City That Never Sleeps - Literature review Example

That Never Sleeps: how has NYC attracted and repelled tourists, and why? In the United s, New York City’s nickname is the city that never sleeps. According to Musto (n.p) the nightlife hours have lessened and people only enjoy part of the night while going back to their homes. This was not the case years ago when the city was not characterized by gentrification, Guiliani, Brooklyn, and the advancement of social media. These factors have led to a discouragement on debauchery. However, despite this situation, most operators of night clubs reveal that their business had grown. These fact can be attributed to the thriving of nightclub market, and the continued rapid opening of new clubs, especially to replace those that have closed down and are replaced. This situation in New York City is reflected in numerous other large cities in the world including Miami, Ibiza, Sydney, and Las Vegas. Such night life scenes clearly indicate that even though the current generation is interested in going out at night, they lay little emphasis on spending the entire life out in the dark. Efforts to quantify the average night sleep hours in New York and other cities indicate that New York ranked best compared to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. New York’s average night sleep time is six hours and 47 minutes, while Los Angeles has six hours 41 minutes, and Las Vegas has six hours 32 minutes (Klein n.p). Unlike cities in the US, Tokyo in Japan has the shortest sleeping time of about five hours 44 minutes. In this paper, the discussion focusses on clarifying the proposal that New York City never sleeps and has attracted tourists instead. The critical issue of evaluation on the changed image of New York and other cities is “Post feminism” To begin with, New York City dwellers deserve to have a paycheck that remains afloat in order to meet other basic needs. According to Mutso (n.p), New York City’s current situation that call for the end of night life way before the end greatly differs from the 1980s when people used to spend their nights out until 4:00am in order to escape from the day’s potential tedium. Being out for long night hours assisted with crucial clubbing raging on into the morning hours with no one watching. In addition, dance clubs back then were spacious such as the World and the Area. These areas and other served the role of making New York a city that never sleeps. However, today, people only spare some time to destroy themselves far less vigorously compared to the good old days courtesy of gentrification, the internet, Giuliani, and crackdowns among others. In addition, money flow today, is not comparable to that in the 1980s when money flew like wild fire and employers were never concerned about their followers. The introduction of post modernism is evaluated to understand such changes in New York and other cities today. Post feminism is today a very crucial aspect in media, cultural, and literature. Amongst literature scholars, the three dominant but diverging versions include the perception of post-feminism as a political position; a historical shift from within feminism; or a backlash against feminism with the festivity of neoconservative that bring out post-feminism as characterized by prominent traditional values (A. McRobbie 5). The presence of multiple definitions indicate that post feminism has no definite or fixed meaning as it is contradictory and pluralistic discourse within the academic field of cultural and television studies. Post feminism is also within the media setting of user culture, and within the prevalent culture. Consequently, post-feminism is not against feminism but regarding feminism in the current day and age. The implication is that post feminism is situated within contemporary setting of modern neo-liberal, individualism, late-capitalists evident in prevalent consumer culture. Within this contemporary world context, post feminism gender struggle is a real issue within both the public and private including issues to do with glass ceiling when it comes to the fight for equal payments. Some of the main qualities of post feminism in attracting visitors to New York and other cities, as defined by Tasker and Negra (107) is novel form of autonomy and empowerment, sexual pleasure, personal choice, fashion, humour, hybridism, and consumer culture with much emphasis being on the female body (Andriaens n.p.). This focus is centrally defines post feminism within contemporary culture with media discourses playing a great role in representation, development, and evolution of this new form. According to McRobbie (1), the new form of post feminism is the third wave of re-appropriation of Girlie. Girlie is defined by McRobbie as a challenging shift in attitudes amongst young women or post feminism. This definition conquers with the media representation of women and the changes in the perception of the female body. This pro-capitalist evolution of post femininity-oriented repertoire is staged by corporate consumer culture that eagerly awaits to tap into the consumer market with aim of improving women incomes (McRobbie 158). Furthermore, McRobbie believes that the pro-capitalist culture’s use of words such as empowerment and choice has deliberately transformed them into a distinctive discourse where they are used in guise, especially in popular culture and the media, and by the state as a substitute for feminism (Butler 950). Unfortunately, this guise is defined in such a way that young modern ideas concerning women particularly the young ones are aggressively disseminate to guarantee no re-emergence of a new movement by women. In this case, the older generation of women is degraded, while the fights against inequality or discrimination are left by the wayside and are no longer relevant. Consequently, women are disempowered through discourses that disguise themselves as empowerment being provided as alternatives to feminism (McRobbie 49). The modern perception of post modernism like bait, positively invokes and draws on feminism to propose the attainment of equality and install new meanings that bring to attention something that is of no more use. According to Negra (28), post feminism bears the assumption that feminism has already attained its goals and is a thing of the past. Based on the media, numerous films confirm the undermined nature of feminism in their actions that feature both aggressive heroines, and girling of aging women. In these films, post modernism reveals women as unsatisfied with their social and legal equality and that their satisfaction is only through empowerment and transformation practices. By default, the main players in promoting this kind of post feminism are white youth-obsessed middle class females who are anchored in the strategy of consumption and leisure is the place for producing self. Through the strategy of consumption, the postmodern female only engages in consumption as a rational being to maximise personal benefits. Marxist defines the post modernism consumer as powerless and one isolated from own needs (Gram-Hanssen n.p). Just like other products of late capitalist society, the post-modern consumer generates signs, experiences and places, and products. Within the anthropological or sociological approach, consumption by postmodern feminists is used as a mark of social belonging, and through social gatherings the consumption rituals of self are confirmed and witnessed and confirmed by others (Douglas and Isherwood 12) . Based on the findings by Bourdieu (23), post-modern consumption and its good taste are ways used to distinctly identify the higher social classes and differentiate them from the lower classes. Miller (4) confirms that post-feminism is characterized by differences and personal confrontation to a hegemonic social understanding, while changing the person to a playful and creative individual seeking freedom, individuality, pleasure, and desires in the new stores and shopping arcades. In New York, post-feminism is a crucial characteristic that instead of chasing tourists attract them even more. According to McRobbie (1), feminism is spearheaded and claimed by governments in the western countries as a sign to the world that is crucial in the definition and meaning of freedom. Consequently, the boundaries between the west and the other world are then coded through granting of sexual freedoms and gender. This is defined by Plant (1) as a frozen moment in history since those who share in the revolutionary goals are unable to actively participate or experience the building of the lived world. During this moment, it can be implied that the west manages to cultivate and promote an alienation that is crucial for the class society causing capitalist production to permeate in every aspect of knowledge, social life, and culture (Plant 1). Consequently, people are isolated and estranged from their personal emotions, desires, creativity, and experiences, and from the goods they create and consume. The results is that people become spectators to their own lives, and any personal gestures are practiced at one remove. Furthermore, New York City is characterized by a set of disciplinary institutions, discourses, and practices that authentic its modes of control and domination, while the Enlightenment dialectic turned reason into its opposite, and masked domination and oppression as modernity’s promise of liberation. Domination and control have been possible through the entry of big name entertainment companies into the city through partnerships that have led to urban development. Like the merchants of leisure during the early twentieth century, these entertainment companies locate potential destinations domestically and internationally supplying signature products that are crucial to the success of post-feminism. According to Hannigan (124), majority of the private partners from both real estate and entertainment industries share the affinity for security, safety, and tourist dollars, and are inclined towards profitability and practicality questions. This means that both entertainment and real estate industries must attain a delicate balance of what is needed by the city and what is needed by investors and tenants for effective financial growth. With great entertainment and real estate companies in New York City, free time is occupied with provided forms of entertainment and leisure while free choice is done from pre-selected assortment of roles, lifestyles, goods, and opinions (Hannigan 127). The content of life is swept aside by the product form in which it seems, and all judgement, living, and evaluation means are drained off their actual meaning and minimized to the abstract consumption and production standards. Consequently, the society goes ahead to declare that everything that appears is respectable, and that