Space,body And Symbol: A Study On The Consumption Behavior Of Young Women In Bars

The deepening of gender equality concepts and the upgrading of sales skills in consumer society have all led to a trend of desexization in current consumer behavior.Women have also started to enter bars for consumption,and bars have also made women a special market target,encouraging them to enter bars.This study focuses on the particularity of female drinking groups,and attempts to analyze the motivation of young women’s bar consumption by using participatory observation and semi-structured interviews from the perspectives of consumer society theory and spectacle society theory.The spatial layout of the research site,the clothing,words,and actions of young women,and the interactive behavior of men and women in the space are observed in real situations.The study found that some female drinking in bars has the following three characteristics: First,female consumers do not choose a certain bar,but temporarily "roost" in a bar overnight like migratory birds.Secondly,although in the scene where young women enter the bar to consume,some of them show consciously or unconsciously catering to the male gaze,some young women still show behaviors and concepts beyond the traditional gender ideology.In the process of challenging the traditional gender relationship and the male gaze,the role of women as the "other" under the masculine measure has been changed to some extent,but at the same time,this change cannot completely get rid of the framework and norms of the traditional gender ideology.Finally,women rated the quality of the drink as "fluid." Female consumers themselves are not very concerned about the quality of the wine itself,the quality of the wine is an important media symbol for women to judge the status of others.In addition,non-alcoholic soft drinks can not directly reflect the status of consumers,but their booth location will replace the alcohol as a standard of status judgment.The social-cultural causes of these phenomena are also discussed in this study.First of all,compared with male consumers,female consumers are more likely to have emotions on "space",which leads to the imagination of transforming bar "space" into "place".However,due to the obvious characteristics of space-time disinter locking,the dimension of bar is reduced to symbol.Although female consumers devote emotional imagination to bar,the possibility of transforming from "space" to "place" Almost nothing in capitalist logic.In addition,when female bar consumers go to bars to consume,to some extent,they can obtain a sense of identity through high consumption of drinks and the attention of the opposite sex,which is also one of the main reasons for them to go to bars to consume.But at the same time,bar is a field based on the construction of capital and gender relations.Because of its particularity,female consumers cannot avoid self-objectification and labeling in the process of daily aestheticization.Based on the above discussion,this study finally puts forward a consumption model based on the female consumer space and the "active-passive" symbolization of the body,so as to achieve social and cultural interaction.This model holds that in order to pursue the carnival atmosphere and stimulating feelings,female consumers will actively consume the space and each other’s bodies as symbols,but their consumption behavior will be shaped and disciplined by the bar space.In this consumption mode combining "conscious" initiative and "forced" passivity,the symbolic consumption behavior of female bar consumers is not only induced by the ideology of consumerism,but also inseparable from women’s needs to seek relationship interaction and identity belonging.The two constitute the internal and external motivations of female active and passive consumption,and jointly promote the interaction between the female consumption community and the social and cultural world.