| This dissertation traces the emergence of lifestyle as a concept and a form of media in American culture, examining its relationship to gender, capitalism, and everyday life. It argues that lifestyle is a transmedia cultural form that links individuals to social life through affect and consumption. Drawing on cultural studies methodologies, the dissertation charts the emergence of the concept of lifestyle during the postwar period and the consolidation of lifestyle as a cultural form through the domestic, consumerist media with which the term became associated. The term "lifestyle" was first applied as a marker of social difference to African-Americans, homosexuals, and the hippie counterculture in the 1960s, and was re-articulated by marketers to address mainstream print audiences in the 1970s. Lifestyle became a television format instructing audiences in gendered domestic pursuits in the 1980s and 90s through the efforts of Martha Stewart and cable channels Home and Garden Television and the Food Network, and it migrated onto blogs as a form of entrepreneurial domestic labor in the mid-2000s. Throughout, this dissertation demonstrates that lifestyle's ordinariness, its blend of instruction and inspiration, and its idealized visions of sociability were instrumental both to media producers as a form of media that encouraged consumption and to audiences as its shifting constructions of ordinariness helped them make sense of the diminishing forms of middle-class social life in an era of neoliberal economic restructuring. |
