Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism

Abstract

Postmodernity, the cultural mode of neoliberalism, reduces history to a set of discourses with the concomitant assertion that the individual’s knowledge of the real emerges from an engagement with images of the real The economic structures of neoliberalism encourage rugged individualism, self-reliance, and assert a spurious gender equality. Mad Men, a contemporary media product situated in media-derived nostalgia demonstrates how audiences read the past through the postmodern, neoliberal discourse of style. These readings encourage an ahistorical understanding of gender and class that reinforces neoliberal suppression of people as members of political classes.