Driver's license
By: Meredith Castile
Series: Object lessons
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 154
ISBN-13: 9781628929133; 9781628929782; 9781628925647
Subjects: Drivers' licenses; Identification cards; Liberty; National security; LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory; PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies
Description: "A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long  symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car  travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to  regulated vice--cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints,  music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become  increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The  airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws.  Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. The  driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of  contemporary American culture--freedom and security, mobility and  checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and  exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in  flux"--

"A lively exploration of how the driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values of contemporary culture and identity, and especially freedom and security, mobility and restriction"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-140) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: AmericaFakeDesignTeenIdentityCivics.