Opulent Servitude: Shoplifting in a Culture of Material Excess and Systemic Racism

Why did the latter part of the nineteenth century witness a sudden growth of white, middle class female shoplifters? Psychology tells us that shoplifting is a mental deficiency manifested in women as “kleptomania” (Abelson 4). Given the subsequent international growth of shoplifting, we argue instead that shoplifting is in many ways condoned in contemporary culture: used as a form of social and political control in a late capitalist society. This article first turns to female consumers as shoplifters in the late nineteenth century, alongside the growth of mass production, large-scale department stores, and visually spectacular forms of display. In line with feminist critiques of Marx’s Capital, we uphold the conditions prescribed to women under capitalism and extend this argument to newer forms of systemic racism in the consumer sphere, which ensure that women of colour and of lower economic standing face even greater obstacles to success. Using a broad historical view, we analyze the act of shoplifting in two forms of cultural media, both set in Paris. The first is Émile Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), based on Paris’s first department store, Le Bon Marché. Due to Zola’s commitment to verisimilitude, we argue, his work offers the strongest corroboration of the ways in which new forms of visual display and a new class of psychologically-entitled females worked together to generate astounding accounts of theft. Our analysis then turns to a work of cinema produced nearly a century and a half later, Céline Sciamma’s 2014 Girlhood. Sciamma portrays a group of young French African girls who navigate their paths into adulthood from the vantage of Bagnolet, a lower income immigrant suburb over four kilometers from Paris’s city centre. The girls experience racial profiling and demonstrate varying forms of resistance, one of them shoplifting. While shoplifting then appears to be an enduring weapon of the weak and strategy of resistance by the dispossessed, leading to, not surprisingly, tacitly permissibility for white middle class women and harsher consequences for women of colour, we conclude that the activity is leveraged to perpetuate pre-existent forms of gendered social control and cultural stereotyping.