The Voluntary Simplicity Movement: Reimagining the Good Life Beyond Consumer Culture

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Voluntary Simplicity ◽  
Voluntary Simplicity Movement

Making Skin Visible

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L Borgerson ◽  
Jonathan E Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Human Skin ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Body ◽  
Marketing Communications ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Representational Practices

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but ‘blank’ backgrounds or ‘neutral’ meaning spaces. We analyse how skin ‘appears’ to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices.

scholarly journals PERSONAL ASPIRATIONS, THE “GOOD LIFE” AND THE LAW

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIM KASSER
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Legislative Agendas ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ecological Behaviour

[Many of the messages conveyed and laws created by capitalistic, consumer culture encourage the pursuit of goals for wealth, image and status. Sub- stantial research shows, however, that when individuals focus on such “ex- trinsic” goals, they report lower personal well-being and engage in more problematic social and ecological behaviour than when they are oriented towards “intrinsic” pursuits for personal growth, affiliation, and community feeling. Legislative agendas that are designed to increase “time affluence” and protect children from commercialisation are discussed as example ac- tivities lawyers could pursue to help increase intrinsic and decrease extrin- sic aspirations.] 

Tensions Between the Good Life, the Good Profession, and the Good Society

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 667-668
Author(s):  
Isaac Prilleltensky
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Good Society

Is the Good Life the Easy Life?

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie K. Napa ◽  
Laura A. King
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life

AESTHETICS AND THE GOOD LIFE

1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-155
Author(s):  
Esmee Cromie Bellalta
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life

Beautiful Beach Bodies and Muscle Heads

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-123
Author(s):  
John D. Fair
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Guise Of The Good ◽  
Beach Boys ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Age Of Aquarius

Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document