Driving after class: Youth and suburban life in the boom economy.

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the cultural politics of class in Marlboro Township, a suburban New Jersey community largely made up of white-flight emigres from the outer boroughs of New York City, particularly Brooklyn. Town residents have been experiencing first-hand the economic chasm splintering the shrinking middle class, a divide dramatically exacerbated during the economic boom of the late 1990s. I conducted two years of fieldwork in Marlboro (1997--1999) to investigate how the economic shift was being articulated in the intimate spaces and quotidian moments of family life, youth culture, and municipal debates. Through participant observation and interviews focusing on key sites, such as zoning board meetings, home interiors, sport-utility vehicles, and board of education meetings, the research explored the ways that class anxieties intersect with memories of an ambivalent urban past and trepidation about the security of American Dream aspirations. Each ethnographic moment analyzed brings to life the means by which emerging class subjectivities are produced, and how they shaped the architecture of the community, the social make-up of its schools, and the larger economic system. The account as a whole illuminates Gramsci-inspired regulation theory. The central argument in the dissertation is that the economic boom of the late 1990s created the conditions for transforming the liberal myth of rugged individualism into a structure of feeling I have termed rugged entitlement. As state entitlements continued to be chipped away, a sense of entitlement to the privileges (and accoutrements) of the middle classes was nevertheless amplified. Class anxieties emerging from these conditions played out in a nervous and somewhat aggressive struggle for the maintenance (or at least, appearance) of privilege. While there are no gated communities in Marlboro, and town residents appear to have not lost faith in the liberal promise of postwar-style suburbia, my work in this town uncovers significant non-architectural mechanisms of gating. They are extraordinarily powerful and operate in subtle ways, through the everyday production of habits, desires, and sentiments; the racialized, gendered, and class-encoded organization of space; and the discursive and linguistic policing of borders and boundaries via humor, rumor, heckling, and coded language.