which is respectable will appear. According to Plant (13), the productive forces within the capitalist society no longer seek to propagate the development requirements for middle-class property, since they are too powerful for such conditions and overcome them to disorient the middle-class society. This causes overproduction that marks the bourgeois society and cultivate new markets that are perceived to abolish social and economic links that drag production forces. What remains is a class society, founded on a production system that alienates worker from each other, the fruits of their hard work, and what they consume (Plant 14). Plant (15) reveals that the resulting society is one characterized by dissemination of alienated relations in each element of daily life causing a radical and all-encompassing contestation. Contestation causes modern opposition evident in the struggle of humans against their alienation and the resulting conflict and split in all aspects, moments and spheres of social life (Munford and Waters 4). New York City’s contestation is facilitated by numerous factors with where post-feminist media culture is one of them. Gill (5) defines post feminism media culture as one that emphasizes femininity as a bodily possessions; the shift from objectification to subjectification; resurgence of natural sexual variation ideas; culture sexualisation; and focus on consumerism and variations in commodities. These themes, according to Gill (6) coexist with and are organized around stark and ongoing exclusions and inequalities that are linked to gender, age, sexuality, and ethnicity among others. The greatest emphasis of post-feminist media culture is its inclination to the body, therefore shifting from the definition of the body as a bodily property and not a social or psychological property. The media’s perception of the body undermines the central aspect of femininity in nurturing and caring, and shifts to the possession of a sexual body to present women’s main identity source (Young and Powers)a. The woman body is also presented as one that requires remodelling, monitoring, discipline, and surveillance to adhere to the constrained judgments of what an attractive contemporary female should look like. Cultural obsession with celebrity almost concentrates entirely over the bodies of women with magazines enhancing this culture through pages of huge coloured photographs of bodies of female celebrities. These photographs are also characterized with scathing comments regarding everything about that celebrity from visible panty lines, to armpit hair. The major focus is fat and the perception of what is deemed as very thin women. According to McRobbie (23), the ordinary woman is not an exception from hostile scrutiny for their postures, wardrobes, and bodies. Turner (n.p) highlights that such scrutiny involves the input of paparazzi writers and photographers who pick over and pick apart small transgressions and this attracts both genuine and envious reactions from the public. In her review of what not to wear, McRobbie (118) notes that women in the post feminism world are subject to insults that are considered to be hilarious and a window into the inner life of the affected individual. For instance, many believe that Bridget Jones is emotionally broken down for her excessive smoking of 40 cigarettes a day (Chan n.p). Consequently, some people do not associate her with success like they would with a sleek, toned and controlled woman. Despite being contradictory, the stand of Bridget have little to do with what she or others feel inside. Besides emphasizing the celebrity lifestyle, the media also emphasises various forms of sexualisation in popular magazines where sex discussions take the form of youthful, pleasure-seeking, and unselfconscious vocabulary. In addition, women and girls are expected to monitor and survey all sexual relationships by presenting themselves as desirable sexual heterosexual subjects, that protect self from pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases while defending their reputation and caring for men’s esteem (Gill 8). While New York City has gradually changed since the beginning of the twentieth century, numerous factors have contributed to this changes and resulting in the attraction of tourists. While the city dwellers have changed the night life to few hours, post feminism adaption in the city have led to changing life that have seen women as the central point in tourist attraction. Through post feminism, the media presents celebrities as the key to womanhood and this attracts tourists to quench anxiety to visit the city of celebrities, perfect women body, great entertainment and real estates, and other practices that guise feminism to dominate and control the people while alienating them from their own desires to that dictated to them. Works Cited Andriaens, Fien. Post feminism in popular culture: A potential for critical resistance? 9 November 2009. Web. 5 May 2015. Bourdieu, P. Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Print. Butler, Jess. “Review of The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change.” International Journal of Communication (2009): 950-956. Print. Chan, Joel. Post-Feminism is About Regianing Whats Lost. 15 April 2013. web. 6 May 2015. Douglas, M and B Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Pengiun Books, 1980. Print. 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