Shopping for the Real: Gender and Consumption in the Critical Reception of DeLillo's White Noise

In: Postmodern culture, Volume 23, Issue 2

Abstract

This article connects the critical reception of White Noise to a history
of anti-consumerist critique that relies on and promotes an understanding
of consumer culture as destroying authenticity and individual autonomy
through its "feminizing" effects. Arguing that critics of DeLillo's novel
imagine the crisis of postmodern culture as a crisis of masculinity, the
article focuses on these critics' hostility toward the novel's
representation of shopping and shoppers. The essay offers a feminist
critique of the nostalgia betrayed by this criticism, which wittingly or
unwittingly reproduces a modernist logic equating masculinity with
authentic culture and femininity with consumer culture.