Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995)
By Gail Bederman

Synopsis: This book seeks to illuminate the ways in which "middle-class men and women worked to re-define manhood in terms of racial dominance, especially in terms of 'civilization'" (20). Focuses the bulk of the book on four different figures: Ida B. Wells (discussed race problem and lynching as "unmanly" and an act of barbarism, yet whites continued to link lynching with manliness); G. Stanley Hall (believed in "recapitulation" theory that each human lived entire evolutionary sequence, and that kids were going through "primitive/savage" stage, and this should be encouraged so they don't turn out as weak, overcivilized pansies); Charlotte Perkins Gillman (linked feminism to white supremacy of civilization); Theodore Roosevelt (obsessive view that white race was the manliest and most powerful, and that it would remain manly via the strenuous life and via imperialist expansion into Cuba, Philippines, and Puerto Rico; and that middle class whites must prevent "race suicide" by having more kids). Argues that race and gender are intricately linked, and that "gender - whether manhood or womanhood - is a historical, ideological process...[it's a] continual, dynamic process" (7). Because definitions of manliness are always shifting, we shouldn't see 1870-1910 as a time of "crisis" per se, but rather as another redefinition. The rise of leisure and the decline of self-employed men led to changing notions of "masculinity," and increased fears that the "feminine" Victorian era would emasculate men. Men basically felt that they were losing control. However, the rhetoric of "civilization" and "manliness" was so flexible that it could be used in an array of ways - often contradictory ways. At its core, "civilization" discourse was all about race, gender, and power. 1910 Jack Johnson (black)/Jim Jeffries (white) "fight of the century" all about "reclaiming" white male dominance (though Johnson won).

Interacts With:

Hope in a Jar, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, Terrible Honesty (with idea that certain eras can be "feminine" or "masculine" - "masculine" modernity as a reaction against "feminine" Victorian era), All the World's A Fair (for discussion of white male superiority and racial dominance)

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998)
By Kathy Peiss

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the rise of the cosmetics and make-up industry in the U.S., and the constantly reconfigured and renegotiated understanding of make-up use among women, and in American culture overall. Aim is to understand women's intentions as well as social and cultural forces surrounding them. She focuses mostly on imagery and general cultural trends, rather than on what individual women thought, and does this by analyzing the history of the cosmetics industry from the early nineteenth-century to today, with the bulk of the focus on 1900-1930. She shows the way the beauty industry evolved from a female-run business which ducked standard advertising and marketing efforts, to a big consumer culture phenomenon in the 1920s run by men. She also shows how make-up moved from the realm of hookers to average American women, and the way it ultimately came to be deeply connected to femininity and self-expression, identity and community. Argues that the beauty industry continues to be a contested thing - the African American side is especially political, i.e. what is the ideal beauty?
Peiss argues that beauty culture was a way for women to negotiate modernity - the artifice and performance aspect of it was appealing and appropriate for the modern era, yet men continuously had a hard time with this "artifice." Make-up as "skin improvement" vs. make-up as "paint" was an early and tight distinction. This is all still up for debate though - i.e. is this oppressive? "Hussy" outsold "Lady" by a lot, and these two types were seen as moods and not types of people (how postmodern!!) Transformative power of make-up. [The parts about failed attempts to get men to use make-up are fascinating - kind of reminds me of failed attempts to get people to drink coke for breakfast].

Interacts With:

Manliness and Civilization, Tarzan, Houdini, and the Perfect Man, Venus Envy, Where the Girls Are, Fraud in the Age of Barnum (for the discussion of artifice), anything that deals with the performance or charade aspect of Modernity/urban life: Confidence Men and Painted Women,

Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction

Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (2000)
By David Fine

Synopsis: This book asks how LA, as a place, shaped the imaginations of novelists who wrote about it. Fine does this by surveying the various genres of L.A.-based fiction, ranging from early booster imagery and myth-making of the 1880s-1920s, hard-boiled 1930s, tough guy detective stories, the Hollywood novel, "down and out in LA," Black Dahlia and Zoot Suits, and apocalyptic lit. It's not very argument-driven, and seems that the bottom line is that L.A. has always been both a utopia and a dystopia. It has long been seen as a land of new beginnings and of opportunities, thus also seen ironically when these new beginnings turn out to be false. Interestingly, much of L.A. lit is by migrants, and not by those who have long been entrenched in the culture, which is what regionalist lit is usually like. L.A. is shown as a timeless and placeless "liminal zone" filled with odd architecture that embodies no dominant style. For a place so obsessed with the future, L.A. always seems to be recreating the past.

Interacts With:

City of Quartz, Golden State, Golden Youth, The City in Literature

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)
By George Chauncey

Synopsis: This book seeks to challenge the idea that a vibrant gay culture did not exist prior to WWII by refuting three myths: 1) the myth of isolation, 2) the myth of invisibility, 3) the myth of internalization. Chuancey does an amazingly thorough social history which reconstructs the gay subculture of 1890-1940 New York City by drawing from vice society records, police records, newspapers, and all variety of media in order to provide a rich ethnographic description of gay life. The book is divided into three parts: I: Male (Homo) Sexual Practices and Identities in the Early Twentieth Century; II: The Making of the Gay Male World; III: The Politics of Gay Culture. Chauncey provides both a portrait and analysis of the geography and symbolism of the gay male world in order to show that it was more restricted/hidden in the second third of the century. Basically, the hetero/homo binary and way of defining personhood as based on sexual object preference did not really happen until the 1930s-50s, when it replaced the then-dominant system of "fairie" vs. "normal men" which used gender behavior/identification as the main categorizer (fairies were effeminate, queers were not but liked men, "trade" were masculine and "normal" but would fuck men if approached). This shows a much more fluid range of sexual activity that was allowed to "normal"men then versus now. The book also maps the "sexual topography of the gay world," and shows the way gay culture flourished within urban spaces like streets, parks, bathhouses, boarding houses, and nightclubs. Urban space was thus essential to the development of this culture. Argues that the thriving of this culture was an act of resistance, and that gay and straight culture were defined dialectically. Gays especially flourished among the working class and ethnic/immigrant communities. Seems to show that a sort of utopia emerged during prohibition in which all classes/sexualities were thrown together in search of booze/revelry, and that the repeal of prohibition ultimately led to a rise in anti-gay policing. "Privacy could only be had in public" (198).

Interacts With:

All books that deal with public life/public space:
Sidewalk, Rudeness and Civility, Urban Masses and Moral Order, Land of Desire, Confidence Man and Painted Women, Horrible Prettiness (urban life and the particularities of urban spaces like the theatre),
Maybe de Certeau (transgressive power of small everyday acts, use of space),
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (not on lists, but connects on urban space and sex culture, and both have a sort of utopian bent to them), Cities on a Hill,
Could maybe contrast with books that focus more on private life, like Behind the Gates, Building Suburbia, The Levittowners, Middletown, Country of Exiles, etc
For books that focus on a different, mobility-based form of public life/space:
Learning from Las Vegas, Neon Metropolis,
Flourishing of gay culture as act of resistance (there's the pop culture list tie-ine!!)
Connects with Foucault, for idea that middle class tries to control sexuality by naming it and defining it.

**Still one of the best!** Tons of good info - See full notes for more details.

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998
By Jill Lepore

Synopsis: This book is a study of war, and the ways in which people write about it. It looks at the way war is remembered and how its documentation and discussion is subject to who is doing the narration and what purpose the narration is supposed to serve. Lepore does this by following different understandings and interpretations of Kin Philip's War, and the way language was used to control meaning. Basic argument is that: "...wounds and word - the injuries and their interpretation - cannot be separated, that acts of war generate acts of narrations, and that both types of acts are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples" (x). KP's war was the war waged on NE colonists started by "King Philip," Chief of the Wamanoags, to prevent the Puritans from completely taking over. Says NEs didn't even search for an NA motive, and instead just marked NA behavior as "savage," and started telling tales of their "savagery" in order to increase their own distance from them (culturally). In 1776 or so, KPW was used as anti-English Revolutionary rhetoric (i.e. as proof of English savagery), and was again used in the 1820s to hasten Indian Removal, and then was also later used again as stage actors utilized Indianness as "Americanness."

Interesting Specifics:

"The story of King Philip's War...is the story of how English colonists became Americans..." (240).

KPW = 1675-76

KPW was most fatal war in U.S. history.

"If was is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing press?" (xxi).

The NE colonists wanted to make sure not to appear "Spanish" at all in their dealings with NAs; i.e. they didn't want to be brutal like the Spanish were.

By the late 17th century, "what one owned defined who one was" (76).

Were many plays of KPW; famous American stage actor Edwin Forrest was the most famous to play King Philip, and it was the clash between him and his English rival Charles Macready that sparked the Astor Place riots of 1849.

Interacts With:

Books that talk about shifting meanings of events, and the way events are remembered according to presentist concerns. Meaning of historical events often remains contested.
Culture is malleable.
Cronon (in relation to centrality of property-ownership to colonial identity, and in colonists inability to see different NA way of life as legit).
Horrible Prettiness (just as connects to Astor Place Riots)
One review says this book embodies a very American studies approach, and also shows way KPW helped colonists define themselves as "American" through a contrast with Native American and with the English.

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1992 [1978])
By Paul Boyer

Synopsis: This book is "a fresh synthesis of familiar material" that examines America's moral response to the city, from 1820-1920, and the various reform measure taken to deal with it. The book is divided into four parts: 1) The Jacksonian Era, 2) The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation, 3) The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time, 4) The Progressives and the City: Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies. Argues that prior to 1920 (mostly pre-1860), many of the reform efforts really focused on restoring a sort of village life/familiar surveillance in a society which no longer followed that model. Reform efforts also sought "moral uplift" through tracts (Lyman Beecher was especially involved). The switch from a rural to urban society freaked people out and led them to fear a loss of control. Into the Guilded Age, more coercive strategies took hold (such as Teddy Roosevelt's "we have to fight the poor to save them" strategy - wasn't he post-Gilded Age though?) vs. positive environmentalist strategies (such as the City Beautiful Movement, park movement, playground movement, etc). By the 1920s, however, the view of the city had changed, and people now saw it as a den of conformity.

