Postmodern Culture

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.