Things to do with Shopping Centres (Meghan Morris)

This is how I feel about this article: WHAT?!?! Morris' article is very dense and wordy. It is full of covoluted ideas that I feel were just thrown up onto a piece of paper. After second read, I have not made much more sense of it than I had the first time.

Morris wants to discuss issues for feminist criticism that emerge from a study she's doing of the management of change in certain ‘sites’ of cultural production involving practices regularly, if by no means exclusively, carried out by women. (11) So this seems like one of the main focus of her article, amongt what I think is "too many" otheres. I am unsure about how she implies that women do all the shopping and what is involved with it. I am not denying that women do not practice generally but it is excluding the increasing number of men who perform those tasks. What does that say about normatised gender roles?

The project which she discusses is looking a differences in shopping centers to see how particular centers "produce and maintain (…) ‘a unique sense of place’—in other terms, a myth of identity.
Exploring common sensations, perceptions, and emotional states aroused by them (…) and on the other hand, battling against those perceptions and states in order to make a place from which to speak other than that of the fascinated describer. (14) By analyzing it from a feminist perspective she claims that we can see how it allows for the possibility of rejecting, what we see and refusing to take it as given.

What is especially significant and seen as a contribution of this article, is the fact that she acknowledges that her article is not meant for ‘ordinary’ women but more for academics, students etc…but that this not mean that it condescends women shoppers either. She raises the issue of theory being in the every day. Theory doesn’t always imply academia for as she says, those who conceive of shopping centers also do theory as they theorize the conception of the shopping center on consumers (in this case, women).

Since I had a difficult time understanding how this article was meant to speak of sites of remembrance, I want to work with this idea of theory and who and why people do it. I remember talking about this in another class last semester and thought it was quite interesting since theory is something I seem to struggle with. I think we were speaking of bell hooks’ idea of how children make the best theorists because they have not yet been educated and exposed to our daily social routines and norms. What was key for me in this article was the discussion on how we, ‘ordinary people’ as Morris would say, practice theory without ever knowing it or labeling it as such. I often found it hard to theorize when I had to do it, but in reality we do it in our every day lives without even realizing it. For example, we are constantly theorizing our memories. We remember them differently and question what we really observed or experienced. By doing this we are deconstructing and reconstructing our memories, sometimes to make us feel better but other times to make sense of what is happening in our lives at the present time. If you think about it, it is actually a very postmodern thing (i.e. Derrida) but only this is done in our personal lives and not in literary texts. I have come to realize that some of us keep personal journals and oftentimes (I know I do) we go through them years later and analyze and ‘theorize’ how we handled certain situations and how we now make sense of it or how we would of handled it better. So we should be encouraged to use ‘theory’ in whichever way we understand it to inform our practice and work towards new understandings of our lived experiences.