Daniel Thomas Cook

Betwixt and be Tween Age Ambiguity and the Sexualization of the Female Consuming Subject

In this article, we argue that what is now known as the ‘tween’ cannot be understood apart from its inception in, and articulation with, the market exigencies of childhood - specifically girlhood - as they have emerged since the Second World War. Drawing upon trade discourses from the children’s clothing industry since the 1940s, interviews with children and views expressed by children’s market observers, we demonstrate how ‘the tween’ (or subteen/preteen) has been constructed and maintained as an ambiguous, age-delineated marketing and merchandising category. This category tends to produce and reproduce a ‘female consuming subject’ who has generally been presumed to be white, middle or upper middle class and heterosexual. Building upon historical materials, we focus much of our efforts on analyzing contemporary cultural commercial iterations of the tween as they have arisen since the early 1990s, a time when clothing makers and entrepreneurs of childhood redoubled their efforts to define a market semantic space for the Tween on the continuum of age-based goods and meanings.

The Missing Child in Consumption Theory

Children are essentially invisible in theories of consumer society and culture, despite their presence and centrality in everyday life. In this article, I argue that children and childhood, and thus mothers and motherhood, must be acknowledged and investigated as constitutive of — rather than derivative of or exceptional to — commercial, consumer culture generally. The focus here is not on how to better accommodate children and childhood (and mothers and motherhood) within extant notions of consumption and consumer culture, but to begin to open up the field of consumption studies to the essential and non-negotiable presence of children and childhood throughout social life.

The other child study : Figuring children as consumers in market research, 1910s-1990s

This article examines how notions of “the child” were constructed in marketing research literature from the 1910s through the 1990s. Drawing on childrens industry trade literature, market reports and books, I argue that children have become increasingly portrayed as individualized, autonomous consumers. Over this time period, the desire for consumer products becomes figured by industry observers and researchers as a mode of childrens “self expression.” The analytic isolation of “the child” in the persona of a “consumer” authorizes a new morality for consumption by construing childrens desire for goods as preexistent and thus natural.

Beyond Either/Or

CHILDREN’S CONSUMER CULTURE occupies an ambiguous place in contemporary thought. It stands, on the one hand, as a ubiquitous presence in the everyday public culture of wealthy nations and, on the other, as a relatively neglected area of social research and thinking. It is, indeed, nearly impossible to avoid encountering the goods, icons and media characters produced for children’s use and consumption when one walks down the street, enters a school or supermarket, flips through a magazine, scans television channels or pays even scant attention to one’s own children. We see inscriptions of consumer media culture painted on the walls of nurseries, sewn on school backpacks, emblazoned on the faceplates of mobile phones and encoded in the array of branded breakfast cereals strategically slotted at children’s eye level in grocery store aisles. Yet, children’s consumer culture remains on the sidelines of the study of consumption and society. It retains a kind of adjunct or sub-subfield status, whereby children’s consumption represents a special case in the putatively more encompassing world of ‘adult’ structures and practices. It might be objected that my characterization of the scholarly treatment of children’s consumption as one of relative neglect is misleading, perhaps even irresponsible, if recent work within the field of consumer and media studies were taken into account. The number of books1 and research papers devoted to the topic since the early 1990s is impressive, encouraging and continues to grow (for a review, see Martens et al., this issue; see Journal of Consumer Culture

Semantic Provisioning of Children's Food: Commerce, Care and Maternal Practice.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with mothers in the US about feeding their young children, this article examines how consumer culture — broadly construed — constitutes part of the indispensable context of mothering practices. The argument put forward is that mothers not only provide food and sustenance for their children, but necessarily encounter, engage with and make use of commercial meanings of foodstuffs as part and parcel of the caring work they accomplish while providing food and meals. The concept of ‘semantic provisioning’ is meant to capture the meaning-making labor of mothers as it arises in sometimes contentious negotiations with children over ‘proper’ and ‘appropriate’ foodstuffs and meals. The approach offered seeks to demonstrate how commerce, sentiment, caring and children’s subjectivities interweave at the level of practice.

Knowing the child consumer: historical and conceptual insights on qualitative children's consumer research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer a selective and necessarily truncated history of the place and use of qualitative approaches in the study of childrens consumption in order to provide some depth of understanding regarding differences between and commonalities of approaches employed by academic market researchers, social science researchers and, to a lesser extent, market practitioners.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines key research statements about childrens consumption beginning in the 1930s to ascertain the underlying conception of the child informing the work.Findings – It is argued that there has been a displacement of psychologically oriented, developmental conceptions of the child with sociological and anthropological conceptions resulting in an acceptance of the child as a more or less knowing, competent consumer. This shift has become manifest in a rise and acceptance of qualitative research on childrens consumer behaviour by social science and marketing academics a...

