As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in folklore and rhetoric, I am continually drawn to questions of gender, race, sexuality, and power as they pertain to a wide range of cultural narratives. Through my research, I work to identify and analyze the complex processes at the heart of gender and racial formation in order to understand how such cultural productions prove significant for envisioning a socially and politically just world.
A transformative lens revealing the historical racial context that profoundly influenced European fairy tales.
Elli Köngäs-Maranda Professional Prize, American Folklore Society, 2015
Explores the peculiar enchantments at the heart of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Carter’s commitment to imagining unforeseen possibilities for heterosexual love and desire.
In the thirty-five years since the publication of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's reimagined fairy tales have inspired an impressive body of criticism. Yet none has addressed the ways her fairy tales grapple with and seek to overcome the near impossibility of heterosexual love and desire under patriarchy. In Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, author Kimberly J. Lau argues that the strangeness of Carter's fairy-tale enchantments—the moments when love or erotic desire escape the deeply familiar, habitual structures and ideologies that contain them—show the momentary, fleeting possibilities for heterosexual love and desire.
Lau begins by situating her reading of The Bloody Chamber—as individual stories and as a collection—within and against the critical literature, especially that which addresses Carter's relationship to psychoanalytic theory and issues of language and desire. In chapter 2, she illustrates Carter's construction of gender and language as labyrinthine structures—complex cultural edifices constructed and augmented over time. She moves on to consider Carter's "feline stories" in chapter 3—"The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," "The Tiger's Bride," and "Puss-in-Boots"—as an initial move away from the labyrinthine structures and toward an alternate erotics. In chapter 4, she reads "The Erl-King" and "The Snow Child" as another pair of mirrored tales, while chapter 5 elaborates on the pedophilic and necrophiliac fantasies of a pornographic culture, introduced in the previous chapter with the Count's desire for the Snow Child. In chapter 6, Lau situates Carter's three concluding stories—the wolf trilogy—within the context of feminist psychoanalytic understandings of infidelity as that which destabilizes patriarchal hegemonies and constructs.
Lau argues that Carter's "erotic infidelities" work against our culturally determined expectations and longings and usher us into welcome new enchantments. Situated at the intersection of feminist, psychoanalytic, literary, and fairy-tale studies, readers interested in a variety of scholarly disciplines as well as scholars of Carter's tales will enjoy Lau's look at enduring questions of gender, sexuality, and desire.
Enduring narratives: narratives that endure; the act of enduring narratives.
The love story. The fairy tale.
To speak of love is tricky. It is to fall into cliché, to ventriloquize, to diminish one’s individuality. The words with which we hope to convey our most profound feelings—our supposedly unique experiences—are largely empty, transformed by custom and collectivity into worn platitudes and rote sentiments. Love stories suffer the same fate. As Roland Barthes observed, “Every other night, on TV, someone says: I love you” (2001: 151). I love you is all too familiar: at once a commonly shared feeling and a commonly shared narrative. Love is trapped by convention as well as by the limits of discursivity.
If language confines love to repetitive expression, then the fairy tale may well epitomize its narrative incarnation. With its highly formulaic structure, its bare plotting, and its minimal character development, the fairy tale is all tradition and trope. And yet the predictability of the fairy tale, like the love story, might very well be part of its allure. The comfortable structures—from form and plot to image and phrase—that hinder the possibility of thinking love and desire anew also sustain the cultural ideologies at the heart of the love story and the fairy tale, enduring narratives par excellence.
