I read Ben Highmore's 'Cityscapes. Cultural readings in the material and symbolic city' last week. I really enjoyed the way the book digs underneath the surface of our everyday cities (and their past), using novels, films and popular culture as a starting point. One of the beautiful stories from the modernising cities of 19th century is that of the anxieties and fantasies rising with the development of department stores and particularly shopwindows.
Jean Baurdrillard, for instance, notes that: 'whether as packaging, window or partition, glass is the basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch. The message is universal and abstract. A shop window is both magical and frustrating - the strategy of advertising in epitome'. It is this immaterial materiality that ushers in a new theatricality to the city.
But with this new theatricality come new anxieties. With the development of those department stores, came an increase in shoplifting."
"What shocked the keepers of moral and social propriety was not that shoplifting should happen, but that the practitioners should be relatively wealthy women." ... "Theft by 'respectable' women was problematic, not least because it seemingly could not be explained in terms of material need."
"Kleptomania as a diagnosed malady was invented as a partial solution to middle-class and upper-class female shoplifting. Like hysteria, kleptomania was initially seen as biological - linked to the specificity of the female body. Elaine Abelson describes this explanation in terms of women being 'diseased by their own sexuality'. "
"Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault, a psychiatrist employed by the Paris police, made a number of studies of women shoplifters who stole silk form department stores. The case studies repeated a central motif: the women stole the crisp new silk, masturbated with the silk and then threw the cloth away."
quotes from
"Highmore, Ben. Cityscapes. Cultural Reading in the Material and Symbolic City, Hampshire: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2005"