The Crooked Codes of the Luxury Handbag: Narratives of Empowered Feminine Consumption in Africa

Mehita Iqani

Feminist Economics, 2023, vol. 29, issue 3, 178-198

Abstract: This article critiques discourses about women consumers of luxury goods in Africa. It does so through the example of the designer handbag, which presented as a key theme in interviews with people employed in luxury sectors in major African cities. The luxury handbag symbolizes an overarching idea of women’s success, though women are narrated as taking different routes to achieve it. Employing the spatial metaphor of the “crooked room,” this article shows how luxury handbag-talk reproduces taken-for-granted ideas about what successful feminine consumers look like. The “crooked codes” of the luxury handbag refer to skewed expectations, routes, and rationales for the wealth-oriented consumption practices of African women. Luxury handbags thus symbolize the ways in which neoliberal ideology limits African women’s quest for economic inclusion. This article argues that this consumption distorts African women’s feminist goals while claiming liberation.HIGHLIGHTS The luxury handbag is viewed as a symbol of African women’s economic success.This understanding obscures the realities of access to economic equality for most women living in African contexts.Luxury consumption privileges wealth and does not offer alternatives for women’s economic empowerment.As evidence of women’s achievement, the luxury handbag reveals the limits of neoliberal views for women’s empowerment.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2023.2183973 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:29:y:2023:i:3:p:178-198

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2023.2183973

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().