Fantasies of Difference / Different Fantasies
Angela Carter was savvy to the gendered politics of enduring narratives, and The Bloody Chamber is devoted to unsettling both its meanings. First published in 1979, The Bloody Chamber remains one of the most enchanting—and one of the most bewildering and provocative—collections of retold fairy tales. With their fantastically strange couplings and wonderfully disorienting endings, Carter’s fairy tales work to free love from its existence as cliché. Love’s entrapment in trope is especially dangerous, because the formulaic nature of the love story, of the fairy tale, of the romance novel—like pornography—imbues it with a mythic quality that structures gendered fantasies of sex and desire and denies the possibility of subjectivity, as Carter suggests in her critical work The Sadeian Woman: “At the first touch or sigh he, she, is subsumed immediately into a universal… The man and woman, in their particularity, their being, are absent from these representations of themselves as male and female. These tableaux of falsification remove our sexual life from the world, from the tactile experience itself” (2006: 8-9). Although both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman critique love’s reduction to a universalizing myth and women’s complicity in the oppressive power relations it veils, Carter refuses to give up on love. Instead, she seeks to conjure it in previously unrecognizable ways. For Carter only a radically reimagined love has the power to liberate us—and our subjectivities, our sex, our desire—from enduring narratives, and this effort to retrieve love from cliché and convention lies at the heart of The Bloody Chamber…
Intertextual Multiplicities
Just as narratives of love and sex—fairy tales, romance novels, pornography—are prone to formulaic predictability, so too are most efforts to theorize them in fiction. The Bloody Chamber stories avoid such heavy-handedness, however, because they move away from expected feminist critiques and their anticipated fairy-tale revisions. Instead, Carter’s stories are rich with paradox and play; they delight with their clever interventions into patriarchal narrative legacies and theoretical inheritances even as they disturb with their attention to women’s complicity in such oppressive structures. Much of Carter’s brilliance in creating subtle and nuanced narrative arguments derives from her remarkable intertextual range: not simply fairy tales but also Romantic poetry, Gothic novels, Shakespeare’s plays, biblical mythology, visual art, literary pornography, folklore, and, of course psychoanalytic theory as well as The Sadeian Woman, her own critical work published in the same year as The Bloody Chamber. In addition, as Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (2013) so convincingly demonstrates, Carter’s 1977 translation of Charles Perrault’s Histoires of contes du temps passé, along with her extensive research for it, provide another rich source for her intertextual play. Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère’s reading of the overlapping tales—those that Carter first translated for The Fairy tales of Charles Perrault and then transformed, primarily in The Bloody Chamber—highlights the way they make sly use of the slippages implicit in Carter’s own translations, thus opening up opportunities to draw out, reimagine, and complicate the adult themes lurking around the edges of Perrault’s seemingly child-oriented tales. Such intertextualities—the conscious references and allusions to other texts in order to comment on them—reveal the historical sediments and multilayered nature of enduring narratives, the cultural trappings that render them trite while also conveying the weight of their gendered burden.
At the same time, the Bloody Chamber stories provide their own productive intertextualities: from story to story, among stories within thematic and formal groupings, and over the course of the collection as a whole. As several critics have noted, The Bloody Chamber must be read as an interdependent set of stories that continually approach the collection’s central concerns from different vantage points. This shifting and multiple style is characteristically Carter. Lorna Sage identifies it in the way Carter’s radio plays “would, within the same story, give you different versions, turn it around or inside out, transform it” (1994: 36), and Lucie Armitt sees in The Bloody Chamber “a single narrative which uses the short story medium to work and rework compulsive repetitions” (1997: 96). Always resisting even her own narrative enclosures, Carter instead opens the Bloody Chamber stories to speculation and possibility.
The rich internal intertextuality of the Bloody Chamber stories also gives rise to several narrative-theoretical arcs that emerge across the collection and exacerbate the multiple meanings of individual tales. Carter’s spatial and temporal movement from story to story seems to offer its own narrative argument for an alternate erotics that might exist beyond the phallogocentric Symbolic Order, for instance. The Bloody Chamber thus begins with the highly cultured and civilized world of the Marquis’s castle and slowly makes its way through spaces that invoke its demise and degeneration. Mr. Lyon’s Palladian house may be a bourgeois instantiation of the Marquis’s aristocratic fortress, a simple step down in class, but the Beast’s palazzo is in ruins and finally crumbles at the following story’s end. The Erl-King’s labyrinthine woods imprison the heroine much as the Marquis’s castle does, and Carter implies that “the natural world” is no safer for women than “the civilized world,” because both are determined by patriarchal power. Even in disarray and without his physical presence, Nosferatu’s mansion overwhelms the vampire Countess with its ancestral hauntings, with Nosferatu’s patriarchal legacy. It is only in the space of geographic and ontological liminality—the zombie-werewolf Duke’s abandoned castle, another denlike home for the feral Wolf-Alice—that an alternate erotics might come into being. In terms of temporality and the collection’s female protagonists, Carter’s fairy tales track women’s development in reverse, beginning with a recently married heroine and regressing back to the presymbolic Wolf-Alice, a regression that seeks to undo women’s incorporation into the Law of the Father and its enduring patriarchal narratives of love, marriage, and women’s propriety. (1-6)
Elli Köngäs-Maranda Professional Prize, American Folklore Society, 2011
In her evocative ethnographic study, Body Language, Kimberly Lau traces the multiple ways in which the success of an innovative fitness program illuminates what identity means to its Black female clientele and how their group interaction provides a new perspective on feminist theories of identity politics—especially regarding the significance of identity to political activism and social change.
