Eighties People

Kevin L. Ferguson is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, the City University of New York, USA. His work has been published in such journals as Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and the Journal of Medical Humanities. He earned his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA, where his dissertation received the Lloyd Davis Memorial Prize for Distinguished Work in Cultural Studies.

"Kevin Ferguson's Eighties People brings into new focus a decade whose complex cultural history we are only just beginning to fully recognize. With its previously unheard stories and unconsidered characters, this lively and engaging book offers a fresh intervention in the periodization of the 1980s and on the controversies that shaped 1980s American culture. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America's recent cultural past." - Graham Thompson, University of Nottingham, UK "In lucid prose, and with a deft, diagnostic touch, Kevin L. Ferguson decodes stock figures of the 1980s, while giving us an inspiring model of how to be a skilled demystifier. In the spirit of Foucault, but with more wit and tragicomedy, he cleans the camera-lens and helps us see what history's myth-cluttered mise-en-scene really looks like." - Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays

• Introduction: The Love Affair with Labels: New Subjects in the Eighties1. The Surrogate Mother: Sed mater certissima?2. The Crack Baby: Children Fight the War on Drugs3. The Person with AIDS: Graphic Humor and Graphic Illness4. The Yuppies and the Yuckies: Anxieties of Affluence5. The Brat Pack and its Mommy: Motherhood in the Age of YuppiebacksCoda: The Ventriloquy of Childhood