Archaeologies of City Life: Commercial Culture, Masculinity, and Spatial Relations in 1980s London

Abstract

Studies of contemporary systems of consumption across the humanities and social sciences are frequently shadowed by a recurrent problem. Difficulties centre on the tendency to construct a set of general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, about the economic and cultural transformations which have been associated with recent shifts in the structure of demand. It is argued that such a synthetic use of the concept of consumption cannot grasp the specificities of particular market sectors and their attendant forms of cultural and spatial relations. In this paper I propose a more precise and grounded focus to study the formation of a particular regime of gendered commerce in one area of London during the 1980s. The study demonstrates the ways in which a distinctive grouping of media professionals and cultural entrepreneurs occupied a pivotal role in the transformations taking place in Soho during this period. Shifts in the material and symbolic structures of social space were central to this process of urban change, which drew on earlier representations of city life to claim cultural authority. It was this metropolitan regime which actively shaped the production of a series of identifiable masculine identities. Such personas were plural and diverse, rather than unified and monolithic. The product of different masculine communities in the area, they were linked by consumer culture, but differentiated by their access to heterosocial or homosocial space.