Interesting Specifics:

Attempts at increased surveillance included the publishing of personal details, whose aim was "to introduce a public dimension into even the most intimate private realm; to reassert society's right to oversee every facet of personal behavior" (19). [Interesting, as this is exactly what's going on now with MySpace, etc, but in an intentional, hey look at me and my personal details! way. Would this idea still even work? Oh, I guess it still exists with "To Catch a Predator"]

Many of the religious-based reform movements were designed to reach the masses and provide them with a sense of order. Thus, the Jacksonian era became somewhat obsessed with order and discipline as a counter to the increased chaos; "this early urban moral-reform effort, then, simply underscored the erosion of an organic sense of community in a period of urban growth" (56).

YMCA movement started in England in 1841, and was brought to the U.S. in 1851.

1910 = Mann Act passed - made is a federal offense of transport a woman across state lines for "immoral purposes" (191).

The 1890s saw a massive rise of anti-prostitution and anti-liquor sentiment.

1896 = Raines Law, and the rise of Raines Law hotels.

Park movement, playground movement, etc, were all part of the "positive-environmentalist" movement, which sought to improve living conditions of the poor so as to influence their moral and social values (234).

Interacts With:

Rothman (Discovery of the Asylum, in this increased push for order and hermetic, old-time community as a solution to increased chaos and change of urbanization)
Hmm, I wrote in my notes that this book might also be about the (implicit) homogenizing effects of mass culture, even though it doesn't explicitly state that.

Understanding Popular Culture

Understanding Popular Culture (2006 [1986])
By John Fiske

Synopsis: This book is an attempt to outline a theory of popular culture in capitalist societies (ix). Main argument is that popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and the disempowered, "and thus always bears within it the signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system"...(5). Popular culture is fluid and changing and full of contradiction, and change can only come from below. Popular culture is an active process that must be relevant to the immediate social situation of the people. In this way, "consumers" make their own oppositional meaning from within the space that they are given, which results in an ever present struggle for control over meaning. Uses jeans as a semiotically-rich example, as tearing can be an act of resistance. Popular culture is a type of pleasure which is sometimes subjugated by the ruling classes, as pleasure can be seen as a sort of "out of control-ness." There are two types of pleasure: jouissance (the pleasure of avoiding social order), and plaisir (the pleasure of relating to it) [I guess this comes from Barthes?]. Fiske argues that popular culture is not subject to "aesthetics" (in the elitist sense of the word), because popular culture is important for what it does and not for what it is. Popular culture can thus be used to create moments of progressivism which can help people combat the dominant culture.

Interesting Specifics:op

** Great one! Focus on for exam! **

Pop culture is full of contradiction.

In the U.S., news moves from East to West (due to time zones), and weather moves from West to East. East = Culture, West = Nature (10).

"A commodity is ideology made material" (14).

"Popular culture is not consumption; it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never be adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities" (23).

A popular culture text must "contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them" (25).

"Popular culture is the art of making due with what the system provides" (25). [This is very de Certeau]

In capitalist societies, there is no "authentic fold culture" against which to measure the "inauthentic" mass culture (27).

"Every act of consumption is an at of cultural production, for consumption is always the production of meaning" (35).

"Popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by the subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control them" (49).

Loss of self = evasion of ideology [I think this connects to the idea of utopia - that within popular culture there is space to lose ones' self, and this is essentially what utopia thrives on].

"The struggle for control over the meanings and pleasures of the body... is crucial because the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature" (70).

The obsession with the individual body is an obsession with capitalism and labor, and what labor produces (96). [Which would be the opposite of the collective Rabelais-ian body].

"Aesthetics is naked cultural hegemony, and popular discrimination properly rejects it" (130). Aesthetics is also "an attempt by the bourgeoisie to exert the equivalent control over the cultural economy that is does over the financial" (130).

In saying popular culture is not mass culture: "Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass audience" (177).

"...I do wish to question the claims that radical art is politically more effective than the progressive uses of popular art" (191).

"...I believe the popular forces to be a positive influence in our society and that failing to take proper account of their progressive elements is academically and politically disabling" (194).

Interacts With:

Stuart Hall (with his belief in the firm existence of a "popular culture" category that appeals to the "downtrodden")
Anything that talks about the fluidity of popular culture.
Bakhtin (discussion of carnival and the "proper" uses of the body, especially as the body becomes "individualized" via capitalism and body as labor unit, versus the Rabelais world of the holistic/collective body)
de Certeau (as relates to idea that people make due with what they are given by the dominant culture; can then eek out own meaning within those goods/texts/practices]
Barthes
Bourdieu (as relates to idea that working class culture is more participatory, and bourgeois is more about distance)
I think this book was a bit of a break-through, idea that consumers of pop culture are not just mindless dupes, and can in fact create their own meaning and forms of resitence from what they're given.

