Ordinary Lifestyles : Popular Media, Consumption and Taste

by Bell

• ISBN13: 9780335215515
• ISBN10: 0335215513
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Open University Press

Summary

There are now more "lifestyle" books, magazines, websites, and radio and TV shows than ever, focusing on topics such as cookery, gardening, travel, and home improvement. This collection of new essays explores how lifestyle media influence contemporary taste and cultures.

Author Biography

David Bell teaches Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. His recent publications, as author or editor, include The Sexual Citizen, Cyberculture: the Key Concepts, City of Quarters, and Science, Technology and Culture.

Joanne Hollows teaches Media and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture and co-author of Food and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Television and the Classification and Framing of Lifestyle Culture

Thinking Habits, and the Ordering of Life

Making Lifestyles Ordinary

Whose Lifestyle is it Anyway?

Recipes For Living: Martha Stewart and the New American Subject

Home Truths?

Cookbooks as Manuals of Taste

It Was Beautiful Before You Changed It All: Class, Taste and the Transformative Aesthetics of the Garden Lifestyle Media

Monoculture versus Multiculinarism: Trouble in the Aussie Kitchen

Mediated Tourist Adventures

Playing the Tourist: Ideology and Aspiration in British Television Holiday Programmes

Holidays of a Lifestyle: Representations of Pleasure in Gay and Lesbian Holiday Promotions

Countryside Formats and Ordinary Lifestyles

It's a Girl Thing: Teenage Magazines, Lifestyle and Consumer Culture

Gender, Childhood and Consumer Culture

A Taste for Science: Inventing the Young in the National Interest

The Worst Things in the World: Life Events Checklists in Popular Stress Management Texts

Sabotage, Slack, and Non-Alienating Labour: Zines and the Search for an Authentic Life