Identity, Olympics, and the Canadian Myth (1st Year Cultural Studies Paper)

I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Identity, Olympics, and the Canadian Myth

In this essay I am going to look at Olympic line of products, and what they represent about identity and consumer culture. For the purposes of this essay, I focus only on the knitted Cowichan sweater (Please see Appendix A), and the red wool mittens (Please see Appendix B), since these are the things that have come to define “campus cool” and the Canadian Olympic identity. I will explain identity in relation to this trend by using lifestyle consumption and incorporation as examples of some of the processes by which identity is constructed. This is important because society presents identity, in this case Canadian identity, as being natural and innate - but it is actually constructed, and aspects of it and the processes which shape it are hidden.

O'Brien and Szeman define lifestyle marketing as “the increased prominence and importance of style in popular culture which goes hand in hand with a redefinition of consumption as an aesthetic or artistic exercise” (O&S 140). Lifestyle marketing in this case is marketing both the supposed “Canadian” lifestyle, and the lifestyle associated with the Olympics, which both contribute to the sense of identity constructed by the wearing of red wool mittens. Canada has a brand that we present to the rest of the world, prominently on display now because of the winter Olympics. The red knitted mittens have a white maple leaf in each palm and the Olympic rings on the outside. Wearing the mittens allows the consumer to buy not only a souvenir of the Games, but to buy into an identity that says “I'm part of a peace loving environmental country and you should be nice to me”, much like the Canadian flags on backpacks of travellers, except in this case it's “I'm part of a peace loving, Olympic hosting country”. Other supposedly natural Canadian values of liberalism and tolerance are also often associated with products that are intended to market the Canadian...