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media (1994)
By Susan Douglas

Synopsis: An exploration of pop culture media representations of women, and the way such representations have led women to feel highly ambivalent about themselves and about feminism. Douglas looks at music, TV shows, film (a little bit), commercials, print ads, and general cultural effluvia connected to women. The tone is very casual and chatty and dated. Her argument is basically that the media has essentially cast women as brainless "bimbos" with microscopic waists who - as heroines - are always deferential to men or - as villains - are 'masculine' and gross and self-absorbed and evil. The media tried to put down women and the feminist changes taking place - a burden which feminism still bares today. She spends a bit of time on the domestic perkiness of sitcom women, though feels that girl groups - especially black girl groups - can be seen as at least somewhat empowering. Bottom line is that women continue to feel conflicted and ambivalent about the images they're presented with, and the best we can do is to teach out kids (and people in general) to be critical consumers of media - to talk back to it, question it, and make fun of it.

Interesting Specifics:

According to Disney, "vanity means a girl is probably evil and deserves to die" (30).

The Mickey Mouse Club was on from 1955-59.

The 1960 Shirells song "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" was the first #1 hit by a girl group.

Maude was great for focusing on a woman who talked back, but she also reinforced stereotypes of the feminist as "a strident, loud, unfeminine, bruiser" (203).

1976 = debut of The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie's Angels (212).

In reference to pop culture's obsession with the "catfight:" "It may be filled with ambivalence and compromise, tradition and rebellion, but the space between the two cats - the space where we, the girls, are - is what feminism is all about" (244). [Please!!]

"But on of capitalism's great strengths - perhaps its greatest - is its ability to co-opt and domesticate opposition, to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products. And so it was with fitness" (260). [This connects with ideas in Cycle of Outrage - that youth culture was eventually "tamed" by media co-option].

Excessive working out, as embodied by a perfect ass, "doesn't reflect hard work or entitlement so much as mindless narcissism, unproductive self-absorption, and the media's ongoing distortion of feminism to further their own misogynistic, profit-maximizing ends" (265).

'The decision to get a face-lift or not is, inescapably, a political decision" (266).

Interacts With:

Golden State, Golden Youth, Cycle of Outrage (really just for its focus on youth - hmm, should compare their angle on the media)
Is a little different because although it talks about ambiguity on the part of the consumer, it doesn't really go so far as to say that consumers carve their own meaning and use what they are given for their own ends. To me, this book is a "fun" book that's more conversational than anything else. Has a very "Hey, remember that show/film/song?!" feel to it. Has the same baby-boomer circle-jerk/self-referentiality thing going on that Jennifer Price's Flight Maps has.

A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s

A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (1986)
By James Gilbert

Synopsis: Gilbert investigates the increased fear of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, and examines the various factors that meshed together to create or to deal with this "problem." In this way, the book is "about the interconnection of ideas, individuals, and institutions that at first glance, might appear only to have a marginal relationship to each other" (10). Plans to deal with/investigate delinquency included sociological studies and increased pushes for censorship of pop culture, especially of crime comic books, demonstrating the "increased social and cultural power of the mass media and the marketplace over ourselves and our children" (10). Gilbert argues that a lot of this fear was brought about by general postwar anxieties about the changing society, which reached a peak in the mid-1950s, only to "cave in" via a rejuvenated appreciation for/acceptance of the power of the emerging youth culture of the 1960s (which was quickly engulfed by media attention). Gilbert's argument "focuses on the terrible but reoccurring accusation that modern American culture deprived adolescents of their innocence, their childhood, and their independence" (10). Shows that people were scared of both a burgeoning youth population and of the power and pervasiveness of "mass culture" - and mass culture's ability to wrest control away from parents (ironic in an age of nuclear family exaltation). Parents were also worried about elements of lower-class culture sneaking into youth culture (i.e. Elvis, etc). This "seduction of the youth by culture" should be seen as episodic - i.e. it comes up every so often [1920s?]. Basically, fears of juvenile delinquency were also really about fears of mass culture, and of parents losing control over their kids.

Interesting Specifics:

In a way, 1950s America has become the mass society dreamed about in the 1930s (6).

"The radical dreamers of the 1930s awakened to the dystopia of suburbia" (109).

Disputes over mass culture in the 1950s were shaped by the homogenization of American society (7).

Frederic Wertham wrote The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), and was very interested in the influence of the media on youth, but was also interested in larger sociological and cultural influences as well. He later wanted to ban sales of crime comic books to kids under 15 (106).

1950s saw a lot of fears over this new "mass culture."

Argues that issues of class were central to pop culture fears.

The Kefauver (a senator) censorship hearings were among the biggest, and he headed the Senate Subcommittee on Delinquency which "urged more self-regulation and internal censorship on the comic book, television, and film industries" (162).

