Driving after Class

"A paradoxical situation emerged in the late 1990s: the dramatic upscaling of the suburban American dream, even as the possibilities for achieving and maintaining it diminished. Driving After Class explores middle-class anxieties and suburban life during those years. Drawing on nineteen months of ethnographic research in a suburban New Jersey town as McMansions sprouted up next to subdivisions of moderately sized colonial-style homes and infrastructural essentials like schools and roads became overburdened, each chapter throws into relief subtle gradations within the middle class and among middle-class sensibilities, and brings to life the ways that people were reorienting themselves--both consciously and unconsciously--to the discursive and material displacement of postwar liberal approaches to middle-class life in favor of newly dominant neoliberal logics. The ethnographic moments illustrated in the book, drawn from fieldwork in people's homes, their town hall, and their SUVs, reveal the ways that efforts to appease feelings of insecurity--whether through place-making practices, childrearing strategies, or 'had-to-have' purchases--often made people (and their neighbors) feel and