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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... turn , starting with the how , and moving on to the more subtle and provocative question of why this migration occurred . In the chapters that follow , the diffusion of the loosening motif will be sought in volumes of lifestyle ...
... turn that has insinuated new forms of flexibility , fragmentation , and fluidity into the very fibers of self - identity . Such lives are no longer tests of character or expressions of devotion to long - term goals requir- ing the ...
... turns in the social fabric . What Anthony Giddens calls ontological insecurity , the sense of exis- tential meaninglessness that shadows the construction of identity in modern societies , was resolved , however tenuously , in the ...
... turn them to new and better purposes . In that sense , the aims of this book are quite optimistic : by better understanding the modernities of the past and by seeing with clarity the lineage we share with them , we read our own predica ...
... turn from the light shows and rock concerts to the prescriptive lifestyle texts that became increasingly prominent in the 1970s , a new perspective opens on a culture typically defined by hedonism and irrationalism , by immersive ...