In 1922, Hollywood created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Hays, to demonstrate attempts at self-policing (164). Says that in a way, "the Code was like a Victorian hemline, defining an erogenous zone" (169).

Big "youth gone awry" films included The Wild One (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and West Side Story (1961).

By the 1960s, elites even started viewing mass culture as "American culture" (214). [So, was dangerous youth culture ultimately tamed by its value in the marketplace?]

"Struggle took a new form, for despite the power of American culture to homogenize, to sanitize protest, and to absorb the energies of subcultures, the process of protest, renewal, and invention is also perpetual" (217). **

Interacts With:

The Lonely Crown, Organization Man (re. fears of mass culture)
Golden State, Golden Youth (relationship between youth and media imagery)
Pre-Code Hollywood (censorship issues)
** This quote here makes the book blend in with all those other pop culture books that are focused on the malleability of culture. I'm not exactly sure though, what this particular statement is referring to.

Orientalism

Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said

Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.

Interesting Specifics:

Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).

Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).

Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.

Interacts With:

In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)
By Lizabeth Cohen

Synopsis: Cohen makes an argument that the postwar period (1945-1975) embodied the rise of the "Consumer's Republic" - that is, "an economy, culture, and politics built around the promises of mass consumption, both in terms of material life and the more idealistic goals of greater freedom, democracy, and equality" (7). Utilizing government sources, sociological surveys, marketing research, and historical monographs, Cohen provides a dense history of this era as it connects with the "consumers' republic" notion. The book is divided into: Origins of the Postwar CR (1930s, New Deal and war efforts); Birth of CR (consumption as the American way of life; continuous push for more purchasing and ownership; Black purchasing and boycotting power to voice discontent; The Landscape of Mass Consumption (suburbanization, commercialization, and privatization; feminization of public space via suburban shopping centers usurping downtowns; decline of legal redlining leads to rise of more covert segregation); Political Culture of Mass Consumption (rise of market segmentation and splintering off into more specialized groups; rise of the consumer movement). Cohen argues that the rise of the "consumers' republic" was just as influential as other Cold War issues, in that it was the belief that mass consumption could bring increased prosperity and equality. While it did do some good, it resulted in increased market segmentation and overall fragmentation.

Interesting Specifics:

Discusses the postwar "return to normalcy" push, and thrift as almost "un-America."

The national output of goods and services doubled between 1946 and 1956, and would double again by 1970" (121).

Between 1947 and 1953, the suburban population increased by 43 percent (195).

1948 Supreme Court ruling of Shelley vs. Kraemer found restrictive covenants unconstitutional.

In 1953, 70,000 person Levittown was biggest community in U.S. with no black residents.

Interacts With:

Actually, does kind of interact with books about the rise of mass production in the late nineteenth century and the hopes that this would democratize goods and put everyone on equal footing. Also is kind of connected to the republican ideal that we will all be united by our (relatively) equal access to stuff. It's a very "common man"/anti-elitist kind of idea that Americans seem to love.
Also, can be seen as another example of increased fragmentation of the modern era.
This is what most of my 1950s lecture is derived from.
This book has tons of good info, but is extremely dry and not American studies enough for me.

Rabelais and His World

Rabelais and His World (1984 [1968])
By Mikhail Bakhtin

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the raw, folk-culture, laughter-infused aspects of Rabelais's work, mostly centering on the carnivalesque. It focuses on 1) ritual spectacles, 2) comic verbal compositions, and 3) "billingsgate" (curses, oaths, etc.). Both Bakhtin (post-Russian Revolution) and Rabelais (Renaissance), were writing during a time of revolution and renewal. Bakhtin looks at laughter, the language of the marketplace, festive images, banquet imagery, the grotesque body,. "material bodily lower stratum," and Rabelais' image in his own time. Bakhtin argues that carnival is all about "the feast of becoming, change, and renewal" - the suspension of all hierarchies. Much of Rabelais' imagery is about the lower regions - guts, ass, stomach, etc - and bodily functions and secretions - piss, spit, shit, etc. This can be called grotesque realism, and depicts humanity as a collective body. Whereas today we have privatized and individualized bodily functions, in Rabelais' time such functions were seen as connected to society and to the cosmos; universality and a body's interaction with the outer world. Laughter was seen as essentially human, and Rabelais saw moments of festival gaiety as utopian. Essentially, these scenes are all about bodily sensation and about material sensual bodily unity (but infused with some individual distinctions).

Interesting Specifics:

Bakhtin is a philosopher and literary scholar; a theorist of the novel.

Laughter is central to Rabelais, and during the Renaissance, laughter had a positive, regenerating, creative meaning (71).

"...in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, reveling, dancing, music were all closely combined with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement, and other images of the material bodily lower stratum" (224).

In Rabelais' day, "excrement was conceived as an essential element in the life of the body and of the earth in the struggle against death. It was part of man's vivid awareness of his materiality, of his bodily nature, closely related to the life of the earth" (224).

"The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or on the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity" (255).

"Death from laughter is one of the forms of gay death" (408).

