Rebels

“Rebels illustrates the more crucial challenge about the relationship between liberalism, identity, and ‘politics’ as an identitarian practice, which can reach uncomfortably far back into the ideological, economic, and historical roots of the suburbs themselves.” - Victor Cohen, Minnesota Review

“[A]n approachable and well-reasoned work on the cultural contexts of rebellion and identity. . . . [A]n effective study in the origins of the American-influenced themes dominant in popular culture today.” - Andy Lonsdale, M/C Reviews

“[T]his is a strong, interesting book that has some new insights into familiar texts from the 1950s and makes us think again about texts we easily dismiss as unimportant to the Cold War discourse of identity.” - Jay Mechling, Pacific Historical Review

“Medovoi’s Rebels is a hefty contribution to our evolving understanding of mid-century culture. . . . Medovoi moves cold war studies in new directions by examining the rise of identity as a concept after World War II and then by showing how the identification of ‘rebel’ was linked to national allegories about democratic freedom. . . . What is perhaps the most exciting about Medovoi’s thesis is that is helps us understand how the fifties became the sixties.” - Steven Belletto, Contemporary Literature

“Medovoi’s thesis is both simple and elegant: that the rebel, particularly ‘the bad boy,’ was a necessary part of 1950s popular culture as a corollary and corrective to the man in the gray flannel suit. . . . . Medovoi does an excellent job of working through the existing scholarship on the 1950s and, in particular, recent discussions of masculinity in the postwar era. . . . Medovoi’s analysis of rock ’n’ roll as a cultural phenomenon is particularly useful.” - Sarah E. Chinn, GLQ

“Rebels is a great book about bad boys and girls, melodrama and rock ‘n’ roll, and the emergence of ‘identity’ as a site of social concern and capitalist fantasy: a focused, engaging revision of white Cold War pop culture aesthetics in the United States.” - Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“This is a bold and original study of Cold War masculinity, one that will force scholars to reconsider many of their assumptions about the gender and sexual politics of Cold War culture. In showing how the ‘bad boy’ functioned as a sign of democratic possibility, Leerom Medovoi opens up new ways of thinking about the relation between the 1950s and 1960s.” - Robert J. Corber, author of Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity