Eighties People
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Reviews / Votes
"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-scène really looks like." - Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays
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Content
Introduction: The Love Affair with Labels: New Subjects in the Eighties
1. The Surrogate Mother: Sed mater certissima?
2. The Crack Baby: Children Fight the War on Drugs
3. The Person with AIDS: Graphic Humor and Graphic Illness
4. The Yuppies and the Yuckies: Anxieties of Affluence
5. The Brat Pack and its Mommy: Motherhood in the Age of Yuppiebacks
Coda: The Ventriloquy of Childhood
