Consuming Youth : Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption

From the novels of Anne Rice to __The Lost Boys__, from __The Terminator__ to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In __Consuming Youth__, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth. A startling look at youth in our time, __Consuming Youth__ will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Arguing that contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of prosthetic empowerment and predatory exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system, Latham offers detailed readings of major works of fiction, film, and cultural theory that centrally address issues related to youth, technology, and consumption.

MLR

“The value Latham’s study provides . . . lies in his resolutely rational voice in a field that often provokes hysteria, and his insistence on placing these over-theorized . . . icons of popular culture in a social and economic context. . . . Vampires and cyborgs, the undead and the human machine, are not as far apart as their temporal locations in Gothic past and Science Fiction future might indicate. They share the same logic: figures who consume, serially offered up for our eager consumption.”—Catherine Spooner, MLR

— Catherine Spooner

From the novels of Anne Rice to 'The Lost Boys', from 'The Terminator' to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. This book explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. In my introduction I focused principally on the political-economic implications of Marx's metaphor of the vampire-cyborg: how it allows a critique of the capitalist factory as an undead machine that feeds upon and incorporates workers' living substance. From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within popular culture. In this work Rob Latham explains why, giving a perspective on youth culture and the media