Consuming youth: Technologies of desire and American youth culture.

摘要

This is a study of the theoretical, socioeconomic, and cultural consolidation, during the 1970s and '80s, of youth-consumer identity in the United States. My title, "Consuming Youth," is a pun linking three discrete but overlapping modes of analysis: (1) an empirically-grounded study of consumer youth culture, seen as the historical by-product of postwar demographic and economic expansion; (2) a psycho-social examination of the libidinal impulse to consume the substance of youth through images and other commodities, seen as the appetitive by-product of a commercial system that instantiates and fetishizes "youth" as the privileged marker of a ludic consumption; and (3) an ideological interrogation-cum-critique of the obsessive cultural "consumption" with youth, seen as the ethico-political by-product of the foregoing.;My subtitle, "Technologies of Desire and American Youth Culture," acknowledges the informing importance of technological systems in mobilizing youth-consumer desire and unfolding the psycho-social horizons of its agency. I focus in particular on the electronic (video) and microelectronic (computer) technologies that have come to define consumer youth culture during this period, viewing them not simply as mechanical apparatuses but as conduits of imagination and potential sites of resistance. Since what is essentially at stake in youth-consumerization is the technological enabling and constraining of the youth(ed) body (as libidinal reservoir, as locus of fantasy), my argument takes the form of situated examinations of two iconic figures--two embodiments--of consuming youth that emerged during the '70s and '80s: the vampire, literally an insatiable consumer, and the cyborg, literally an incarnation of the instrumentalities of consumption.;The first two chapters of the dissertation focus on the vampire and its imbrication with the televisual apparatus, while the final two consider the cyborg and its links with information technologies. Chapters 1 and 3 lay out the theoretical-cultural matrices in which the respective figures operate by means of close readings of specific films (The Lost Boys, Videodrome), and Chapters 2 and 4 outline the socioeconomic contexts constraining their operation by means of wide-ranging discussions of relevant discursive and institutional formations (e.g. Music Television, the novels of Anne Rice, postindustrial theory, cyberpunk subculture).