Interacts With:

I love the idea of a "collective body," and bodily fluids and the lower regions as expression of connectivity and union with the cosmos - cool man!
Connects with books that stress the importance of historical context.
Connects with any books that deal with the carnivalesque and inversion of "natural" order.
In Place/Out of Place

Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
By Lawrence W. Levine

Synopsis: Investigates how and why cultural categories come into being, and demonstrates that such categories are products of their time. Looks at the movement of Shakespeare from the realm of popular to "high" culture; the sacralization of culture, partly via the emerging distinction between unique and mass-produced objects - attack on the "inauthentic"; the establishment of rigid rankings. Focuses mostly on the examples of theatre and music. Argues that culture is highly malleable and constantly in flux, thus we should not view categories as fixed and immutable. Americans became obsessed with order and individualization from the mid-nineteenth-century on, and this led to the hushing of the communally-focused bawdy, participatory theatre audiences in favor of the individually-focused and "polite" well-mannered audience. Levine expresses a sense of loss here, over "what I perceive to have been a rich shared public culture that once characterized the United States" (9). This "individualization" was partly a result of the increased chaos and "strangeness" of the city; it made elites want to escape the jumble and either retreat to the private realm or to make everyone more like the elite. The increased separation between private and public led to decreased accessibility and increased "high-brow"-ness. We need to know that "the same forms of culture can perform markedly distinct functions in different periods or among difference groups" (240).

Interesting Specifics:

"Culture is a process, not a fixed condition; it is the product of unremitting interaction between the past and the present" (33).

The Astor Place Riot of 1849 was "a struggle for power and cultural authority within a theatrical space" (68).

Although museums, symphonic halls, and parks, etc, were public places, "they were meant to create an environment in which a person could contemplate and appreciate the society's store of great culture individually. Anything that produced a group atmosphere, a mass ethos, was culturally suspect" (164).

Olmstead's Central Park (1850s) was a "didactic space" in which users had to be taught the "correct" way to use it (186).

"Highbrow" was first used in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority, and "lowbrow" first used in 1900 to denote that which was not very refined or intellectual; both terms were derived from phrenology of racial types (221-22).

The creation of categories is largely about the struggle for intellectual and cultural authority (236).

Interacts With:

Stuart Hall (Hall seems to believe that categories are fixed - i.e. there is always a "popular" category, but feels that content changes)
Horrible Prettiness (transformation of theatre, from boisterous participation to "respectable" middle-classness)
Is it Eight Hours For What We Will? Basically, any of the books that talk about the rise of the middle class and of the increased separation of work from living space, and work from leisure.
The Lonely Crowd (with the discussion about the rise of "individualism" and the move away from community-mindedness); Bowling Alone;
No Place of Grace (for its discussion of the increasing importance of the "authentic")
That book that talks about John Philip Sousa (Sousa is mentioned here as one who defended his choice to appeal to the largest array of people possible - p. 235 or so).
An attack on those who feel there is a defined and definitive "cultural canon," and who believe the content and categories of such a canon are fixed and unchanging. Basically this fits with all the other books on this list that prioritize the fluidity of culture and of cultural categories.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
By Laura Mulvey

Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.

Interesting Specifics:

"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).

"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).

Interacts With:

This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.

Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
by Judith Butler

Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.

Interesting Specifics:

Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).

When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).

"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.

"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).

Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.

"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).

Interacts With:

Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.

Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966 (2002)
By Kirse Granat May

Synopsis: This book examines popular culture representations of California from 1955-1965, especially as focused on white, middle-class suburban teenagers full of wholesome "good clean fun." Focuses on the rise of the CA postwar suburban ideal/CA as land of youth and promise; launch of Disneyland and Disney TV shows such as Davey Crockett and the Mickey Mouse Club; Rebel Without a Cause as showing suburban rebellion and Gidget as showing middle class cuteness; rise of the surf craze with its middle class, white leisured youth lifestyle; rise of the CA aesthetic in fashion; Berkeley and Watts turmoil as complicating the CA image; Reagan for CA governor as way to "restore" wholesome, golden land CA image. Argues that CA created a very sunny, youth-obsessed, wholesome, white, middle-class, leisured, problem-free fantasy image which served to obscure the real racial, class-based, and political tensions and struggles going on in the state. Though events of the 1960s occasionally snapped people out of it, the persistence of this "golden" image continues to shape memories of the past and ideas of the present.

Interesting Specifics:

"California was America's tomorrowland" (5).

"Promoting the virtues of the California teenager suburbanized popular culture" (6).

The CA youth image "represented CA trends and middle class America to the extreme: mobile, capitalistic, outdoorsy, consumer-oriented, involved in harmless, well-meaning fun" (26).

Calls "California Girls" am "aryan anthem" (113).

Interacts With:

To me this book seems almost like a top-down approach - doesn't take a very radical view of popular culture. Seems to imply that pop culture here was used as an escape, that consumers were happily taking what producers wanted them to have and using it as a means of obscuring the painful tensions of the time. So, is that radical or conservative? Seems conservative to me. This book is not about creating one's own meaning, or about multiplicity.

