Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumpion.

Latham, Robert. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumpion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

From the U of Chicago Press website: "From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction" literature, "vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture." Consuming Youth "explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed."

Using Karl Marx's image of the "cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth."[1]

Reviewed, with enthusiastic approval, by Roger Luckhurst, "Perspicacious Consumption," Science Fiction Studies #89 = 30.1 (March 2003): 136-41.[2] — For whatever reason, Erlich was blocked by the site from seeing this review (22 June 2019). Those with JSTOR access might try here.[3]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 13July17, completing 22June19