Sisters in Shape, Inc., Fitness Consultants (SIS), a Philadelphia company, promotes balance in physical, mental, and spiritual health. Its program goes beyond workouts, as it educates and motivates women to make health and fitness a priority. Discussing the obstacles at home and the importance of the group's solidarity to their ability to stay focused on their goals, the women speak to the ways in which their commitment to reshaping their bodies is a commitment to an alternative future.
Body Language shows how the group's explorations of black women's identity open new possibilities for identity-based claims to recognition, justice, and social change.
On Friday, March 20, 1998, the Philadelphia Daily News published an article that would dramatically change the lives of many black women. Written by Marisol Bello and titled “Shape Up, Sisters!” the article offered an extensive portrait of Melanie Marchand, a local fitness profession, and one of her clients, Denise Murphy, who had gone from a size 16 to a size 8 over the course of the previous year and a half. For her article, Bellow shadowed Melanie and Denise through one of their typical training sessions, interviewed both of them, and described Melanie’s program of weight training, aerobic exercise, and nutrition education in the context of addressing the health problems black women face as a group, including disproportionately high rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Subtitled “52% of Black Women Overweight,” the article caught people’s attention. Not only did it offer a snapshot of black women’s negative health indicators relative to those of women of other racial and ethnic groups but it also succeeded in capturing Denise’s enthusiasm for her lifestyle changes and Melanie’s commitment to improving black women’s health. At the end of the article, Bello included a short sentence that set everything in motion: “For more information, contact Sisters in Shape.”
That day alone, more than one hundred women called Sisters in Shape. More continued to call over the next few days. All told, between two and three hundred women called Sisters in Shape in the week following the article, and the tone of their messages ranged from despair to hope, from anger to motivation. In one of our first interviews, Melanie recalled some of the messages:
One woman called [raises voice slightly], “I’m three hundred pounds, I’m overweight; I need help; please help me.” Another woman [said], “Hi, my name is so-and-so, and I wanna get more information about Sisters in Shape. I’m ready to make a change. I want a new me,” and she was all excited: “I want a new me” [repeated with attitude]. And then you this other woman who calls and sa[ys], “Hi, may name is so-and-son and me and about five other women here at such-and-such middle school are out of shape and overweight. Please call.” It was just really inspiring to hear the hope, the optimism that they had in their voices because they felt like they had found some answer to something they need help with.”
When the calls started, Sisters in Shape was little more than a voicemail box for three black women who worked as fitness instructors in the city and who performed together as part of the 12th Street Gym aerobics demonstration team. On the basis of their own life experiences and evidence from their classes at a number of gyms in the greater Philadelphia area, Melanie, Kathy Tillery, and Carethia Thomas believed that African American women generally tend not to prioritize exercise and fitness in their lives. Drawing on their collective knowledge, their many years of experience in the exercise and fitness industry, and their status as fitness role models, the three decided to try to increase awareness of the benefits of exercise and nutrition and the importance of living a healthy lifestyle for black women in particular.
The three women named themselves Sisters in Shape and began participating in a number of regional fitness festivals and events, where they would do aerobics demonstrations and then talk to other women, mostly black, about their health and fitness programs and experiences. They came together for annual Philadelphia events such as Unity Day, Fitness Fest, the City of Hope fitness showcases, smaller health fairs in local churches, and even Power99’s radio show Sistahs, a program devoted to issues affecting black women’s lives. Sisters in Shape was active in the community, but it did not exist as an organization outside these sorts of engagements. Today, almost fifteen years later, Sisters in Shape is one of the most successful health and fitness programs ever developed for black women, with hundreds of longtime members as well as its own gym. (1-3)
The Sisters in Shape women’s everyday conversations and organizational discourses specify some of the ways that issues of black women’s self-esteem are integrated into broader social concerns. By altering, shifting, and reorienting the dominant discourses to prioritize their own experiences as sources of information, the Sisters in Shape women produce new bodies of knowledge capable of explaining their own everyday lived realities while establishing new paradigms for black women’s bodily visibility. The Sisters in Shape women’s rearticulations intervene in hegemonic academic and popular accounts of black women’s bodies and black women’s beliefs about their bodies, accounts that begin with and continue to reinscribe their assumed inherent difference from a white normativity.