The disempowering empowerment of children's consumer “choice”

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explore how discourses of childrens empowerment through goods have emerged and function as a key narrative among many in childrens commercial industries, particularly in the USA and Canada.Design/methodology/approach – The central philosophical and theoretical approach guiding this inquiry rests on the notion that the “child consumer” exists as a rhetorical figure which has an existence that is as consequential as “real,” biographical children. The child consumer arises from, and in many ways resides in, discourses produced by marketers, retailers, researchers and advertisers on the pages of marketing publications, often framing the imaginations and guiding the actions of advertisers, retailers, merchandisers and marketers. Articles from trade publications such as AdWeek, BrandWeek, Brandmarketing; KidScreen and Progressive Grocer, in addition to books written by marketers about the childrens market since the 1990s, were examined.Findings – Three key themes – ch...

Introduction: Specifying mothers/motherhoods

The place of mothers and motherhoods in commercial life represents one of the great under-told stories of consumer culture. At once revered and despised as leisure shoppers, women nevertheless have borne the brunt of the labor of consumption for the household and thus have garnered the attention of advertisers and marketers since at least the early decades of the 20th century. During these formative years, the ‘mother’, as conceptual persona, can be found informing the design and staffing of retail spaces of urban department stores in the USA (Benson, 1986; Cook, 2004), completing the ‘family circle’ in depictions of the ‘housewife’ in advertising promotions (Marchand 1985) and occupying center stage in consumer education efforts of the time (Frederick, 1929). A good deal of the story of the mother– consumer – in both historical and contemporary treatments – has until recently remained enfolded into, and perhaps lost in, the general figure of a ‘female’ consumer with all if of its attendant ideologically inflected foibles and presumptions. Indeed, relatively recent key works focusing on women and shopping, such as those by DeVault (1991), Miller (1998) and Zukin (2004), tend to elide the specificities of what women do as mothers and thus of how constructs and understandings of motherhood may inform those of womanhood as well as those regarding consumption. Motherhood remains caught in the tussle between seemingly disparate forms of value and valuation. Abiding cultural norms continue to set expectations for mothers to defer some measure of personal gratification to their children’s ‘needs’, or at least to their wants, both at home and in the marketplace. Yet, it is in the regular handling of children’s desires that the sorting of priorities and the fabricating of value take place on a fundamental, everyday basis. It also is in the handling of such desires that various motherhoods come to be constituted as social practice (cf. Warde, 2005). As Douglas and Isherwood remind us, consumption, in the broad sense, constitutes the way the materials of culture become organized. It is ‘the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape’ (1979: 57). Consumption here includes the sorting of values – of good from bad, of appropriate from

Commercial Enculturation: Moving Beyond Consumer Socialization

The scholarly attention paid to children’s commercial lives and the consumer culture of childhood in recent years belies some of the slippages and disjunctions that remain between the fields of childhood studies and consumer studies. On the one hand, as I have argued elsewhere (Cook 2004b, 2008), those writing in and for a specifically “childhood studies” audience tend to ignore or marginalize the material and commercial aspects of children’s existence, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Zelizer 2002; Marsh 2005). This indifference occurs perhaps because the hallmark of childhood studies — the active, agentive child — is also central to marketers’, advertisers’ and retailers’ constructions of the child consumer. This coincidence of similarly imagined children does not fit well with the liberatory posture and agenda of many in childhood studies: the knowing, meaning-making child resembles rather too closely the marketer’s dream. On the other hand, a good deal of mainstream social-cultural “consumption theory” and studies of consumer society either ignore children and childhood completely or see children as appendages or adjuncts to the central claims, preoccupations and problems of this field of study (Cook 2008).

Agency, Children's Consumer Culture and the Fetal Subject: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Connections

The aim of this article is to offer a perspective on how the personhood implied in and by children’s consumption can extend beyond its initial context to inform other identities, like that of the individuated, autonomous fetus. Drawing upon historical material on the rise of the child-consumer in the USA, I examine how the practices and institutions built up around this child-consumer laid the cultural, philosophical and epistemological groundwork for the secular acceptance of the idea that the unborn is always and already a person. I argue and demonstrate that the construct of the child-consumer increasingly instantiates and authorizes that of an agentive, autonomous child, a figure which historically precedes and informs inscriptions fetal personhood. In short, I offer the child-consumer as an historical homologue for the fetus-person.