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The Ironic Contradictions in the Discourse on Generation X or How `Slackers' are Saving Capitalism

University of Michigan rjheiman{at}umich.edu

In the early 1990s, youth in the US were deemed a generation of `slackers'. Marketing and advertising agencies capitalized upon this mix of concern and blame concerning Generation X. This article explores the ways that these representations reflect changes within and anxieties about the future of the professional-managerial class. I suggest that these images have been also inadvertently shaping the subjectivities of the younger members of this generation. In so doing, they may be helping create the flexible worker that appears to be enabling the capitalist system to regulate itself during contemporary shifts to transnational capitalism.

Key Words: capitalism • class • popular culture • United States • youth

Childhood, Vol. 8, No. 2, 274-292 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/0907568201008002008


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