Abstract

This study focuses on the cultural construction of oil in the United States that occurred during the Great Depression to reexamine accepted historical narratives on race, class, and gender. Though it is present in thousands of products and represented in countless visual forms that we buy and see today, oil has paradoxically become a difficult thing to grasp and concept to represent historically; oil is both physical substance and social material that has defied adequate materialization in scholarship. Of particular interest to this study are the intersections between the symbolic economy surrounding oil use and automobile culture, and how both reflected a particular discourse that defined “American ways of life” and who was deserving of it. Critically, this study examines how automobile ownership and automobility reconfigured particular middle-class imaginaries during the 1930s. A discursive analysis of print advertisements from this time, therefore, provides unique historical insight into the peculiarities of middle-class American lifestyles developed by and premised on the combustion of oil (petroculture), and why today many Americans are loathe to disentangle themselves and their definitions of life from it. Chapter one explores the development of American consumer culture during the early twentieth century that normalized the centrality of oil in human life. Chapter two discusses how and why New Deal policies created societal institutions to provide Americans with “modern” standards of living premised on the mass consumption of oil. Chapter three analyzes how automobile advertisements became the single largest factor promoting petro-capital life in which social, gendered, and racial division were (re)produced and legitimated via acts of oil consumption and the exercise of class power. In so doing, automobile advertisements re-envisioned the aesthetics of life through representations of mobility, freedom, distinction, and modernity; the most prominent fantasies within white, middle-class consumer society mediated and enabled by oil energy.