Body shopping: Maternity and alterity in Mamatoto

Author(s): Cuthbert, D.

Journal/Book: Cult Stud. 1996; 10: 11 New Fetter Lane, London, England EC4P 4EE. Routledge. 430-448.

Abstract: The products and practices of The Body Shop, both material and rhetorical, can be inserted into a number of competing discourses along the axes of feminist interests in the body and its relation to culture. We focus here on The Body Shop's Mamatoto range as it relates to contemporary Western discursive formations of maternity, alterity, and the vexed constructions of 'difference' and 'globalism' that emerge from them. Among the meta-products of Mamatoto are discursive formations of the body itself which, while they appear to endorse, even to celebrate, an active engagement with transcultural specificity and difference, actually reinstate the Western, white body of 'woman' as the 'gold standard' against which the eroticized currency of other women can be classified, appropriated and disowned. Within this framework, maternity itself is deployed by The Body Shop as a richly suggestive trope that serves to represent the problematics of body-as-nature, body-as-culture and body-as-identity that continue to preoccupy feminists across a wide range of political and cultural agendas.

Note: Article M Grossman, Victoria Univ Technol, Dept Commun & Language Studies, Melbourne, Vic 3000, Australia

Keyword(s): The Body Shop; feminism; maternity; postcolonialism; representation; women of colour

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