Representing Agency In Popular Culture

Representing Agency in Popular Culture addresses the intersection of child and youth agency and popular culture. Here, scholars expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, identifying popular culture as an important source of inspiration and inquiry within the future of childhood studies.

This is a book about popular culture and the role it plays in people's lives and in American society. The first section of the book, on theoretical concerns, deals with the meanings of the terms popular and culture, with how cultures vary, and with the impact popular culture has on our personalities. It discusses a number of ways of analyzing popular culture texts and then considers the relationship between popular culture and political cultures and other social groups. The second section of the book contains analyses of topics such as the Superbowl, the sitcom Frasier, Bloopers, and everyday rites and rituals. The title of the book comes from a chapter which offers an extended ethnography the author made of two advertising agencies - one in London in 1973 and one in San Francisco 25 years later. The book also contains a discussion of the author's travalls in writing his dissertation on the comic strip Li'l Abner and concludes with some thoughts about surviving Survivor and other popular culture crazes.

This collection merges representations of children and youth in various science fiction texts with childhood studies theories and debates. Set in the past, present, and future, science fiction landscapes and technologies sometimes constrain, but often expand, agentic expression, movement, and collaboration.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

This book examines the history of female adolescent sexuality in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1960s. The book analyzes both adult perceptions of female adolescent sexuality and the experiences of female adolescents themselves. It examines what girls knew (or thought they knew) about sex at different points in time, girls’ sexual experiences, girls' ideas about love and romance, female adolescent beauty culture, and the influence of popular culture on female adolescent sexuality. It also examines the ways in which adults responded to female adolescent sexuality and the efforts of adults to either control or encourage girls' interest in sexual topics, dating, girls’ participation in beauty culture, and their education on sexual topics. The book describes a trajectory along which female adolescents went from being perceived as inherently innocent and essentially asexual to being regarded (and feared) as primarily sexual in nature.

If there is one trend in children’s and YA literature that seems to be enjoying a steady rise in popularity, it is the expansion of the YA dystopian genre. While the genre has been lauded for its potential to expand horizons, promote critical thinking, and foster social awareness and activism, it has also come under scrutiny for its promotion of specific ideologies and its often sensationalist approach to real-world problems. In an examination of six YA dystopian texts spanning more than twenty years of development of the genre, this book explores the way in which posthumanist ideologies in particular are deployed or resisted in these texts as a means of making sense of the specific challenges which young people confront in the twenty-first century.

Tweencom Girls analyzes the different ways character tropes are portrayed in media targeted at eight- to twelve-year-olds, particularly female characters, over the last twenty-five years. The book focuses particularly on sitcoms produced by the cable giants Disney Channel and Nickelodeon because of their popularity and ubiquity. It provides extensive examples and alternative interpretations of the shows’ tropes and themes, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with the genre. The first section explores common tweencom tropes, focusing on different themes that are prevalent throughout the series. The second section includes a discussion of the big picture of how tropes and themes give insight into the female characters portrayed in the popular tweencom programming, as well as advice to parents and educators.