Consuming class, buying identity: Middle-class youth culture, 'lower-class' style and consumer culture, 1945--2000.

摘要

This dissertation examines white middle-class youth culture's appropriation of 'lower-class' style since WWII. I argue that middle-class youth have manipulated the signs of class otherness as a means of critiquing shifts in white middle-class identity. After the enforced scarcity of WWII the federal government and corporations encouraged Americans to increase consumer spending to insure U.S. economic power and Cold War political might. The rise of consumer culture coincided with postwar anti-communism and suburbanization resulting in a shrinking middle-class civic sphere. Middle-class youth used the styles of socially marginalized groups, particularly the urban white and nonwhite working class and poor, to express their discontent with this consumer-based identity and to search for social alternatives.; Since the 1970s structural change has been seen as increasingly unlikely due to the collapse of countercultural politics, the incorporation of youth dissent by marketers, and economic dislocations which have reduced the upward mobility of middle-class youth. At the turn of the 21st century, mainstream middle-class youth culture has abandoned structural change for an individualized nihilism that uses signs of the lower class to abandon the system rather than critique it.; This study is significant for three reasons. While social science and humanities scholars debate what defines middle-class identity in the U.S., they have generally relied on structural markers. My project intervenes by using British cultural theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show that style and fashion are central to the formation of middle-class identity. Taking style and fashion seriously allows us to see that although the white middle class is normative, it is acutely uncomfortable with this position. Secondly, Consuming Class demonstrates that the postwar triumph of consumer culture was not a foregone conclusion, but was resisted through popular youth culture. The consistency of this resistance suggests that the middle-class youth cultures of the 1950s and 1960s are essentially linked with those since that time and that play with class difference is constitutive of middle-class identity. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates the necessity of considering both the production and marketing of culture as well as its reception in understanding the maintenance of hegemonic structures.