Exploring Corporeality in the Context of US Countercultural Movements: Dynamics and Conformist Response

The article analyzes the theory of body perception among countercultural groups such as the “beat generation” and the hippies during the “long sixties”. The author draws parallels between the medieval carnival and nonconformist performance, examining the meaning repertoires embedded in the works of countercultural representatives. These repertoires reflected their attitudes toward the established hierarchy and mainstream society's taboos regarding corporeality. On the one hand, this approach allows the author to analyze certain bodily contexts that were adapted to the dominance of the visual in the hippie era, as well as those that lost relevance once literature receded into the background. On the other hand, it supports the hypothesis of the stereotyping of the nonconformist generation. This stereotyping was linked to their positioning as the “internal Other” at the state level, which was reflected in a series of obscenity trials and the visual coding of hippies in the process of remembering the “long sixties”.