Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture

6. Commodifying the Aunt

115 6 Commodifying the Aunt A surprising number of businesses identify their products and services —from pretzels to pet-walking—with the aunt, most explicitly by using that kinship title in the company name. A quick Web search for “aunt” will turn up hundreds of thousands of pages (33,100,000 in January 2010) for commercial sites using the aunt in the company name. For example, we found: Aunt Bertha’s Kitchen, Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch Restaurant, Aunt Jeni’s Home Made Pet Food, Aunt Verna’s Orange Cake, Aunt Pearlie’s Food Products, Inc., Aunt Ilene’s Devils Food Cake, Aunt Susie’s Child Care, Aunt Minnie’s Food Service, Aunt Granny’s All-You-Care-to-Eat Buffet, Aunt Annie’s Crafts, Aunt Dimity’s Christmas, Aunt Izzy’s Gnocchi, Aunt Irene’s Care Packages, Aunt Wilma’s Companion Home Care, Inc., Aunt Patty’s Natural Foods, Aunt Sally’s Market, Aunt Mary’s Country Store & Bakery, Aunt Susie’s 10 Minute Low Fat Recipe Books, Aunt Midi’s Fresh Quality Produce, Aunt Ann’s Elder Home Care, Aunt Martha’s Youth Service Center, Aunt Sue’s Country Corner, Aunt Margaret’s Gift Basket, Aunt Bessie’s Golden Syrup Sponge Puddings, Aunt Polly’s Fried Chicken Restaurant, Aunt Vi’s Garden Bath Care Products, Aunt Tesa’s Toy Box, Aunt Sally’s Praline Shop Inc., Aunt Bee’s 116 WHERE THE AUNTS ARE All Natural Skin Products, Aunt Edna’s Kitchen, Aunt Sarah’s Restaurant , Aunt Aggie De’s Pralines, Aunt Betty’s Steamed Puddings, Aunt Leah’s House, Aunt Sarah’s Casual Clothing, Aunt Chilada’s Mexican Food, Aunt Nellie’s Farm Kitchen, Aunt Ann’s Home Care . . . to name just a few! On the surface, the aunt image that sells everything from real estate to cleaning services is beneficent, female-gendered, and happily domestic. Importantly, the aunt image is relational because the aunt is an aunt only by virtue of a recognized kinship relationship—biological , legal, or voluntary. This relationship appeals to cultural images of aunting as mothering (“my aunt is like a mother”), as friendship (as the title of one popular book puts it, Aunts: Our Older, Cooler, Wiser Friends),1 as mentoring, and as generational caretaking (a recent study emphasizes generativity—caretaking across generations—as the hallmark of the aunt relationship).2 This point is critical because, as a marketing image, the iconic aunt associates whatever product or service is on offer with the emotional connections and loyalty evoked by the cultural ideal of the aunt. The aunt as a brand image is a form of emotional branding; as such, emotional connections conjured by the image overwhelm our relationship to the product.3 The aunt image is, in this sense, akin to the “lovemark,” an idealistic and sentiment-infused relational connection that invokes intense loyalty and desire.4 The repercussions are daunting, for brands and their loyalties are not peripheral to but constitutive of lived culture; brands shape our understandings of and conflicts over personal, cultural, and national identities.5 Accordingly, the first part of this chapter documents the qualities associated with the aunt image and the cultural associations and relational bonds evoked in such associations. We question the appeal of the aunt as a marketing image by “interrogating the image.”6 A cultural image is a “sign” that circulates within the semiotic economy of cultural life in any given historical moment. From a feminist interpretive perspective, we question the intersections of representation, power, and cultural imagination and memory within which the image comes to be meaningful. Importantly, meaning-making entails the play of differences—what is included or excluded, familiar or strange, legitimate or deviant, and so forth. COMMODIFYING THE AUNT 117 In considering the dominant marketing image of the aunt from a feminist perspective, we argue that this image is not just benignly appealing but also baldly stereotyped, ahistorical, and morally bereft. In the second part of this chapter, we deconstruct the appeals that recall our emotional attachment to an ideal aunting relationship as a means of promoting a market transaction. We address the question: What are the links between the gendered image of the aunt and the rampant contemporary commodification of family life?7 The argument is this: family labor—caregiving, homemaking, affective relations, and so on—cannot be valued in strictly market exchange and monetary terms. Rather, the value of family labor is incommensurate with economic exchange...