Flippant Appropriation

Linda, I didn't interpret your comment as flip. I intended to surprise by pairing trauma and '80s impersonation/replication/imitation. And, while one could occupy a contrary position that Desert Storm wasn't a major war, I would argue it has/had traumatic effects. See, for instance, the sixth chapter in Megan Boler's book Feeling Power entitled "License to Feel."

Anyway. Jan's example struck a different chord (in contrast to Drew's anxiety) with me because it drew upon a figure like Lennon who seems situated in the 60's and 70's. So their absence of knowledge should not be conflated with a preoccupation with Cindi Lauper, for instance. To Jan's example, I would ask a quite different question: how the heck have your students not encountered John Lennon given the cultural preoccupation with the currency of his image as a generative peace symbol (see for example his Warholesque face on the recent Darfur-aid CD entitled "Instant Karma") but perhaps more interestingly, how have these students been interpellated to produce affective responses when presented with the contingencies his death? And, how do representations of his death produced affective effects in order to posit a particular trajectory for action and belief?

Ok, so back to the original question about college kids in the 80's . . . well, I wouldn't begin there. I read their fetish as a response to an already established rhetoric that values that type (retro) of articulation of popular culture. The preoccupation with prior "decades" as symptomatic of a different time is certainly not new, and so it seems more interesting to me how this subjectivity, looking retrospectively for what is "cool" and utilizing that past discourse (or representations of it) in order to produce rhetorical effects, continually recycles itself. But there is this curious, and simultaneously occuring, phenomenon where kids replicate the "look" of, for example, Fall Out Boy in order to contemporaneously dentify with them. My favorite is the Friends flashback where Chandler sports a Flock of Seagulls hairstyle. So, I don't know, I would expand the inquiry and begin to locate how commercial jingles and 80's gear is an effect of something more complex- as part of our cultural subjectivities that look backwards in fetishtic, maybe even melancholic ways. But, to be clear, this is all improvisationally and crudely drawn.

KJ