Through these discursive practices, the Sisters in Shape women also highlight the significance of a collective identity based on multiple and shifting selves for generating a context-specific standpoint that fosters new critical theory, political change, and social justice. Such a context-specific standpoint challenges [Patricia Hil] Collins’s reliance on a stable group identity at the center of her intersectional standpoint theory even as it adds a new dimension to her claim that black feminist thought is one way of sustaining and oppositional consciousness and critique: “For Black feminist thought, remaining oppositional involves challenging the constructs, paradigms, and epistemologies of bodies of knowledge that have more power, authority, and/or legitimacy than Black feminist thought” (1998: 88). As the Sisters in Shape women make clear, such an oppositional consciousness resists hegemonic interpellations and dominant representations and insists on new epistemologies that might enable a productive identity politics.
This oppositional consciousness also grounds the Sisters in Shape women’s epistemic status as black women, what [Chandra] Mohanty would refer to as their “realist” identity, specifically these black women whose experiences give rise to a new body of knowledge about black women’s body esteem. While the more general category of black women builds on a constructionist foundation and underscores the ways that social identities are produced when ideological formations are mapped onto material bodies in historically constrained and nonarbitrary ways, the Sisters in Shape “realist” identity and context-specific standpoint suggest that there is also always at least some room for self-definition and self-determination in collective rearticulations (as the group similarly demonstrates through its performances of multiple black womanhoods and its resistance to dominant interpellations discussed in the previous chapter). The Sisters in Shape women’s ability to organize around a context-specific standpoint and to assert an oppositional consciousness illustrates the undeniable potential of identity politics for both social recognition and new epistemological claims.
At the same time, while such theories of identity may allow for diversity within the group, they also tend to preclude an articulation of too much diversity. Rather, identity groups necessarily rely on a collective interpretation of experience according to the group’s dominant self-definitions, a tendency that complicates the group’s self-determination by overgeneralizing the bases of their social and political claims to justice. As an example, the Sisters in Shape women’s focus on anger as an index of low self-esteem forecloses other potential readings of anger as a justifiable response to being a black woman in a racist and sexist culture. Though many feminists have read anger in this collective way (see Scheman 1980; Spelman 1989; and Holmes 2004 for detailed discussions), and such a reading may also contribute to a context-specific, shifting standpoint, LaTanya and Bev clearly invoke their anger in a way that further consolidates Sisters in Shape’s dominant discourses: as an individually located emotion linked to their low self-esteem, a connection they can overcome through their engagement with Sisters in Shape.
Given the Sisters in Shape women’s impulse to foreground the social dimensions of many different problems—such as the lack of comprehensive health care and health education, the gym as a raced and gendered site, and black men’s supposed love of big black women—LaTanya’s and Bev’s emphasis on anger as individually located is particularly striking. The group’s discursive coherence around the issue of anger raises the question of how alternative understandings of LaTanya’s and Bev’s claims might affect the potential effectiveness of group-based claims to social justice. Thus, while this chapter has detailed the capacity of a context-specific and embodied Sisters in Shape standpoint to make use of discourses of self-esteem in order to intervene in dominant epistemologies of gender, race, and health and to generate new bodies of knowledge, the next chapter attends to the potential downsides of a feminist standpoint theory that depends on such discourses for its claims to social recognition and action. (140-142)
The pursuit of health and wellness has become a fundamental and familiar part of everyday life in America. We are surrounded by an enticing world of products, practices, and promotions assuring health and happiness—cereal boxes claim that their contents can reduce the risk of heart disease, bars of aromatherapy soap seek to wash away our stresses, newspapers celebrate the wonders of the latest superfoods and herbal remedies. No longer confined to the domain of Western medicine, suggestions for healthy living often turn to alternatives originating in distant times and places, in cultures very different from our own. Diets from ancient or remote groups are presented as cures for everything from colds to cancer; exercise regimens based on Eastern philosophies are heralded as paths to physical health and spiritual wellbeing.