No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
By T. J. Jackson Lears

Synopsis: This book explores the origins and effects of American antimodernism - especially its "recoil from an overcivilized modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience" (xv). Lears argues that the turn of the century was not marked by democratization and the decline of the elites, "but rather by the reinforcement of elite power in new corporate and bureaucratic forms" (xii). Utilizing Gramsci's notion of hegemony, Lears analyzes books, magazines, private letters, novels, poems, essays, and sermons to build his argument linking antimodernism with the rise of therapeutic culture. He feels that antimodernism was "both more socially and more intellectually important than historians have supposed" (xv), claiming that "the shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic world view, which antimodern sentiments reinforced, marked a key transformation in the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes in America" (xvii). Modernism (lit and art) and antimodernism share common roots in the yearning for authentic experience - physical, emotional, or spiritual (xix). The book is divided into the following sections: 1) Roots of Antimodernism (the increased rationalization and systematic organization of life for maximum productivity leads to an increased feeling of "unreal"-ness; increased focus on time; increased obsession with comfort; crisis of cultural authority; fears of overcivilization; neurasthenia and weightlessness); 2) Arts and Crafts Ideology (regeneration through handicrafts); 3) Martial Ideal (war as antidote to weightlessness; rise of boxing, football, and the "strenuous life"); 4) Medieval Mentalities (increased focus on childhood and fantasy and antirationalism); 5) Catholic Forms (increased interest in Catholic art/ritual); 6) Patriarchy to Nirvana (oscillation between autonomy and dependence; male versus female realm); Henry Adams (epitome of antimodernism, hated efforts to banish irrationality, deeply conflicted). Antimodernists feared a docile and complacent society. "By exalting 'authentic' experience as an end in itself, antimodern impulses reinforced the shift from a Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial to a therapeutic ideal of self-fulfillment in this world through exuberant health and intense experience" (xvi). The cult of self-fulfillment was easily co-opted by consumer capitalists whose economy worked perfectly via constant generation of new individual wants and desire. In a way then, antimodernism paved the way for these new modes of cultural hegemony. The therapeutic worldview is thus both a symptom and source of the banality of modern culture.

Interesting Specifics:

* Focus on this one for exam * Tons of notes on this book *

Modernity led to "the systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity and of individual life for maximum personal achievement...the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique" (7).

An obsession with comfort and a decrease in pain, along with a focus on time, were key components of modernity. This was also linked to an increased sensitivity to suffering in general (i.e. slavery, animal abuse, etc).

Spencerianism = optimistic faith in progress.

Increased presence of capitalism leads to increased fracturing of the self.

Modern culture = weightlessness [Marx derivative]

"...most varieties of 20th-century militarism - at least in the West - share a common cultural origin in the late-nineteenth-century recoil from a weightless modernity" (98).

"Antimodern vitalists, for whom intense feeling was its own reward, stressed becoming rather than being, eros rather than agape" (162).

Henry Adams, son of John Adams: "Riven by tension between autonomy and dependence, doubt and faith, he rejected efforts to banish irrationality and contradiction in the name of social or personal harmony" (295).

"Under a twentieth-century regime which multiplied wants and sanctioned total gratification, the avant-garde cult of self-fulfillment sometimes only exaggerated the culture it set out to repudiate" (299).

This desire was all too easily usurped, as "intensity of feeling...became a product to be consumed like any other" (300).

"...the vision of a self in endless development is perfectly attuned to an economy based on pointless growth and ceaseless destruction" (307).

Interacts With:

Gramsci's notion of hegemony
Terrible Honesty,

Illuminations

Illuminations (1969)
By Walter Benjamin

Synopsis: This book is a series of essays that span about 15 years, and most are reflections on various cultural components or figures, including Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust. Also includes a chapter on Benjamin's personal library. Book is most focused on the way history, memory, artifacts, and time together. Underlying all his work is the tension of modernity. In his most famous piece here - "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Benjamin argues that the shift from art as steeped in ritual and tradition, to art made solely for mechanical reproduction messes-up the concept of authenticity and also messes with the "aura" of the work. Benjamin is fixated on phenomena and "the wonder of appearance," and seems to be amazed by the way memory and history is embodied. There is a strong sense of loss and longing in his writing, and he seems very concerned with the way human relations and the artifacts between humans have been transformed by modernity. The nineteenth century seems to be more of his place than the twentieth.

Interesting Specifics:

Benjamin loved the flaneur; "To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special purpose of the flaneur" (195).

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" (220).

"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (241)

War is a way to mobilize all technological systems while still maintaining the property system (241).

Jew are forbidden in the Torah from investigating the future [is this why Benjamin is so obsessed with the past?].

