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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... groups and across a range of locales and lifestyles . In millions of American homes , food would become purer , its naturalness less constrained by additives and processed ingredients ; clothing would become more sexual and revealing ...
... groups and relationships ; to release oneself from the artificial prohibition on communion with nature enforced by technological civilization and to find oneself in oneness with the earth and its natural products ; to release one's body ...
... groups and specific locales , while falsely elevating the experiences of one group to a more general status as typical of an epoch . With this problem in mind , it should be stated unequivocally that the loosening of the self , as it is ...
... to be natural , by tracing them to the specific groups and media through which they were developed and by reconstructing the specific historical horizons against which they were shaped , we position ourselves to better 12 Introduction.
... of daily life . Such a self - choosing self was developed in the counterculture , exported widely to other groups , and ultimately codified in standardized repertoires of consumption . By emphasiz- Mediated Immediacy 19.