scholarship on American suburban living / box stores / Disney adults

August 13, 2023 9:21 AM

I'm on the hunt for some scholarship or essays or articles exploring the phenomenon of many Americans wanting pre-packaged, safe, and predictable "known quantity" experiences.

I don't have a perfect thesis here, but it's something to do with trying to uncover why people like basic and pre-packaged experiences.

I'd love to read more about and learn more about why, exactly, certain people -- and specifically white Americans -- are more drawn to wanting to live in the suburbs where things are homogeneous, only go to chain restaurants or box stores, wanting to go to Disney as an adult, wanting to travel abroad only to a resort where everyone speaks English, etc. Obviously there's a degree of fear here, but I think there's a lot of overlap with colonialism, trauma, laziness, American ideals -- and I'd love to have someone lay it all out thoughtfully.

To be clear, I'm not looking for people to necessarily pontificate within this thread -- I'm looking for longer form scholarship, articles, essays, videos, etc. with reasoning and connective tissue. But feel free to add some of your own thoughts with any links you share.

If you have other links to subject matter you think is connected to what I mentioned above, please share!

Thanks in advance.

posted by knownassociate to Society & Culture (15 answers total)

Not quite scholarly, but you might enjoy Joe Queenan's Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon (excerpt) and John Seabrook's Nobrow (excerpt).
posted by box at 9:33 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It may relate to American anxiety and its relationship to the pursuit of happiness. If you expect to be happy, a lot of non-curated experiences might just...not be.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:22 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

My former colleague Chris Niedt runs this institute at Hofstra University. You might explore some of their research and publications.
posted by Dr. Wu at 10:25 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Take a look at Neighborhood of Fear by Kyle Riismandel
posted by knile at 10:28 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can't think of anyone who has written about all of these things together, but certainly there is a literature on individual elements of this.

Box Stores:
To Serve God and Walmart - really interesting look at how Walmart developed, and the religious goals behind it - it's been awhile since I read this, but I recall it also gets into why Walmart appealed to a lot of white rural customers, especially in the early years.

Suburbia:
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South - not exactly an answer to your question, but a helpful overview of some suburban case studies/their appeal/ideologies. This professor recently published a second book related to suburbia/war on drugs.

I don't have an recs for travel/tourism, but I'd search both terms in various academic press websites (Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, etc.) and see what pops up.

Lastly, I know you said you don't want pontifications, but I'll just briefly suggest that it's largely learned. I am a white American who doesn't like any of these things, and I have no doubt that's largely because I was born to parents who never took me to chain stores growing up, and who were into adventurous/off-the-beaten track travel. What is sorta interesting to me is how the Internet, largely through YouTube and Instagram, is influencing more people to shift their approach to travel - I thought this article, which is about this type of traveler more broadly, covered the topic well. Not everyone on Metafilter agreed.
posted by coffeecat at 10:28 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I recently read Meet Me By The Fountain, a really interesting cultural history of suburban malls.
posted by forkisbetter at 11:27 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just to complicate your stereotypes a little bit - the majority of population growth in the suburbs is nonwhite and has been for years. White people are moving to either cities or exurbs, and the people buying the houses they vacate are largely nonwhite.
posted by potrzebie at 11:35 AM on August 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Two books come to mind, neither is particularly recent at this point.

"Celebration, USA" is a recommend based on a most literal interpretation of your question.

"Suburban Warriors" is a good book about the political goals of prior generations of suburbanites in southern CA. I remember really getting a lot out of it.
posted by kensington314 at 11:48 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a classic in the genre. It's over 20 years old and shows in places, but it's basically a meditation on "why cruises?"
posted by damayanti at 12:41 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

A class I took and the book Black Lives and Spatial Matters introduced me to the phrase "white suburban imaginary" which might be some of what you're after. I just skimmed this page I found but it looks promising :

"As demographics changed, whites attempted to construct a “white suburban” imaginary to prevent what many saw as the excesses of a dark or racialized city. Few regions represent this shift as clearly as Southern California, and within Southern California few metropolitan areas illustrate this development as clearly as Los Angeles. Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles explores the construction of a “privatized, consumer oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness and suburban home ownership.” As government policies attempted to reconstruct American identities along consumerist lines, white suburbanites attempted to build a “classless” ideal that separated them from the “darkened” inner city. .... Avila juxtaposes the portrayal of the inner city in Los Angeles film noir with the rise of Disneyland, each representing an idealized/demonized version of metropolitan regions."
posted by sepviva at 6:15 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The 2006 book Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles seems to tackle some of what you're looking for, including discussion of Disney, whiteness, and freeways (the mass building of which facilitated white flight).
posted by bluedaisy at 7:50 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

And here's a very recent (December 2022) research article that might be of interest: "Mothers’ Hopes and Domestic Magic: White Racial Habitus and Fantasies of White Suburban Childhood," from the Journal for the Anthropology of North America.

This article is a collaborative ethnographic examination of the formation of white, middle-class, suburban mothers’ subjectivities and mothers’ roles in the reproduction of racial inequity and structural violence. We focus on their affective labors transforming home spaces and suburban landscapes into white fantasies of childhood, which we describe as kind of domestic magic. We argue at the heart of this white racial habitus is the figure of the child and childhood. The child embodies mothers’ hopes for happy families and motivates their work and sacrifice. Our aim in this article is to show how racialized suffering and violence may not be reproduced by racial animus, neglect or ignorance but by seemingly innocuous hopes to make or conjure idyllic fantasies for children.
posted by bluedaisy at 7:53 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

City Observatory is charting the percent number of 'chain restaurants' by major city and per capita. For example LA is 20% chain restaurants, SF 14%, Nashville 35% with 17 restaurants per 10k people.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:34 AM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space was written in 1992, but its critiques are as relevant as ever.
posted by chevyvan at 4:33 PM on August 14, 2023

The Geography of Nowhere by James Kunstler is about the built environment and the transition from cities to increasingly homogeneous suburbs.

A Consumers’ Republic by Lizabeth Cohen is about the transition starting in the mid-20th century to an American economy based on mass consumption.
posted by scantee at 6:50 PM on August 14, 2023