Though not exactly the mecca of anarchism, Barcelona “is not far off,” explained a British expatriate and self-admitted “technical anarchist” I met while visiting the city in 2009. “During the Spanish civil war,” he said, launching into a history of the movement justifying shoplifting,
uniquely in Cataluña, anarchism had organizational structures. . . . Barcelona was full of meeting clubs and anarchist unions, fighting against the fascists. . . . Anarchism in Barcelona is best understood in relation to . . . being an anarchist rather than writing down rules or talking about it. You can find many of the components of Anarchist philosophy in the Scottish enlightenment philosophers—but when a contemporary anarcho-syndicalist like Noam Chomsky wants to illustrate a conceptual example about this form of politics with a positive historical example, there are few places to turn to other than Barcelona.
I visited Barcelona to interview members of the anarchist artist collective Yomango in person. Now I was standing at 15–17 Portal d’Angel Avenue, in front of Bershka, a popular clothing company with a branch near the Plaza de Cataluña, one of the most touristy spots in the world. Seven years earlier, Yomango staged its first shoplifting “action” at this “mall,” which looks like malls everywhere.
On June 5, 2002, at five-thirty in the afternoon, Yomango, whose name is slang for “I steal” and a pun on the Spanish ready-to-wear clothing line Mango, attracted a crowd. They cordoned off a runway with tape on which they had written “gratis/dinero” (free/money) and which stretched from the store entrance into the street.
As a uniformed security guard watched, Yomangoites clad in revolutionary rags set up an impromptu catwalk and began to vogue. An emcee in a blue jacket with a bullhorn announced the Yomango brand and its models. A fashionista in a ratty beard wore a glitter heart on his cheek. Several men in pink minidresses and belly shirts waved blue pompoms. A man in a Rasta cap stripped to blue-and-white-striped boxers and shimmied across the cobblestones. Some “models” wore red smocks with multicolored nylon tights and Uggs, others tulle skirts, leather miniskirts, or green polyester pants. One carried a Danish butter cookies tin as a purse; another grasped a person-size fork.
A crowd gathered. The Yomangoites raided Bershka, chatted with customers and guards, and handed out flyers. An extra phalanx of guards arrived. As if on cue, the model with the Danish butter cookies tin deposited a maxi sky-blue spandex dress worth 9.50 euros inside it and left the store. Outside, she popped the lid off the tin and twirled the dress around her head. Everyone cheered. The hairy guy in the blue striped shorts put on the dress.
A guard chased them, but according to one Yomangoite whom I’ll call “A,” “our security convinced their security to back down.” As A explained to me, “stores want to deal with this sort of business as discreetly as possible, as if resistance to shopping is something that does not exist.”
Yomango displayed the “liberated” dress and showed a video of their shoplifting at the Cultural Center of Barcelona, at INn Motion, an arts festival. The police denounced Yomango as crooks, but a columnist in El País applauded them, summarizing the message they propagated. “Yomango accuses the market of appropriating ideas, ways of life, fashion (desired by ‘cool hunters’), sexuality, already invented by society, in order to resell them as new luxury products. It believes that stealing is nothing more than reclaiming what belongs to us.”
On July 8, some members of Yomango returned the shoplifted dress to the men’s department of Zara, another store on Portal d’Angel Avenue. They attached to it a note explaining the dress’s adventures, part of which read “The liberated dress took a walk through Barcelona and now it’s back. Because Yomango does not recognize borders or security alarms.”
Yomango intended the shoplifting to critique multinational companies’ failure to give consumers “real” choices. And many American media sources treated them as countercultural heroes. Wired magazine traced Yomango’s roots to Argentina, where protesters angered by the economy’s collapse in 2001 looted stores. Another news article linked them to 1990s Barcelonese performance artists famous for constructing a prêt à révolter clothing line with pockets sized to fit guns.
But according to “Leo de Cerca,” a pseudonym for one of the group’s founding members, Yomango’s birth occurred in 2001, after an antiglobalization demonstration against the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa. “We realized that we needed to build a protest not just for the summits but for our daily life, a political tool it [sic] can be useful every day,” he said. “We wanted to show the false alternative that capitalism offers us.” He wrote of “circulating goods,” of “a million shoplifters rising,” of Yomango as a meta-brand, as a synonym for ethical shoplifting and as either a noun or a verb.
In response, I fired off a simple e-mail, “Who are you?”
De Cerca replied, “We are an international network, we are a transnational brand name, as all the brand names of today we don’t sell anything, we just offer a lifestile [sic].”
I e-mailed back: “I meant literally ‘Who are you?’ ”
De Cerca scolded, “I told you, Yomango is an open process, no authors, no stars, no personal names, Yomango is you!”
The Yomangoite A, a fashion designer who described himself as Israeli, Barcelonese, and American, was among those leading “magic bag” workshops—magic bags are Yomango’s version of booster bags—all over the world. Asked how many workshops took place, A said between dozens and hundreds of people had studied with him. A’s inspiration for the bags came from magic. He had learned from magicians’ card tricks and sleight of hand. “The gesture [to shoplift] has to be quick. It’s an ergonomic study,” he said.
