1st Edition
Lifestyle Media in American Culture Gender, Class, and the Politics of Ordinariness
This book explores the emergence of "lifestyle" in the US, first as a term that has become an organizing principle for the self and for the structure of everyday life, and later as a pervasive form of media that encompasses a variety of domestic and self-improvement genres, from newspaper columns to design blogs. Drawing on the methodologies of cultural studies and feminist media studies, and built upon a series of case studies from newspapers, books, television programs, and blogs, it tracks the emergence of lifestyle’s discursive formation and shows its relevance in contemporary media culture. It is, in the broadest sense, about the role played by the explosion of lifestyle media texts in changing conceptualizations of selfhood and domestic life.
Introduction: A Better Everyday Is Waiting for You
1. Life-Style: The History of an Idea
2. Empires of the Everyday: Gender, Entertaining, and the Emergence of Lifestyle Media
3. Logics of Lifestyle: Cable, Class, and Domesticity on HGTV and the Food Network
4. The Trading Spaces Train Wreck: Blandness and Lifestyle Anxiety on TLC
5. Fantasies of Production: Digital Lifestyle Media and Women’s Work
Conclusion: Lifestyle Unmoored
Biography
Maureen E. Ryan is an instructor in media and cinema studies at DePaul University, USA. She is the co-editor, with Jessalynn Keller, of the collection Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture.