We seek to understand how, by engaging in various sites of consumption, we learn particular gendered, raced and classed consumer subjectivities that often uphold patriarchal consumer capitalism. Drawing from academic literature on the history of consumption, we examine the historical construction of shopping and consumption as 'feminine' domains and explore how current discourses about females and consumerism continue to construct women as particular kinds of consumers who possess and enact particular behaviors, dispositions and values. We also conduct a cultural studies analysis of popular culture discourses about female consumers. We argue that dominant discourses about women as consumers operate as master narratives, creating controlling images and perpetuating a politics of disgust that demeans and oppresses women. We specifically focus on how particular groups of women are differentially subjected to more or less negative characterizations with/in these discourses. We examined historical texts, including print advertisements, television commercials and popular literature, that memorably portrayed the roles of women as consumers. Contemporary print advertisements, television commercials, internet sites and music lyrics from popular artists provided sources for further analysis of the proliferation of these stereotypes. Through critical analysis and description of these popular culture representations, we hope to reveal and challenge-to disarticulate and rearticulate-the deficit, racist, classist and sexist perspectives in these majoritarian stories, in order to challenge dominant discourses of White, male and middle-class privilege.

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In this article, we examine how Disney participates in an affective economy through an analysis of how it engages with pleasure, and ask questions about what Disney's manufacturing and selling of pleasure does, pedagogically. We posit that Disney's pedagogies of pleasure, which operate from the notion that escape is attainable via the pleasurable experiences offered at Disney parks, teach us how to be particular kinds of Disney subjects who escape into safe and controlled forms of pleasure -these escape fantasies offer a way for consumers to disavow the racism and white supremacy that characterize Western humanist and colonialist projects. Then, through a reading of Escape From Tomorrow, a recent surrealist horror film that explores the ''dark side'' of the ''Happiest Place on Earth,'' we analyze how pleasure and the false promise of escape from conflict are illustrated in the film. We take up Nietzsche's concept of ''eternal recurrence'' to explore the inescapability of our own complicity in the perpetuation of white, heteropatriarchal narratives through our repetitive affective engagements with Disney. Finally, we explore how an acceptance of inescapability demands that we acknowledge how we are complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy through our engagements with Disney's pedagogies of pleasure. We argue that this acceptance is not a nihilistic trap that suggests only an unbearable despair but an active choice that holds productive potential for acknowledging and exposing the racist myths of Western humanism perpetuated through Disney's pedagogies of pleasure.