In New Age Capitalism, Kimberly Lau examines the ideological work that has created this billion-dollar business and allowed "Eastern" and other non-Western traditions to be coopted by Western capitalism. Extending the orientalist logic to the business of health and wellness, American companies have created a lucrative and competitive market for their products, encouraging consumers to believe that they are making the right choices for personal as well as planetary health. In reality, alternative health practices have been commodified for an American public longing not only for health and wellness but also for authenticity, tradition, and a connection to the cultures of an imagined Edenic past. Although consumers might prefer to buy into "authentic" non-Western therapies, New Age Capitalism argues that the market economy makes this goal unattainable.
The pursuit of health and wellness runs deep in the texts and textures of contemporary daily life in the United States. First thing in the morning, cereal boxes promise to reduce the risk of heart disease, and orange juice cartons herald the juice’s ability to ward off cancer. Aromatherapy soaps and lotions are designed to uplift the spirits in preparation for the stresses of daily toil or to wash them away at the end of the day. Suggestions for healthy living are regular features on television and radio programs and in magazines and newspapers. As a popular and fundamental part of everyday life, the pursuit of health and wellness is dispersed from the specialized realm of medical doctors and Western biomedicine to the broader domain of alternative strategies for holistic living.
In this way, exercise regimens are made of Eastern philosophies through the conversion of holistic practices like yoga and t’ai chi. Belief systems become healthy, low-impact exercises as well as training advantages for professional football and basketball players. Superfoods derived from vaguely identified traditions of herbal medicine and special diets based on ancient and/or remote non-Western cultures suggest themselves as cures for everything from the common cold to cancer, as antidotes for memory loss, stress, and aging. The prevalence and presence of the alternatives cannot be ignored. If you don’t practice yoga or t’ai chi, you probably know someone who does. If you haven’t had an aromatherapy massage, a friend has probably told you where—and especially why—to get one. Perhaps you follow a strict macrobiotic diet or maybe you have tried one of the macrobiotic options at the Ritz Carlton while on vacation. Regardless, you’ve probably read about some of these practices and products in a newspaper, magazine, or unsolicited mail-order catalogue. Proclamations of the wise ways of alternative health and holistic living saturate contemporary life in the United States.
Implicit in the popular discourses surrounding aromatherapy, macrobiotic eating, and yoga and t’ai chi is the belief in personal transformation through alternative, non-Western paradigms of health and wellness. Through what Robert Cantwell calls a physical and sensory “ethnomimesis”—that is, the imitation of another culture’s traditions and practices—the rhetoric of holistic living is both operationalized and internalized.
The experiential quality of this bodily ethnomimesis allows people to render their own bodies foreign, to “yield into and become Other,” to encourage their bodies to become, very literally, the “other” bodies commonly associated with these practices. In this way, the processes and practices of mimesis create a symbolic world in which the experiences of miing culture are central and other worlds and other people are absorbed to suit it. Thus, where bodily practices like macrobiotic eating or t’ai chi are concerned, the transformative experience of making the body foreign is refracted through the lens of the familiar, and it is mainly through the practices of “the other” that people transform their bodies so as to achieve the size, shape, and states of physical and emotional health that are culturally valued in the West.
Not only personal health and wellness are to be transformed through the mimetic consumption of foreign bodily practice however. These practices are also upheld as ways of remedying social and environmental illnesses. Thus, aromatherapy products are celebrated for their eco-friendliness, and certain Aveda brand lipsticks—premised on the principles of aromatherapy—are marketed with the information that the pigments used in their production are harvested in conjunction with the Yawanawa people of the Brazilian rainforest. Similarly, yoga and t’ai chi are presented as means of promoting enhanced social relations by reducing individual stress, and macrobiotic eating is upheld for its insistence on organic foods, an aspect of the diet that contributes not only to the economic survival of small farms but also to the protection of the earth’s lands from dangerous pesticides. Through the discursive fields in which these bodily practices are embedded, personal transformations become political as social and planetary wellness is directly correlated with individual health. (2-4)
In reading the complex and intersecting discursive fields of the three cases at the core of this study, I have grounded the everyday ideologies implicit in the commodified discourses of alternative health in an analysis that integrates a critique of the public sphere, the global marketplace, modernity, and the transformative potential of traditionalized and commodified bodily practices. Throughout, I have drawn on this model as a means of understanding the social and political relationship between public discourses of alternative health and the individualization of those discourses within the contexts of identity, ideology, and modernity.
