Sixties Counterculture Research Articles

Review: Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, by John Markoff

Review: <i>Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand</i>, by John Markoff

Revolutions Per Minute: A Symposium on the Sixties Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand

Revolutions Per Minute: A Symposium on the Sixties Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand attracted a diverse group of academics, activists, historians, hippies and punters-without-portfolio. 29 May 2021.

Impact of Sixties Counterculture on World History: Overlooked Sources

Impact of Sixties Counterculture on World History: Overlooked Sources

The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture, by Michael J. Kramer

The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture, by Michael J. Kramer

Dramatic Protests, Creative Communities: VVAW and the Expressive Politics of the Sixties Counterculture

This article locates the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) within the context of the sixties counterculture. More specifically, it explores how VVAW's membership adopted an expansive definition of politics that relied on cultural forms such as guerrilla theater and community activism to convey their antiwar message. In the past, scholars have subdivided sixties protest into the categories of “expressive” and “instrumental” activism. This essay adds to the growing scholarship of the “long sixties” and challenges the division of protest into these two categories using VVAW to reveal the porous nature of cultural/expressive and political/instrumental activism. It illustrates how activists took advantage of this cross‐pollinating tendency to cultivate creative forms of protest that transcended the narrow boundaries separating hippies from politicos, and how VVAW's cultural politics gave rise to a unique antiwar veterans' culture premised on dramatic street theater, experimental self‐healing, and a deep suspicion of centralized authority.

Michael J. Kramer. The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 304 pp. $29.99 (Hardcover). Devon Powers. Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism. Amherst

Michael J. Kramer. The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 304 pp. $29.99 (Hardcover). Devon Powers. Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism. Amherst

Demonizing the Sixties: Possession Stories and the Crisis of Religious and Medical Authority in Post-Sixties American Popular Culture

In his Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1998), Philip Roth evoked image of demonic possession to describe 1960s in United States. His protagonist, Jewish-American glove manufacturer nicknamed the Swede, finds his suburban dream world shattered when his only child, bright young girl who stutters, becomes an antiwar terrorist and kills several innocent people in stream of Weatherman-like bombings. Following these horrors, Swede finds that he must reflect upon everything he ever did as parent. In end, however, neither he nor his wife takes responsibility for their daughter and instead they choose to blame demons of times. The Swede tells himself that his daughter's violent hatred of America was disease unto itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American. .. But back then he hadn't dared to explain to her why he did for fear of unleashing demon... And by that time he had no influence anyway. In what way was she 'his' any longer if she hadn't been his then? Stuttering, spluttering little bitch! Who fuck did she think she was? (206-07) With such words, Roth portrayed sixties not as political or personal emancipation-what Hunter S. Thompson called high and beautiful wave (68)-but rather as demonic nihilism and anarchy. This force had set children against their parents and ended what Roth's fellow novelist John Updike called the great American ride (3).In truth, when Roth used possession as metaphor for sixties, he was returning to worn theme in American popular culture: namely, large literature about demonology and paranormal that first appeared in mid-sixties and by late had become veritable industry. Unlike Roth, these writers asked their readers to treat their stories not figuratively but literally; they should follow established horror genre conventions by suspending conventional verisimilitude and by accepting supernatural as possible reality.1 To achieve this effect, writers set their stories in contemporary US society and suggested that demonic forces had turned American dream into living hell. At first blush, as Stephen King observed, genre was a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in late sixties and early seventies (169).In what follows, I show how popular writers used demonic possession to get beyond basic theme of generational conflict and instead dramatize deeper crisis in American society. In these works, authors painted picture in which everywhere in America traditional authority was falling apart and all old values had dissipated. It was an ethos that theologian Paul Tillich once described, as demonic-the urge to destroy cultural form. In so doing, these books proffered what I shall be calling metaphysical critique of postsixties values. Here, they took memories of sixties counterculture and political radicalism and literally demonized both of them. According to this vision, supernatural forces had instigated whole sixties phenomenon. Worse yet, traditional authorities were somehow unwilling or unable to contain threat-or were collaborating with it.Three pivotal books, I argue, shaped this metaphysical critique: Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971), and David Seltzer's The Omen (1976). These three books-which critics and historians rarely analyze as group-were commercial blockbusters and quickly became successful films, thereby broadening their cultural reach.2 In each tale, demonology underscored specific crisis in values: namely, how legitimate or traditional authority was seemingly collapsing in American society. This felt collapse manifested itself in marked sub-theme about two professional groups usually associated with social order and respectability: doctors and priests. Yet, in this case, neither professional group seemed able to control social disorder, or they were instead portrayed as contributing to problem. …

Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture

Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture

Book Review: Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities and Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture

Book Review: Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities and Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture

