(Re) presentation of Gender Binaries in a Consumerist World: A Study of “Cheer girls” and “Chak de girls”

Abstract

This article attempts to focus its discussion around the expression of gender binaries used in a consumerist world to gain profit by knowing the fact that how the concept of gender and sex is mixed in a patriarchal society. As gender  is  the social and cultural conditioning  of  the  sex, Simone de Beauvoir, the author of The Second Sex and one of the most influential feminists of the early 20th century rightly stated “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (293). In a patriarchal society, there is always a narrative to construct gender binaries in order to produce the ‘inferior other’ - where man/patriarch is in the centre and woman is at the margins of this type of society as her story revolves around the centre - (his)story and eventually gets documented as history. Therefore, gender stereotypes have existed since pre-historic times as myths or facts, across all cultures and places, but with the advent of late modernity the difference in their modes of representation have undergone change in the dynamics of power relations. As in this age of consumerism the representation of ‘women body’ and attention to ‘women beauty’ is sold and marketed as a commodity by the market forces.