Ebook: Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture

Americans love to hate consumerism. Scholars, intellectuals, musicians, and writers of all kinds take pleasure in complaining that consumer culture endangers the “real” things in life, including self-determination and individualism. In Authenticity Guaranteed, Sally Robinson brings to light the unacknowledged gender and class assumptions of anti-consumerist critique in the second half of the twentieth century. American anti-consumerism, despite its apparent complexity, takes a remarkably consistent and predictable narrative form. From the mid-century Organization Man to the millennial No Logo, anti-consumerist critique reinforces the gender order by insisting that authenticity is threatened, and masculine agency curtailed, by the feminizing forces of consumer culture.

Robinson identifies a tradition of masculine protest and rebellion against feminization in iconic texts such as The Catcher in the Rye and Fight Club, as well as in critiques of postmodernism, academic denunciations of shopping, and a variety of other discourses that aim to diagnose what ails American consumer culture. This fresh and timely argument enters into conversation with a wide range of existing scholarship and opens up new questions for scholarly and political discussion.

Sally Robinson is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis.

"The strength in this tightly argued book is how the author threads the needle through not only texts that clearly articulate the author’s feminization thesis but those texts that profess not to."—Casey Ryan Kelly, author of Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film

"I’m excited about the ‘big picture’ the book presents and the way it reframes how we think about anti-consumerism—in literature, in film, but also in contemporary cultural and political debates. This is an important book; it’s accessibly written; and it engages compelling issues that are important to scholars of literature and film, but also to feminists and cultural critics more broadly."—Erin A. Smith, author of What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America

"Offering compelling re-readings of popular media and cultural criticism, each chapter takes up one aspect of the complex dynamic between gender, consumerism, and the quest for an authenticity that, according to the author, hasn’t yet been defined."—CHOICE