保守的抵抗：在新的經濟衝擊下，再造美國車迷的認同與五○年代汽車文化   全文下載

Conservative Resistance: U.S. Auto-fans’ Re-making of Identities and 50s Car Culture in the Recent Economy

本文主張，抵抗不必然是基進的，但可以是保守的，這與早期文化研究學者的論點頗有差異。這個主張是根據一個較大型的人種誌與生命史研究之發現所得到的。此研究記錄了一個有趣的過程：在本世紀初美國受經濟全球化重創的期間，一小群具有大量勞工階級經驗、住在美國東北部的中年白人把一般認為是與宗教無關的，叛逆的五○年代汽車文化轉變成具有顧家傾向的，很有宗教意義的，而且仍是很有男性氣概的汽車文化。透過上述這個過程，這些人一方面展現了對中產階級文化與用車行為的反動，另一方面也顯示了他／她們對保守主義與不公平性別結構的再強化以及對世俗主義的反駁。這些人同時也形塑了他／她們的自我認同──保守的、顧家的、熱衷於改車的基督徒。

This paper discusses the findings of an ethnographic and life-history study that investigated those stories of several middle-aged white American auto-fans who ran a church and a car club together from 1999 to 2008. This research found that while being situated in the 2000s America, impacted by global economic restructuring, ordinary people could carry out resistant cultural practices against an unjust class structure, which did not lead to a progressive social transformation—an argument contrary to cultural studies scholars’—but a conservative resistance. These practices demonstrated the reinforcement of conservatism, the reproduction of gender structure, and the denegation of secularism. This research made such an argument because of the following reasons: although these subjects turned to those manual practices of automobile culture in order to form their masculine and working-class identities and restore their male honor, damaged by the global economy and the class structure, they were not led to a dead end or an unsettled life trajectory, as participants of rebellious working-class car cultures often did. Rather, these male research participants drew on conservative evangelical Christians’ symbolic strategy to transmute meaning of the 1950s car culture from a rebellious culture to a family-oriented one, and those Christians’ traditional family values to reconcile the conflict between family responsibility and automobile interest. These men practiced their sense of being family-oriented through organizing auto-related leisure activities for their families. They also reconsidered as a money saving strategy and thus, family-oriented (and duplicated) the 1950s car culture’s Do-It-Yourself auto-modification practices. Such reconciliation made those women around them willingly accept their family-oriented and still sexist, exclusive, culture, and thus the men’s ascendancy, because for those women their men were better than other auto-fans of more aggressive car cultures. In the end, these men identified themselves as family-oriented and autoenthusiastic Christians.