ABSTRACT

Chapter 2 traces the transition of lifestyle from a discourse of social distinction to a commercial media category in the late 1970s and 1980s. It shows how lifestyle became a postfeminist cultural form as it developed in the newly constituted Lifestyle newspaper page and in Martha Stewart’s cookbook and media empire. As the first media to be identified and marketed as lifestyle, these texts drew on its earlier associations with social distinction, but heightened their focus on upscale, aspirational consumption. Stewart tapped into a burgeoning cultural interest in labor-intensive, domestic femininity; her first two books, Entertaining (1982) and Quick Cook (1983), anchor lifestyle in displays of domestic abundance. The chapter shows how neoliberal economic and postfeminist social principles (including a “return” to prefeminist values and an emphasis on material abundance instead of social relations) were articulated to lifestyle during the political-cultural formation of the 1980s. With the success of Martha Stewart’s lifestyle empire, “lifestyle media” comes to describe genres of women’s media centered on home and style; relatedly, media producers begin to see lifestyle as a cheap way to revamp these genres to make them more aspirational and profitable, and thus more directly in line with the needs of capital.