Getting Loose

Sam Binkley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emerson College.Visit the author’s blog.

• List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction / Mediated Immediacy: Living in the Now 1Part I / Middle Class in the Maelstrom 1. Of Swingers and Organization Men: Loose Modernities 272. Experts Unbound: Intimate Professionals and the Value of Lifestyle 773. Book as Tool: Lifestyle Print Culture and the West Coast Publishing Boom 101Part II / Caring Texts 4. Being One: From Knowledge to Consciousness in the Spaceship Society 1295. Loving Each Other: From Phony to Real in the New Togetherness 1656. Letting It All Hang Out: From Mind to Muscle in the Relaxed Body 207Conclusion / Morning in America: Pulling in the Slack 243Notes 251Bibliography 263Index 287

“Getting Loose is a work of historical sociology that both draws on and challenges central theoretical perspectives on consumption and consumer culture, identity, postmodernism and late modernity, post-Fordism, and contemporary moral culture through exceptionally creative analyses of 1970s lifestyle philosophies and practices.”-Don Slater, author of Consumer Culture and Modernity “Getting Loose is an important and quite interesting study of the discourses of the 1970s lifestyle movement. It casts a whole new light not only on that epoch but, more importantly, on its relationship to contemporary self, identity, and the economy, especially consumer culture. Sam Binkley moves comfortably and insightfully between the most abstract of social theories and the most prosaic of social phenomena, using the former to offer new insights into the latter. He presents a panoramic view of the movement from the 1970s era of the loosening of the self to the reality of the early twenty-first century, where ‘we’re all loose now.’”-George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, and founding editor, Journal of Consumer Culture “[O]ne of the greatest strengths of Getting Loose is its ability to animate the seemingly vague notion of ‘loosening’ in its attention to the specifics of these texts. Perhaps the greatest insight offered is the transformation of the counter-culturally inspired loose life-style into the commercialized mainstream. . . . Binkley’s insights are original and compelling.” - Elana Levine (Journal of American History) “With nearly 600 bibliographic entries, Getting Loose is among the most thorough studies of its kind.The book surveys the period in American society when 1960s counterculture developed into the consumer lifestyles we know today. But Binkley does more than simply mark the transition from yippie to yuppy. He shows how the emancipatory impulses of rebellion helped usher in the new world order of unrestrained global capital.” - Vince Carducci (Popmatters)