1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996582046003316

Autore

Elman Julie Passanante

Titolo

Chronic Youth : Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation / / Julie Passanante Elman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

1-4798-4110-2

1-4798-0629-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (256 p.)

Collana

NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis ; ; 4

Classificazione

LAW096000SOC032000

Disciplina

305.2350973

Soggetti

Youth - United States - Conduct of life

At-risk youth - United States

Teenagers - United States

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies

LAW / Media & the Law

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. From rebel to patient -- 1. Medicine is magical and magical is art: liberation and overcoming in the boy in the plastic bubble -- 2. After school special education: sex, tolerance, and rehabilitative television -- 3. Cryin’ and dyin’ in the age of aliteracy romancing teen sick-lit -- 4. Crazy by design: Neuroparenting and crisis in the decade of the brain -- Conclusion. Susceptible citizens in the age of wiihabilitation -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author

Sommario/riassunto

The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure,the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brinkof success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site ofpop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youthtraces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normativeorder have been negotiated and contained. Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, newmedia, and public policy, Julie Passanante Elman shows how the teenager becamea cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness,



heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven‘edutainment’ prominently featuring narratives of disability—from theimmunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC’s After SchoolSpecials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disabilityand adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much morethan a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about theincomplete and volatile “teen brain.” Undertaking a cultural history of youththat combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elmanoffers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers,policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disabilityto cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s unevenpassage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth showshow teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation andneoliberal governmentality.