Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

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Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts, as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France