Description
Book SynopsisA cultural history of the political legitimization of youth rebellion during the Cold War era
Trade Review“
Rebels is a great book about bad boys and girls, melodrama and rock ‘n’ roll, and the emergence of ‘identity’ as a site of social concern and capitalist fantasy: a focused, engaging revision of white Cold War pop culture aesthetics in the United States.”—Lauren Berlant, author of
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“This is a bold and original study of Cold War masculinity, one that will force scholars to reconsider many of their assumptions about the gender and sexual politics of Cold War culture. In showing how the ‘bad boy’ functioned as a sign of democratic possibility, Leerom Medovoi opens up new ways of thinking about the relation between the 1950s and 1960s.”—Robert J. Corber, author of
Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of MasculinityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
1. Identitarian Thought and the Cold War World 1
2. Cold War Literature and the National Allegory: The Identity Canon of Holden Caulfield 53
3. Transcommodification: Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Suburban Counterimaginary 91
4. Identity Hits the Screen: Teenpics and the Boying of Rebellion 135
5. Oedipus in Suburbia: Bad Boy and the Fordist Family Drama 167
6. Beat Fraternity and the Generation of Identity 215
7. Where the Girls Were: Figuring the Female Rebel 317
Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of Identity 331
Notes 359
Works Cited 377
Index