The discourses surrounding the commodification of aromatherapy, macrobiotic eating, yoga, and t’ai chi all seek to confront the hegemony of science and technology implicit in the project of Western modernization. Thus, aromatherapy practices are upheld as alternatives to Western biomedicine, particularly drug therapies, and the products themselves are celebrated for the positive impact that their production has on the environment, contrasted sharply with the more deleterious effects of growing plants with pesticides and harvesting plant products without concern for long-term sustainability. Macrobiotic eating figures similarly in discourses of alternative health and living that foreground cultural critique; in emphasizing organic, unprocessed foods, the discourse of macrobiotic eating condemns the use of pesticides and processing, both of which lead to various forms of environmental pollution. Along the same lines, yoga and t’ai chi are offered as alternatives to the machine-based exercise technologies that remove us from the natural world, further fragmenting individual and environment.
This mode of cultural critique in popular discourses relies upon an Eastern agelessness, in opposition to Western modernity. Without question, “Western” and “Eastern” are elaborate constructions, and such inventions only further the orientalist fantasies at their core. In this way, the West is represented as a highly individualized, technologized, and scientized modernity, while the East remains the timeless representation of collectivity, spirituality, nature, and harmony. It is precisely this imagined contrast that allows for cultural critique by creating “a position from which to reappraise and reform the institutions and thought systems indigenous to the west.” Here, Clarke refers largely to the way academics have understood and approached the East and Eastern systems of thought and belief in relation to Western reform. Within such a context, the complicated and enduring relationship between Eastern and Western systems of thought and belief may frequently open up spaces for sincere cultural critique. In the popular imagination, however, East and West are caricatured in ways that render any cultural critique meaningless. Rather than subvert the hegemony of the Western Enlightenment project, the discourses of these bodily practices reinforce it by invoking the impression of critique as a marketing device and a selling point.
For instance, in its lifestyle magazine the aromatherapy company Aveda poses a rhetorical question to remind consumers of the dangers of participating in modern society: “In today’s fast-paced world, we often push ourselves to do it all—faster, better, and more completely. But what’s the cost to physical and mental health?” Here, the use of Aveda’s aromatherapy products—which are said to be premised on the principles of Ayurvedic medicine, “a complex science born in India 5000 years ago”—helps defray the “cost to physical and mental health” that results from modern living. In this value-laden contrast between Western modernity and India of five thousand years ago, Aveda gives the impression of participating in a cultural critique of modernity and of the technologies enabling “today’s fast-paced world.” Aveda’s use and celebration of technological innovations like the bioactivity camera, however, typify the hollow nature of any rhetoric intended to critique the superiority of Western modernity: “Aveda offers consumers new technology that helps demonstrate the efficacy of aroma on emotional states: bioactivity cameras. Available at select Aveda locations, these cameras capture impressions of the electrical field that surrounds people and represents their emotional and physical health.” After all, it is the “new technology” that essentially proves the validity of aromatherapy and, implicitly, of Ayurvedic medicine. Through the bioactivity camera, Aveda makes available for purchase the idea of participating in cultural critique, of living according to ancient philosophies, of living an alternative lifestyle. The irony of this type of East-West contrast is not unique to Aveda but characterizes the discourse surrounding all of the practices and products explored in this book.
Through commodification and consumption, seemingly subversive cultural critiques are integrated into systems of New Age capitalism. As demonstrated through the example of Aveda, any cultural critique is an ironic one as consumption becomes a mode of addressing social, political, and cultural disenchantment, although the very processes enabling consumption are what characterize modernity, itself the cause of the disenchantment being critiqued. This irony is paralleled, and to a certain extent anticipated, by Habermas in his critique of the transformation of the public sphere. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere was made possible largely through the early processes of capitalism, yet it is the fully developed capitalist system that ultimately threatens the active participation and rational discourses necessary for democracy to thrive. Along these lines, the mediation of discourse—a core feature of commodity culture—transfers ideological convictions from the private realm (where Habermas contends they must remain) to a public sphere that seems to engage in rational-critical debate around the personalization of political issues. Yet, capitalism does more than contain active participation through communicative action; it authorizes the purchasing of participation. By purchasing the products of commodified bodily practice, and therefore “buying into” the discourses that constitute the public sphere of alternative health and wellness, individuals can lay claim to active political participation. By recycling the discourses inscribed on the surfaces of consumer culture—product packaging, print advertisements, and in-store displays—and through shared face-to-face communication, individuals can see themselves as engaging in the rational-critical discourse that seems to politicize the public sphere of alternative health and wellness. (131-133)
