My body/my playground: Seeking subjectivity beyond the objectification of advertising

Abstract

My Body/My Playground is a theoretical and historical inquiry which firmly locates the spaces in which consumption has infiltrated much of the thinking, and in turn daily practices, of those who understand themselves to be American middle class. It is my theory that the American middle class has become so firmly entrenched in consumption that it has rendered its members objects to, rather than subjects within, its culture. My Body/My Playground narrates the historic and cultural foundation of the hegemony of consumption in an effort to understand an aspect of America's lost subjectivity. It then refocuses our attention on the marked bodies (both tattooed and pierced) of generations X and Y in an effort to locate a possible window in which the body can be employed as a vehicle toward reclaiming subject status. In the end, this text both opens the ways we might collectively read body marking and offers new ways to read personal acts of resistance in an effort toward reclaiming a sense of subjectivity without being forced to exchange it for middle class privilege.