ABSTRACT
Explicitly and implicitly, women are instructed by their environment (from the school room to the women’s magazine) in how to “become” a woman-a task that is never completed and is subject to constant revision.1 This concept of identity as a process of “becoming” has been understood as offering emancipatory possibilities to the individual who is invited, not to take up a stable, untested and fixed position, but, rather, to see her “self,” or even “selves,” as subject to a multiple and on-going process of revision, reform and choices.2
The development of contemporary culture, however, beginning with the rise of consumerism and the concomitant cultivation of the body and selfpresentation, exploits the idea of the “becoming woman” for the purposes of consumer industries. As a result, it is difficult to maintain an entirely optimistic view of this system of unstable identities, which capitalism encourages, rather than discourages.3
