Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970sDuke University Press, 2007 M04 27 - 296 páginas From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Food became purer, clothing more revealing, sex more orgiastic, and home decor more rustic and authentic. Through a sociological analysis of the countercultural print culture of the 1970s, Sam Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class. He describes the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Amateurish and rough in production quality, these popular books and magazines blended Eastern mysticism, Freudian psychology, environmental ecology, and romantic American pastoralism as they offered “expert” advice—about how to be more in touch with the natural world, how to release oneself into trusting relationships with others, and how to delve deeper into the body’s rhythms and natural sensuality. Binkley examines dozens of these publications, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Rainbook, the Catalog of Sexual Consciousness, Celery Wine, Domebook, and Getting Clear. Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the “yuppie” 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding. |
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... defined the dispositions of " the establishment ” and “ my people . ” Indeed , the argot of the drug culture projects a tension between two ways of experiencing the sensual world , and of relating that experience to new modes of self ...
... define the pa- rameters of this study : how and why did the loosening motif , as a counter- cultural pattern of interpersonal style and emotional self - management , mi- grate from the countercultural fringe to the cultural mainstream ...
... defined the loose lifestyle of the 1970s , refining it and disseminating it as a general feature of identity and everyday life throughout the American middle class , retooling it for the demands of an increasingly flexible economic and ...
Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s Sam Binkley. precise market niches and more defined personal needs , and of soothing more effectively the personal anxieties resulting from a world fraught with risk and uncertainty.28 Incorporated into ...
... defined by hedonism and irrationalism , by immersive visuals , booming music , and sartorial excess . In hippie books , magazines , and lifestyle publications , the Dionysian explosion of pleasure , sensuality , and enriched con ...