The post-war period of the late 40s and 50s was the heyday of conformity. The armies of flannel-suited executives marched off to interchangeable offices in cookie-cutter skyscrapers; housewives baked meatloaf in their self-cleaning ovens while 2.5 children frolicked in identical back yards of identical split-level tract houses in the mushrooming Levittowns of the American dream-these were the images that defined the paradigm of mid-century American culture. Dedication to conformity enabled political conservatism to put Likable Ike in the White House and Nixon and McCarthy on the trail of the Red Menace, the perceived refuge of such blatantly anti-conformative groups as beatniks and homosexuals.

The two articles in this section address some ways in which such socially deviant groups were either repressed and their artistic production censored, as in the case of homosexuality, or, as were the Beats, trivialized, co-opted and sanitized by the popular media.

Using the example of the censorship of physique photography in "Aestheticizing Masculinity: The Example of Physique Photography," William Stern demonstrates how the denial of homoeroticism encouraged the de-aestheticization of the male body, resulting ultimately in the triumph of the formalist aesthetic which was itself epitomized by the testosterone-drenched productions of the Abstract Expressionists. Similarly, in "Beat, Beatnik, or Diet Beat: The Choice of a New Generation" Mitchell Smith outlines the steps by which a dangerously non-con-formist literary and intellectual movement was defused, transformed into a caricature of itself, eventually becoming nothing more than an advertising gimmick pushing the virtues of a particular brand of gin or trousers.

Both articles make the point that the modernist preoccupation with form over content serves to transform social entities which are perceived as dangerously abnormal into possibly amusing and certainly harmless marginalities. Both demonstrate how the relatively easy transition from art to fashion can be used to disarm potentially serious threats to the established order.