Eighties People: New Lives in the American Imagination

Through an examination of 1980s America cultural texts and media, Kevin L. Ferguson examines how new types of individuals were created in order to manage otherwise hidden cultural anxieties during the American 1980s. Exploring a variety of strategies for fashioning self-knowledge in the decade, this book illuminates the hidden lives of surrogate mothers, crack babies, persons with AIDS, yuppies, and brat packers. These seemingly simple stereotypes in fact concealed deeper cultural changes in issues relating to race, class, and gender. Through a range of texts, Eighties People shows how the commonplace reading of the 1980s as a superficial period of little importance disguises the decade's real imperative: a struggle for self-definition outside of the limited set of options given by postmodern theorizing.

Author: Kevin L. Ferguson
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 01/30/2016
Pages: 193
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781137586384

About the Author
Kevin L. Ferguson is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, the City University of New York, USA. His work has been published in such journals as Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and the Journal of Medical Humanities. He earned his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA, where his dissertation received the Lloyd Davis Memorial Prize for Distinguished Work in Cultural Studies.

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