Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970sDuke University Press, 2007 M04 27 - 310 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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 91
... experience—a vernacular for a new hedonism, to be sure, but one fashioned on an ambitious program of ethical self ... experiences, realized through a release of the self into the flow of natural impulses, desires and the sensuality and ...
... experience. It was lived in the immediacy of the now—a real life one could really experience. To “be yourself,” to “do what was right for you,” to “let it all hang out” was to release a primordial vitality, to become an artist of ...
... experiences in wilderness trips away from the regimented spaces of the city , while a variety of therapeutic programs would help strip away phoniness by putting people in touch with who they really were . Authen- ticity was increasingly ...
... experiences , though it was a life that demanded , curiously , the mediation of an instructional and pedagogical discourse the new lifestyle publishers were only too ready to supply . >> 5 Indeed , it was through this New Life and the ...
... experience . Through diet or sexual habits , through daily displays of empathy , or through the way one exercised and cultivated one's body , loosening meant becoming an active chooser of a more authentic self . To be loose was to be ...
Contenido
1 | |
Middle Class in the Maelstrom | 25 |
Caring Texts | 127 |
Morning in America Pulling in the Slack | 243 |
Notes | 251 |
Bibliography | 263 |
Index | 287 |