Eighties People: New Lives in the American Imagination [Hardcover]

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.

Through an examination of 1980s America cultural texts and media, Kevin L. Ferguson offers analyses of critical and cultural strategies for fashioning self-knowledge in the American 1980s.

             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-sc?ne really looks like.  Wayne Koestenbaum, lãâ