To make their political points, Yomango stole not just from magic but from bourgeois rituals: The 2003 “Yomango Tango” began as Yomangoites, wearing berets and holding accordions made of tinfoil, crashed a supermarket on Las Ramblas. Seven couples in costumes tangoed through the aisles. A woman in a red dress slid a bottle of champagne into her boyfriend’s knapsack. One salesclerk shouted to another that the tangoers were shoplifting champagne, but a security guard just crossed his arms over his chest.
Through a bullhorn, the leader of the tangoers proclaimed Yomango’s support of “the populist rebellion” in Argentina a year earlier as the dancers, champagned-up, waltzed past the cashiers onto the street. They bowed to the onlookers. They uncorked more champagne the next day in the lobby of a bank that supposedly supported the crackdown on the “populist rebellion.”
Even more popular were dinner parties serving shoplifted gourmet food. One took place in Geneva during the World Summit on the Information Society conference, where, in Yomango’s view, communications companies met to carve up the Internet. The grainy YouTube footage of the Geneva dinner began as about two hundred guests ate, drank, danced, hugged, and laughed. A girl in a ponytail and a fisherman’s cap asked the camera in a German accent, “You want some free food?” And then she answered the interviewer’s question: “If you want happiness, steal it” before a lecture on capitalism and how Yomango had transformed the shoplifted food into a “gastro riot” was delivered in Spanish, with subtitles.
“This is the first time I’ve done it in an organized fashion with a big group of people,” declared a young American in an Andean cap over house music as the camera panned through the aisles of a supermarket where, in predinner madness, Yomangoites had stuck steak, wine, bottles of Moët, and Lindt chocolate bars in their socks, shoes, pants, and in shopping carts. One shopping cart after another was filled up with “liberated” products, which were then slapped with Yomango stickers. “I take the best wine, of course,” the American said as he unpacked one cart.
Several diners repeated the phrase “Shoplifting builds community” as they plowed through cheese, fish, chocolate, and expensive bottles of wine, alluding to something young Americans are hungry for—a nip of luxury, a taste of possessing something out of your reach, and the possibility of creating your own rough justice.
One evening Brufadino delivered an informal talk at the Change You Want to See Gallery in Williamsburg. About fifty people gathered there to imbibe Yomango’s wisdom about shoplifting: hipsters, politically committed New Yorkers, fellow travelers, and gawkers perched on folding chairs. Many in the audience wore leather jackets or granny glasses or both. In front of a large screen displaying small avatars and brands stood Brufadino and a female accomplice.
An Italian who lived in Barcelona, Brufadino was in his twenties. Dressed in a red hoodie with an unrecognizable black logo and jeans, he began to describe shoplifting (he preferred the word “taking”) as a mash-up of Hoffman and Rousseau: Shoplifting was both a righting of personal wrongs and a theoretical exit ramp out of the system. “Corporations steal fashions like baggy trousers, which kids wore while their older brothers were in jail, and then they sell them back to us,” he said in a thick accent, but added that he had shoplifted his jeans because “he needed trousers.”
The audience peppered Brufadino with questions. One person kept interrupting, “I want to make sure I get it.”
Another asked, “Is this Marxist?”
A young woman joked, “What would Jesus say?”
Laughter. Someone else yelled, “He’s not for private property!”
“Let’s e-mail Jesus,” a third person screamed.
Asked what sort of people joined Yomango, Brufadino responded “Yomango is you.”
PART TWO
DIMENSIONS
She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used and nothing which she did not long to own.
—Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
5. AMONG SHOPLIFTERS
For much of its six-century history, shoplifting—whether defined as disease or crime—was considered something women did. But since the 1980s, men have caught up. While men shoplift more, there are more female kleptomaniacs. Yet when it comes to what men and women steal, some studies sound drawn from a pre–Betty Friedan world. In 2005, the Centre for Retail Research in the United Kingdom measured what men and women shoplift: Women steal cosmetics, clothes, jewelry, and perfume; men steal electronics, televisions, and handheld and power tools. Women shoplift from department and discount stores; men from home centers and hardware stores. Although 80 percent of all readers are women, the Centre discovered, most book shoplifters are men.
In the summer of 2009, I lunched at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, near Buckingham Palace, with Joshua Bamfield, a professor of management turned retail researcher who heads the Centre in Nottingham. Where the sheriff of Nottingham used to work, he joked.
As we wandered toward the club’s bar, in a dark, cavernous room in the Greek Revival building, I asked him to explain the gender breakdown in his research. Bamfield, a cheerful, balding man in his sixties, leaned into the bar, ordered a pre-lunch port, and said, “A few years ago I went to the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, and I saw their new security system. So what kinds of books are being stolen here, I asked? Porn and business, right?”
“‘No, it’s theology,’ they said.”
Bamfield began to laugh. “It just goes to show you.”
We moved upstairs to the dining room. Although the club has accepted female members since the 1970s, there were no women, except for a few coat-check girls hovering in the reception area.
