarily on the activity of making and using symbols. But my interpretation does not, 1 hope, succumb to the temptation of subjectivism, either my own or that of social actors.