Flower Children: The Women

Flower Children:The Women Lauri Umansky (bio) Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo . Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009. xii + 256 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. A cloudburst of nostalgia and apologia for the 1960s rained upon the United States in 2009, punctuated by commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock music festival and the Public Theatre's Broadway revival of the rock musical Hair. Not that the long decade of the Sixties has at any point been absent from American cultural fare since its demise in, say, 1975. In music and fashion, television and film, hairstyles and "lifestyles"—in every cultural form imaginable—Sixties culture has been sustained, reprised, and mythologized for well over thirty years now. Scholars have had their say, too. Scores of books have considered the Vietnam War and the war at home, the movements for social justice, and the machinery of reaction. The counterculture, for all its zany excess, has received a level of scrutiny seldom bestowed on a youth rebellion. What Vice President Spiro Agnew famously characterized as a "whole damn zoo" of rebels—of "Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike"—former radicals David Horowitz and Peter Collier, slouching toward the cultural and political Right, later dubbed a "destructive generation," dismissing the 1960s as an era "overrated and unmourned."1 Yet Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s (2002), perhaps the best scholarly treatment of the Sixties counterculture to date, take the children of Aquarius at their own word, as did Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1968) and Charles Reich in The Greening of America (1970). Make no mistake, they say: these long-haired, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking, acid-dropping, commune-dwelling, nature-loving, music-making, sex-sharing "freaks" were rebels for a cause: the cause of remaking society to reject warmongering and artifice, alienation and repression; to reflect instead the jouissance of life unfettered by the restrictive norms of a corrupt and moribund society. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy place the youth counterculture of the Sixties in a still more attenuated context of rebellion that includes the Abrahamic and the Socratic, the Transcendentalist and the [End Page 753] Parisian bohemian, in their sometimes serious romp, Counter Culture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (2004). Within this torrent of retrospection, the experience of women in the Sixties has received uneven treatment. Most scholarly overviews of the 1960s in the U.S. discuss the development of second-wave feminism, tracking activist women's consciousness of gender oppression in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, as in the New Left and other progressive movements, to their eventual creation of a decentralized, multifaceted set of organizations that sought to challenge male dominance and empower women. Todd Gitlin's participant-observer narrative, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), for example, discusses women's experiences intermittently throughout the text, before honing in with a chapter titled, "Women: Revolution within the Revolution." Scholarship focused explicitly on women in the Sixties also trends toward a tributary analysis in which rivulets of discontent in mainstream culture, counterculture, and radical movements eventually culminate in a feminist surge by the late Sixties. With a few exceptions, the counterculture receives sparse attention in studies of women in the 1960s, while women get short shrift in analyses of the counterculture. In Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo seeks to redress these lapses. She challenges two standard and related assertions in the literature: first is that women in the counterculture suffered exploitation as domestic drudges and child breeders in much the same way, ironically, as women in mainstream, mid-twentieth-century American culture; added to that burden, hippie women faced sexual maltreatment in a counterculture caught up in the rapture of sexual revolution. Second is that the truly beneficial and lasting legacies of the 1960s for women resulted from organized feminist activism, not from the more amorphous, frivolous, and male-dominated counterculture. Each of these assertions contains a dose of truth, Lemke-Santangelo contends, but neither reveals the complexity of...

Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture by Gretchen Lemke‐Santangelo

Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture by Gretchen Lemke‐Santangelo

Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (review)

Reviewed by: Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture Debra Michals Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009; 256 pages. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1633-6 (cloth) Most studies of the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s have primarily depicted men as the dominant actors and women as the "extras," background players who participated in, benefited from, and were used by the hippie movement but who made seemingly little impact in shaping it or its legacy. When treated at all, they are described as "chicks," playmates and lovers to the movement's male leaders and rank-and-file or objectified in hippie art. At the same time, histories of the women's liberation movement similarly make little reference to countercultural women, except to see them as the antithesis of feminism's goals of either full equality and rights within the existing system—as liberal feminists sought—or [End Page 169] the creation of an entirely new world that would abolish oppressive gender norms and stereotypes—as radical feminists wanted. In fact, histories of the counterculture and feminism have remained largely separate, tracing parallel paths with scant reference to any possible convergence. As such, these works have inadvertently perpetuated the invisibility of hippie women and their significance to the development of and the changes wrought by both the counterculture and women's liberation. It is this void that Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo seeks to address in Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. A professor of history at St. Mary's College, Lemke-Santangelo not only wants to reclaim the long-silenced voices of hippie women, but more importantly, she hopes to fuse feminist and countercultural histories by staking a claim for hippie women as the "co-architects"—with radical feminists—of what scholars have come to call cultural feminism. She further argues that hippie women's experimentation with and authority around spirituality, peace, alternative health, organic foods, and environmentalism infused what would become the New Age movement that took hold by the 1980s. Lemke-Santangelo makes her case first by reinterpreting the conventional gender roles women played within the counterculture. To be sure, despite its revolutionary zeal, the counterculture was sexist, "heteronormative . . . and hierarchical," and relegated women to domestic and helpmeet roles that on the surface looked very much like the 1950s patriarchy these women claimed to be escaping. But using a range of sources from printed memoirs to oral histories, Lemke-Santangelo points out two important differences. First, hippie women rejected the oppressive social norms around women's bodies; instead of the sanctity of virginity in marriage, hippie women embraced and celebrated their bodies and the right to be sexually expressive with whomever they wanted. Second, and most importantly for Lemke-Santangelo, although men did the intellectual heavy lifting and dominated hippie newspapers and art, women were more than just "domestic drudges." Instead, she argues, because the counterculture created a lifestyle that rejected mainstream middle-class consumerist culture, hippie women imbued their domestic work with a new politics. Living on communes and reclaiming agrarian practices of an earlier America, hippie women understood their domesticity within a larger revolutionary political agenda. As Lemke-Santangelo writes, hippie women revived "an older, agrarian ideal that assigned greater value and visibility [End Page 170] to female productive labor" and made women's work seem "more varied, creative and challenging—performed in the service of countercultural ideals." This view of themselves as agents of change aligned perfectly with another aspect of countercultural ideology: that of the centrality of the feminine in creating a new and better world. Lemke-Santangelo persuasively argues that, although the counterculture embraced separate gender roles and traditional male leadership, it also celebrated the values it defined as naturally feminine. Women's so-called "innate" qualities of nurturing, compassion, and creativity were celebrated in a movement that expected a confluence of the best of masculine and feminine virtue to form the core of a new culture. Empowered, hippie women took these ideas and ran with them, says Lemke-Santangelo. In several compelling chapters, she argues that although essentialist, the celebration of the feminine difference led hippie women to...

Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture

Book Review| July 01 2010 Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. Debra Michals Debra Michals Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2010) 4 (2): 169–172. https://doi.org/10.2307/41887663 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Debra Michals; Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1 July 2010; 4 (2): 169–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41887663 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal for the Study of Radicalism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies

Child & Family Social WorkVolume 12, Issue 1 p. 105-106 Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies Emilie Smeaton, Emilie Smeaton Research ManagerThe Railway ChildrenSearch for more papers by this author Emilie Smeaton, Emilie Smeaton Research ManagerThe Railway ChildrenSearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 December 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2206.2007.00478.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume12, Issue1February 2007Pages 105-106 RelatedInformation

A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965, and: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (review)

Reviewed by: A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965, and: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles Jan-Christopher Horak (bio) A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 by Paul ArthurUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2005 The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles by David E. JamesUniversity of California Press, 2005 Until recently, the history of American avant-garde cinema was written by critics who were often filmmakers themselves or polemicists for the avant-garde, so that their historical narratives were imbricated with other agendas. Descriptions and analyses of avant-garde films went hand in hand with valorizing specific filmmakers. Given the focus on individual works, most histories eschewed discussions of cultural contexts or theoretical frameworks in favor of enlightened connoisseurship. Unanswered were questions of how various avant-garde movements were constituted through institutional networks, historical ruptures, and continuities. As I noted in Lovers of Cinema, "Avant-garde film movements can only be historically circumscribed if they are constituted in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Their role in the history of cinema should not only be gauged according to their individual aesthetic achievements, but also in terms of the myriad contexts of their institutional frameworks and reception."1 The two new books reviewed here are very different, but both are informed by similar concerns for establishing historical contexts. While Arthur's monograph is a collection of essays focusing on a more narrowly defined modernist film avant-garde in America, organized according to a rough chronology from the 1960s to the present, James's history of alternative film production [End Page 142] in Los Angeles over the past ninety years is a monumental work of historical synthesis that seeks to place Los Angeles beside San Francisco and New York as a center of avant-garde practice. Originally published between 1982 and 2003 and reworked for the present volume, Paul Arthur's essays chronicle the American avant-garde's checkered trajectory through the past forty years. As both an acute observer and critic and a participant in the avant-garde—he has been closely associated with Millennium Film Journal—Arthur writes both from within the movement and from outside it, being also an academic film historian. His book's title, then, refers both to the internal vision of the filmmakers as constituted in aesthetic artifacts and to the external vision of the audience and its construction. While each chapter can stand alone, Arthur notes continuities in his introduction: "the legacy of sixties counterculture; uses and theoretical implications of found footage; the allegorizing of technology; intersections of personal and social histories; the philosophical schism between poetic, expressive tropes and structural film's anti-subjective, rationalist basis" (xiii). Arthur's first chapter focuses on Jonas Mekas while discussing the rise of what was then called new American cinema in the context of the burgeoning 1960s counterculture, seeing in the culture at large the very same elements of incompleteness, fragmentation, and presentness in Mekas's diary films and exhibition/distribution projects. Quoting Mekas's dictum, "The policy of NO POLICY is also a policy," Arthur sees the sense of improvisation, of going with the flow, of staying independent by never tying yourself down as key to both the success and weakness of the times. An intense distrust of language went hand in glove with the lack of definitions, because language could be used by the ruling class to control. In chapters 2 and 3, then, the urge to capture the moment is explicated in terms of film portraiture and cityscapes, respectively. While the work of Andy Warhol (Eat, Henry Geldzahler) serves as an example of portraiture, Arthur next discusses numerous city symphonies from Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round to Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma to Ernie Gehr's Signal—Germany on the Air. Common to all these projects is a radical subjectivity that insisted on the primacy of aesthetics and formal experimentation over politics. In the 1970s, then, the American avant-garde turned away from its "desire to exist outside history" by embracing what Foucault has called "the archive." Influenced as much by...