As Bamfield and I settled in, we returned to the topic of gender. Were men stealing books for their girlfriends? What about the other gender-obvious exception in Bamfield’s study? Men shoplift hair dryers. Does this suggest that men are more sensitive about their looks? Or that they are becoming more so? Or does it mean that women are shopping less and men sharing the household chores (like shopping and therefore shoplifting) more?
Bamfield laughed again and answered, “There are many different things. Some men are stealing for resale. It is easier for men to get away with stealing electronics than women’s clothing. We think that men look at [the hair dryer] as an electrical device rather than beauty device. It’s easy for men to sell to other males.”
Bamfield was also referring to the commonly held belief among criminologists that men resell the items they shoplift, whereas women dabble, shoplifting domestic items to enhance their homes, food to sustain their children, and clothing and accessories to improve their appearance. Bamfield ordered meat and potatoes and a carafe of rosé, and I decided on a Cajun salad.
Bamfield, who introduced civil restitution to the United Kingdom in 1998, said it was important to study further how men and women shoplift differently: “The picture is complex,” he said, adding that professionals of both sexes used gender-specific tools to steal. Men liked knapsacks. Women preferred strollers.
At the same time as criminologists began to express skepticism that shoplifting was exclusively—or even primarily—a woman’s crime, feminist historians endeavored to overturn the idea that kleptomania is uniquely a women’s disease. In her award-winning 1989 social history, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, Elaine S. Abelson contends not just that the Victorians invented kleptomania, but that American popular culture’s treatment of the disease as proof of women’s omnivorous appetites echoes the misogyny with which Victorian doctors, stores, and the popular press described it.
A very different attempt to attribute kleptomania’s all-girl reputation to misogyny in this era came from Louise J. Kaplan’s 1990 book, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, which was made into a feature film starring Tilda Swinton as Eve, an icy, manipulative lawyer who has forged ahead by playing a man’s game, while her sister, a dysfunctional graduate student, gets arrested for shoplifting. Kaplan, a psychoanalyst, wrote the book to challenge Freudian sexism. She believes that kleptomania, a female disease, “is a response to the social order where those with penises control the source and flow of economic goods.” She is one of a few writers to perceive shoplifting and kleptomania as reflections of the same excessive consumption problem.
Very rich women just shop and then shop some more and even steal a trophy or two, now and then, whenever they might otherwise get anxious or depressed. Not-so-rich women are kleptomaniacs who replace an experience of deprivation or anxiety with an impulse to steal what they feel deprived of. And poor women merely shoplift, steal what their families need in the way of food and clothing, with an occasional extra . . . to assuage the violence of deprivation.
Kaplan almost convinces the reader that gender equality will stop women from shoplifting. But Jon Grant, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota who studies compulsive gambling and shoplifting, believes that we continue to gender kleptomania because of stereotypes. “Men tend to be criminalized and sent straight to jail whereas women get sent to doctors and get a chance to be rehabilitated.”
I encountered plenty of men of all ages, races, and occupations who shoplifted. But I met far more female chronic shoplifters who shoplifted regularly over long periods of time. Of these, the majority were unemployed or underemployed women (although some were gainfully employed but underpaid, like schoolteachers). Besides that, the shoplifters did not share a particular profile: They were married with children, childless, or single; college coeds and retirees. Hardly any women shoplifting were comfortable describing themselves as kleptomaniacs, even if they had stolen from stores twice a day for ten years. Some flinched when I used the
word. Others talked about shoplifting in the same hushed voices that I imagined kleptomaniacs used in Freud’s era when confessing to it led to ostracism or the asylum. It disturbed and thrilled them.
Framing shoplifting as a reflection of female consumption caught on (again) in the 1990s, when psychoanalysts and research psychiatrists began to explore whether “female appetite diseases” such as body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive buying were connected to kleptomania. In a talk she gave at the Freud Museum in London, the feminist writer and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach attributed her female patients’ shoplifting to consumerism. The frustration of wanting something more sustaining than a mere article of clothing and yet not being able to get it, she wrote, the disappointment left over from childhood, and the disappointment that going to the store turns out to be more of a sentence than an adventure explain why women steal.
The Belgian psychiatrist Walter Vandereycken found that kleptomania was more common in people who have bulimia—most of whom are women—than in those without it. “There’s an immense gender difference between how men and women deal with psychological disorders,” he told me. “Women internalize problems and men externalize them. Is it cultural? Is it biological? We don’t know.”
But Gail Caputo, a professor of criminology at Rutgers University, believes that more women shoplift because women are more susceptible to poverty and depression. Her 2008 book, Out in the Storm: Drug-Addicted Women Living as Shoplifters and Sex Workers, refrains from judging its subjects, most of whom are working-class or poor, drug-addicted women. She defines shoplifting as an illegal form of work. “[Shoplifting] is less invasive [than prostitution] and [women shoplifters] can see themselves as the caretakers of the situation,” she told me, explaining that women would do anything—even steal—to protect their children.
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