Lifestyle Media in American Culture Gender, Class, and the Politics of Ordinariness

This book explores the emergence of "lifestyle" in the US, first as a term that has become an organizing principle for the self and for the structure of everyday life, and later as a pervasive form of media that encompasses a variety of domestic and self-improvement genres, from newspaper columns to design blogs. Drawing on the methodologies of cultural studies and feminist media studies, and built upon a series of case studies from newspapers, books, television programs, and blogs, it tracks the emergence of lifestyle’s discursive formation and shows its relevance in contemporary media culture. It is, in the broadest sense, about the role played by the explosion of lifestyle media texts in changing conceptualizations of selfhood and domestic life.

Introduction: A Better Everyday Is Waiting for You1. Life-Style: The History of an Idea2. Empires of the Everyday: Gender, Entertaining, and the Emergence of Lifestyle Media3. Logics of Lifestyle: Cable, Class, and Domesticity on HGTV and the Food Network4. The Trading Spaces Train Wreck: Blandness and Lifestyle Anxiety on TLC5. Fantasies of Production: Digital Lifestyle Media and Women’s WorkConclusion: Lifestyle Unmoored

Maureen E. Ryan is an instructor in media and cinema studies at DePaul University, USA. She is the co-editor, with Jessalynn Keller, of the collection Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture.