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The fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture frequently make recreational and ideological "fun" of poverty and lower class living. In this book, Halnon delineates how incarceration, segregation, stigmatization, cultural and social consecration, and carnivalization work in the production and consumption of inequality.

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Introduction: Weapons of Mass Distraction 1. Financial Crisis, Ideology, and Alienation 2. Critiquing Postmodernist Zeitgeist 3. Prison Chic 4. Black Ghetto Cool 5. White Trash Stigma 6. Super Trash Spectacles 7. Blue Collar Vogue 8. Redneck and Blue Collar Comedy Conclusion: Tourists, Victims, and Deadening Others

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Karen Bettez Halnon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University-Abington, USA.

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