Interacts With:

Anything on memory its link to material culture/artifacts
Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste

Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society

Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986)
By Harvey Green

Synopsis: This book is a history of the culture of American health reform, 1830-1940, and examines the ways in which ideas about health and fitness changed over the century and were tied to larger cultural events. Utilizes sources like catalogues, ads, diaries, letters, journals, medical books, and advice books, and divides health reform into three major periods: Part I: Millennial Dreams and Physical Realities, 1830-1860 (in which body/health reforms were strongly tied to religion and millennial beliefs that the second coming of Christ would only happen is people had reached a state of perfection); Part II: The Price of Civilization, 1860-1890 (reforms based on increased focus on nervous disorders and neurasthenia due to increased urbanization and brainwork; increased focus on "water cure" and "muscular Christianity" and athletics; U.S. increasingly strives to become world power); Part III: Regeneration, 1890-1940 (increased racism and nationalism and fears of race suicide and the decrease of vigorous manliness; leads to rise of "strenuous life"). Many reforms dealt with diet (especially meat-eating versus vegetarianism), and electricity and devises designed to increase energy/efficiency. There was a lot of concern with, even paranoia over, decreased energy and conservation of energy (within the person). Argues that all of these body reforms were acts of individualism, yet the popularity of sports shows our continued desire for community and emotional bonding.

Interesting Specifics:

Self-help books were big by the 1830s.

Some reformers warned against the dangers of spiced and salted foods, and of too many condiments.

Was a lingering fear that passions might get out of control, and that "stimulation" was harmful because it drained away the body's energy.

Sylvester Graham advocated a vegetarian diet of bran bread, water, and vegetables; "Grahamism" was popular among radical communities which sought to separate themselves from the great mass.

Argues that vegetarianism never really took off in U.S. because it is passive, an avoidance of something instead of an active use of something else (53).

By 1850s, children were seen as pure and not wicked, marking a big shift.

George Beard was the neurologist obsessed with neurasthenia.

John Harvey Kellogg another big advocate of the water cure, etc. Water cure involved lots of submersion, etc, and led to therapeutic spas and resorts.

Some thought that meat-eating was linked with human progress and "racial nationalism" (165) - i.e. idea that meat-eaters were more evolved.

Post-Civil War = increased focus on sports and calisthenics, etc.

Ideal male body type gets bulkier in 1880s (198).

View of the body as a machine (late nineteenth century), and need for internal cleanliness.

The Olympic games were reinstated in 1896.

By 1920, Bernarr McFadden's Physical Culture magazine was crammed with self-help and advice.

In the 1920s, there was a fear that blondes would decrease (i.e. due to floods of immigrants, etc.).

Horace Fletcher invents "Fletcherism" - way to lose weight by chewing food endlessly before swallowing it.

Interacts With:
Books dealing with perfectionism
Manliness and Civilization,
Seems very much a product of the 1980s, which were obsessed with body image and fitness.
This book is awesome, but it covers an impossible amount of stuff.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1991?)
By Alfred E. Young

Synopsis: Seeks to uncover the role of "common people" in the making of the Revolution, and notes that "this contest for the memory of the Revolution [which] jogs us to think anew about the larger historical process of forgetting and remembering" (xvii). How and why are some events remembered, and how are those events infused with meaning? "What does it mean for an event to be 'lost,' then 'found' and given a new name?" (xvii). Investigates these questions by looking at the life of shoemaker George Robert Twelve Hewes, an ordinary many who was ultimately exalted to hero status (as one of the last survivors of the Tea Party). Examines the two bios of Hewes (1830s) in order to probe Hewes memory and the idea of what is remembered. Draws a bit on scientific studies of memory to discuss personal memory process and connect it with public memory process. Wants to know why the Boston Tea Party didn't come to be called this until the 1830s. Also, why was Hewes exalted? Basically, in the process of remembering, Hewes viewed himself as an equal to his higher-ups, and recalls actually throwing tea overboard with John Hancock during Tea Party, even though Hancock was probably not even there. Notes that interest in Hewes and other "common men" veterans really increased in the 1830s as veterans were being denied pensions; Revolutionary War mythology was also really taking off at that time, though the meaning of the Tea Party and of the Revolution itself was contested. "Tea Party" served both conservatives (making light of the event) and revolutionaries (mocking genteel culture). Bottom line: Public memory is affected by popular events of the time. "The Tea Party, lost, buried, and willfully forgotten in public memory, was recovered in the context of popular movements claiming the Revolution...The Teac Party became an iconic event in public memory because men like Hewes came forward with their private memories" (194).

Interesting Specifics:

Memories are constructed "in the context of...community, broader politics, and social dynamics" (xiv).

Public memory "is what a society remembers collectively" (88).

The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773, and was the most revolutionary and carnivalesque event of that decade (102). Radical Whig people donned Indian personas.

American history was not taught in schools until 1820s-30s.

"...in a time of upheaval, ordinary people make events possible" (206).

Hewes was only 5'1.

Interacts With:

Kasson (Buffalo Bill book, with its focus on interaction of personal and public memory), Monochrome Memories (Jeff's list), Lowenthal (The Past is a Foreign Country), any book that talks about memory as affected by current needs.