Desexualization in American Life / Edition 1

by Charles Winick

Overview

Originally published as The New People, this classic volume examines the great changes in popular culture that unfolded in the 1960s with major steps toward political, racial, gender, and social empowerment. The popular culture of the time expressed a series of themes that have become, if not more significant, then certainly more visible in the 1990s. We are now entering the third generation of Americans who are living out the themes that are traced in this book.

The author sees a depolarization, a neutering in content and key people in the popular arts. Some of these trends result from technological changes and others reflect what is happening in the psychosocial interior of the family as well as larger economic movements. Winick believes that in such wide-ranging features of our society as sports, furniture, and architecture, the expression of an epoch can be identified. Clothing conveys the imbalance and ambiguity that reflect larger social forces and that have been identified more recently by Jacques Lacan as so important in modern life. Desexualization in American Life is remarkably prescient and accurate in identifying key trends that affect us today and will continue to do so for the remainder of the decade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560007999
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/30/1994
Series:	Classics in Communication and Mass Culture Series
Edition description:	REVISED
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles Winick is professor of sociology at the City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

1: arts and the man; 2: the hero unhorsed; 3: fun and games; 4: the country of the bland; 5: inner and outer space; 6: childhood, a journey with new maps; 7: costume and custom: the vanishing difference; 8: men, women, and other minority groups; 9: the seventh veil; 10: the way of the neuter

Editorial Reviews

Sadly the New People have become the authorities in setting the modes, the manners, the life-styles. . . . [the] result is a society that is increasingly androgynized, homogenized and devitalized.”—Harriet Van Horne, The New York Post “[Winick] sees us being dominated by an ambiguously androgynous or ‘neuter’ concept of sex role, to the detriment of individual identity and the useful organization of society.”—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times “A learned, witty and sometimes Rabelaisian exposition of the theme of change in personality and social life in the United States.”—Choice

From the Publisher