Eighties People

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Love Affair with Labels: New Subjects in the Eighties

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 1-12

3. The Surrogate Mother: Sed mater certissima?

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 13-35

4. The Crack Baby: Children Fight the War on Drugs

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 37-56

5. The Person with AIDS: Graphic Humor and Graphic Illness

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 57-78

6. The Yuppies and the Yuckies: Anxieties of Affluence

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 79-108

7. The Brat Pack and Its Mommy: Motherhood in the Age of Yuppiebacks

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 109-129

8. Coda: The Ventriloquy of Childhood

   • Kevin L. Ferguson

   Pages 131-144

9. Back Matter

   Pages 145-193

   PDF

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.

• Michel Foucault
• PWA
• brat pack
• crack baby
• eighties
• person with AIDS
• postmodernism
• surrogate mother
• yuppies
• 1980s
• culture
• history
• humour
• postmodernism
• sociology

"Kevin Ferguson's Eighties People brings into new focus a decade whose complex cultural history we are only just beginning to fully recognize. With its previously unheard stories and unconsidered characters, this lively and engaging book offers a fresh intervention in the periodization of the 1980s and on the controversies that shaped 1980s American culture. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America's recent cultural past." - Graham Thompson, University of Nottingham, UK
 
"In lucid prose, and with a deft, diagnostic touch, Kevin L. Ferguson decodes stock figures of the 1980s, while giving us an inspiring model of how to be a skilled demystifier. In the spirit of Foucault, but with more wit and tragicomedy, he cleans the camera-lens and helps us see what history's myth-cluttered mise-en-scène really looks like." — Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays "Kevin Ferguson's Eighties People brings into new focus a decade whose complex cultural history we are only just beginning to fully recognize. With its previously unheard stories and unconsidered characters, this lively and engaging book offers a fresh intervention in the periodization of the 1980s and on the controversies that shaped 1980s American culture. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America's recent cultural past." - Graham Thompson, University of Nottingham, UK

 

"In lucid prose, and with a deft, diagnostic touch, Kevin L. Ferguson decodes stock figures of the 1980s, while giving us an inspiring model of how to be a skilled demystifier. In the spirit of Foucault, but with more wit and tragicomedy, he cleans the camera-lens and helps us see what history's myth-cluttered mise-en-scène really looks like." — Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays

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.

Policies and ethics