Full Description
From television, film, and music to sports, comics, and everyday life, this book provides a comprehensive view of working-class culture in America.
The terms "blue collar" and "working class" remain incredibly vague in the United States, especially in pop culture, where they are used to express and connote different things at different times. Interestingly, most Americans are, in reality, members of the working class, even if they do not necessarily think of themselves that way. Perhaps the popularity of many cultural phenomena focused on the working class can be explained in this way: we are endlessly fascinated by ourselves.
Blue-Collar Pop Culture: From NASCAR to Jersey Shore provides a sophisticated, accessible, and entertaining examination of the intersection between American popular culture and working-class life in America. Covering topics as diverse as the attacks of September 11th, union loyalties, religion, trailer parks, professional wrestling, and Elvis Presley, the essays in this two-volume work will appeal to general readers and be valuable to scholars and students studying American popular culture.
Contents
Introduction: Blue-Collar Broadcasting: Television and the American Working Class
M. Keith Booker
Part I: Blue-Collar Television
1. Fred, Homer, and Peter: Working-Class Men in Animated Television from The Flintstones to Family Guy
Bob Batchelor
2. Citizen Bunker: Archie Bunker as Working-Class Icon
Kathleen Collins
3. The Andy Griffith Show:Mayberry as Working-Class Utopia
Derek H. Alderman, Terri Moreau, and Stefanie Benjamin
4. Blue Collars/White Trash: The Poor White Stereotype in Blue-Collar Society as Enacted in The Beverly Hillbillies
April E. Thompson
5. Poor Southern Whites as the Other in The X-Files and Other Recent Works of Popular Culture
Grant Bain
6. Domestic Goddess: Roseanne as Working-Class Icon
Angie Fitzpatrick
7. Blue-Collar Science Fiction Television: Working for the Future
M. Keith Booker
8. Tony Soprano, Postmodern Scholarship Boy: Class in The Sopranos
M. Keith Booker
9. Working the Case: The Wire and Working-Class Cops on American Television
Tim Libretti
10. Rescue Me: Working-Class Content, Middle-Class Style
M. Keith Booker
11. The Folding of the American Working Class in Mad Men
Enrica Picarelli
12. Class and the Representation of Workers in Children's Television
Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora
13. A Class Act: Cast(e)ing in Kid Nation
Kimberly Eberhardt Casteline and Shu-Ling Chen Berggreen
14. When the Travel Channel Eats: Class, Identity, and Eating to Excess in Television Food Shows
Peter Naccarato and Kathleen LeBesco
Part II: Everyday Blue-Collar Culture
15. The Working Class in American Comics
Will Allred
16. Si se Puede: Liberation Theology and Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign
Matthew D. Towles
17. Jim Bishop's Colorado Castle: A Self-Made Monument to Work
Brian Comfort
18. Money in the Ruins: The Conversion of Abandoned Blue-Collar Worksites into Tourist Attractions
Laura Hapke
Index
About the Contributors
