ABSTRACT
The mall became a template for a space of consumption that has been successfully exported to cities around the world. This chapter discusses the construction of female shoppers in the spaces of modernity, and contemporaneous historical and literary portrayals of elite feminine subjectivity, with the apparently more democratic, inclusive, and gargantuan architectural spaces of the mall. It offers an opportunity to reverse the historical polarity from male writers examining and typifying female consumers, to contemporary feminist critics of shopping practices and consumption spaces. The chapter explores the multiple sites and opportunities for consumption that have appeared outside of traditional shopping spaces and malls. The blending or hybridization of the mall with in-between spaces of airports and sprawling roadside rest areas have been characterized as 'non-places' by the anthropologist Marc Auge. The chapter provides the idea of spaces of fantasy and control further by way of the visionary Marxist activist and theorist Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle.
