Driver’s License

✍ Scribed by Meredith Castile

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 161
• Series: Object Lessons
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

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.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Chapter 1 AMERICA
Desperado Pilgrims
Chapter 2 FAKE
Drunk
Handmade
Digital
Buying in
Thirty years in the desert
Insecure
Syndicates
Chapter 3 DESIGN
Clean
Invincible
Estranged
History
The pursuit of—pursuit of
Chapter 4 TEEN
Rebel, fetish, chore
Chapter 5 IDENTITY
The forged photo
This is not a person
Who sees the license?
Photoshoot
Covered
Secular
I versus I-prime versus I-prime-prime versus ...
Outed
Chapter 6 CIVICS
Remotely yours, xoxo, America
Suspensions
Disenfranchisement
Documenting the undocumented
Imagined futures
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Index