About the Book
While Americans prize the ability to get behind the wheel and hit the open road, they have not always agreed about what constitutes safe, decorous driving and who is capable of it. Mobility without Mayhem is a lively cultural history of America's fear of and fascination with driving, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Jeremy Packer analyzes how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic laws, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in films, television, magazines, and newspapers. Whether considering motorcycles as symbols of rebellion and angst, or the role of CB radio in regulating driving and in truckers' evasions of those regulations, Packer shows that ideas about safe versus risky driving often have had less to do with real dangers than with drivers' identities. In each chapter, Packer focuses on a different cultural figure that has been singled out as particularly dangerous. Women drivers, hot-rodders, bikers, hitchhikers, truckers, those who "drive while black," and road ragers have all been targets of fear.As Packer debunks claims about the dangers posed by each figure, he exposes biases against marginalized populations, anxieties about social change, and commercial and political desires to profit by fomenting fear.
Over-stressed women, youthful hitchhikers, African Americans purportedly engaged in criminal activity--certain populations have been labeled as dangerous or deviant, he argues, to legitimate monitoring and regulation and, ultimately, to curtail access to automotive mobility. Packer reveals how the boundary between personal freedom and social constraint is continually re-negotiated in discussions about safe, proper driving.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Auto-Mobile America 1
1. The Crusade for Traffic Safety: Mobilizing the Suburban Dream 27
2. Hitching the Highway to Hell: Media Hysterics and the Politics of Youth Mobility 77
3. Motorcycle Madness: The Insane, the Profane, and Newly Tame 111
4. Communications Convoy: The CB and Truckers 161
5. Of Cadillacs and "Coon Cages": The Racing of Automobility 189
6. Raging with a Machine: Neoliberalism Meets the Automobile 231
7. Safety to Security: Future Orientations of Automobility 267
Notes 293
Works Cited 325
Index 341
About the Author :
Jeremy Packer is Associate Professor of Communication and a faculty member in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media graduate program and the Science, Technology, and Society program at North Carolina State University. He is a coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality and Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History.
Review :
"Engaging with lively debates in contemporary cultural studies, including critical geography, technological/social history, and popular culture studies, Jeremy Packer denaturalizes the common-sense assumptions that inform our culture's conceptions of drivers and driving." Jeffrey Sconce, editor of Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics "For all that the United States trumpets individualism, it is a nation of obedience--to church, kin, commodity, conquest, and, perhaps above all, car. Jeremy Packer takes us along a wild but always disciplined drive in the fast lane of cultural studies."--Toby Miller, author of The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject "Jeremy Packer has scoured the byways of American history and media to bring back this telling account of how mobility is governed. Along the way, he deepens our understanding of how a culture of individualism, risk, and competitiveness is in fact organized and controlled--by inculcating self-discipline in the name of safety. Freedom is constrained by security, self-expression by surveillance; the American Dream fizzles out in 'road rage.' What does this tell us about contemporary America?"--John Hartley, author of Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture
