Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation Contributor(s): Elman, Julie Passanante (Author) |
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ISBN: 1479841420 ISBN-13: 9781479841424 Publisher: New York University Press OUR PRICE: $88.11 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2014 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Law | Media & The Law - Social Science | Gender Studies - Family & Relationships | Life Stages - Adolescence |
Dewey: 305.235 |
LCCN: 2014017279 |
Series: Nyu Social and Cultural Analysis |
Physical Information: 0.75" H x 6" W x 9" (1.14 lbs) 288 pages |
Themes: - Topical - Adolescence/Coming of Age |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, media, and public policy, Julie Passanante Elman shows how the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late 1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven 'edutainment' prominently featuring narratives of disability--from the immunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC's After School Specials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disability and adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the 1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about the incomplete and volatile "teen brain." Undertaking a cultural history of youth that combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elman offers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable "condition." By tracing the teen's uneven passage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth shows how teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation and neoliberal governmentality. |
Contributor Bio(s): Elman, Julie Passanante: - Julie Elman is Assistant Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. |