ABSTRACT
This book charts the cultural history of lifestyle media, and the different ways that they have presented ideals of everyday domestic life to audiences since the 1960s. Drawing on cultural studies and feminist methods, the introduction first unpacks the ideas bound up in the concept of “lifestyle,” including ordinariness, sociability, simplicity, consumption, and class aspiration. It then traces the conceptual roots of the term from psychologist Alfred Adler, who framed it as a phenomenon of individual behavior, and sociologist Max Weber, who framed it as one of social status. Together, these foundations in both selfhood and social belonging form the core of lifestyle’s cultural form in the postwar decades. The introduction argues that throughout their proliferation across a range of women’s media from the 1960s to the 2010s, lifestyle media have historically linked individuals to the social through affect, ordinariness, and consumption. Understanding lifestyle in terms of its historical development as well as its social dimensions offers a more complex assessment than what is typically offered in sociology, which frames lifestyle as ahistorical and fundamentally individualist. In contrast, this introduction argues that lifestyle media cut to the heart of American life, laying bare our desires to be connected to others in meaningful ways; the affects, anxieties, and investments produced by that desire; and, finally, our fundamental inability to conceive of social connectedness without consumer capitalism’s involvement. The introduction thus argues that lifestyle media should be understood as agents of capitalist expansion with a specific gendered logic, as well as a form of idealized social relations that resonates with audiences in particular moments of anxiety relating to the passing of the American dream.
