Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism

The neoliberal cultural mode of postmodernity 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 and self-reliance, and assert a spurious gender equality. The contemporary series Mad Men is situated in media-derived nostalgia and 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