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 72
... loosening up, of becoming loose. The tensions in Landy's book resonated with struggles around identity, life- style, and the appropriate means of self-regulation that were, in the late 1960s and on into the 1970s, transforming 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 ? How did the loosening metaphor bridge the distance between ...
... loosening ac- quired a specifically prescriptive tone applied to a range of lifestyle practices , propagated in volumes of magazines , books , and catalogs , all vaguely counter- cultural in spirit . As the fires of the 1960s cooled , a ...
... loosening discourse on identity and everyday life . Answer- ing the why question , concerning the specific needs and purposes of middle- class people to which the loosening lifestyle responded , is a complicated task requiring a more ...
... Loosening of the self for the middle classes of the 1970s was part of a reorganization of identity for the con- ditions of a nascent late modernity , or postmodernity : a reflexive project of self- identity undertaken with the support ...
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 |