tweens, adolescence, and sexgender

I've been thinking a lot about adolescence for the last few years, and one of the things I've thought about - but not had time to really pursue - is the way American adolescent culture plays to/engages with/creates sex/gender in different ways. [note: I have not yet come to any satisfactory conclusion about how to refer to sex or gender, because neither term quite gets at what I want to express, which is something to the effect of traditionally-understood, normative traits and qualities associated with males or females, regardless of how an individual is constructed biologically (sex) or psychologically (gender - and psychologically is a problem term here too). For the purposes of this post, I'm going old-school regressive and just saying "boy" or "girl" to mean those normative, traditional qualities and characteristics, with many apologies to trans-and-pan-and-queer-and-counteridentifying persons]

Recently - a week ago or so - I wondered on facebook if "tween" is just girls, or if it includes boys as well. I always think of tween as girls; when I first encountered the term "tween," it was in an article about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and I've rarely, if ever, seen it used in connection with boys. I was surprised that my friends - all of them academics of one sort or another - replied with certainty that of course, tween includes boys.

I was pleased, then, earlier this week to read Tyler Bickford's post of the text of his paper given at this year's SCMS conference, because he writes

the sphere of children’s entertainment that is emerging the most rapidly is directed to “tweens,” who a category that is presumptively (if not categorically) made up of girls. The term, which is a cutesy play on “teen” and “between,” emphasizes an age-based tension between grown-up autonomy and childhood domesticity that resembles nothing so much as the postfeminist tension between feminism and femininity. So talk about tweens is always already gendered. It’s also always already white, affluent, suburban, and consumerist, but then childhood also, as it’s hegemonically constructed, is itself presumptively feminine, white, affluent, suburban, and consumerist.

(emphasis mine)

I felt slightly vindicated in my conviction that tween is predominantly female, and that it at least is far from obviously a category that extends itself to include males in that Awkward Age (because really, that's what tween is: ages around 11-14).

So if, as Bickford claims (and as far as my exceedingly cursory sense of it goes) the most rapidly emerging sphere of children's entertainment is for tweens, where are the boys left?

It's a rare occasion when I say "but what about the boys?!" and mean it in anything but a sarcastic way. I say it when I think about Disney Princess culture, especially as it's enacted at Disney parks, where little girls (and big girls, and adults) are routinely addressed as "Princess." There's just no character set analogous to the princesses that is "for" boys. Of course, and obviously, plenty of little boys play princess quite delightedly, and plenty of little girls scorn princessing. But the culture emphasizes little girls in its focus on princesses, and that leaves the boys with...what?

I feel like this a bit about adolescence and boys. When I browse the teen section of my library (which is often, and it's a good teen section), I'm continually aware and reminded of how many of the books have pink covers, or purple covers, or sparkly covers. Many of them have images of girls on their covers. Many of them have girls as their protagonists, and many of them are written by women, or under female pseudonyms.

When I've asked my undergrads - and because I usually teach children's lit courses, I have a painful dearth of male students - what they read while they were themselves in high school or younger, the girls can usually rattle off lists: Sarah Dessen, Twilight, Hunger Games, Gossip Girl, Maggie Stiefvater, Libba Bray, and so on. The few boys, when I put them on the spot, usually say they didn't read much, then go on to mention James Patterson, Stephen King, maybe Neil Gaiman. Once, I had a boy student who was really into Neal Shusterman - possibly the only boy to name a young adult writer as someone whose books he read as, you know, a young adult.

Despite my general avoidance of Real-World studies and surveys and things that look like social science, I would be extremely interested in surveying a whole lot of teenage boys to see what books they read when they read voluntarily, or get to pick their material. I suspect it would be a whole lot of James Patterson-type stuff.

In class once, talking about something related to adolescence, I mentioned teen magazines - 17, YM (if that even still exists), Teen Cosmo, Teen People - then realized these were all girls' magazines. Then further realized I couldn't think of any teen magazines that weren't for girls. Once again, I put the few boys in my class on the spot and asked about magazine-reading (I supplied them with Maxim and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition just to get that awkwardness out of the way; some day I need to write and think deeply about how incredibly uncomfortable Kids These Days seem to be even acknowledging sex and erotics). The boys said: yeah, things like that, Rolling Stone, snowboarding or dirtbiking magazines, or other sport-specific ones. Those are adult publications - not in the brown-wrapper kept behind the counter sense, but just in that they are not produced with a teenage audience in mind.

so how come girls get to (or are forced to) have this distinct experience of teenager-ness, complete with rituals (prom, homecoming), periodicals, literature, movies, music, and so on?
OR/AND
why do we expect 14-year-old boys to be reading the same material as 34-year-old men? Is one group being "forced" to grow up too quickly? Or is one group being expected to act like teenagers their entire adult lives? Some combination of the two?


I'm concerned about the alienation of boys from YA fiction, in particular. There are some great YA books for and about boys, and plenty of the male students I teach end up really liking a lot of the "girl" books, too (Speak, for instance, always resonates with boys; they are very often the first to initiate class discussion and talk in very serious ways about how the book felt real and relatable). But the YA section as a whole looks extremely girly, and that turns boys off.
Women are attending college in markedly greater names than men now, and while I am not worried about men being oppressed and made into sad minorities, I do think that any kind of substantial gender imbalance - in schooling or in most other places - is not likely to turn out well in the end on a society-wide level. I can't help thinking that there is, or might be, or could be, a connection between the ways boys seem to be left out of this tween/teenage space of cultural production/consumption, and declining rates of college attendance. I could be totally wrong, and that's fine, but I do, for now, have the feeling that something is slightly askew here. Can't quite figure out precisely what it is, or how to correct it - is it a problem of how we're targeting girls? or a problem of how we're failing to target boys? is a creepy normative set of boy-oriented teen crap what I really want to see? (but then, how is that different from Maxim?)

I'm exceedingly interested in this, and I think it's important. I'm near the end of the list of the last people who would say that men in this country are sad, oppressed victims, but I do think that boys are being left out of an important cultural space. And that space also seems to be dedicated almost entirely to building and reinforcing traditional ideas about girl-ness and femininity in a way that is very hard for me to see as feminist or empowering or anything progressive and positive. This is a problem, and I think it's a big one - and it's one we need to be thinking about closely and carefully.

teenage boys

I have never been a teenage boy. I do not regret this, but it does mean my own empirical evidence for male adolescence is fairly limited. I'm dependent on second-hand, after-the-fact anecdotal evidence from males of my acquaintance, evidence of the kind that would never stand up in a court of law.

There's a common belief out there that Boys Don't Read. I know this is bunk. Yet! When it comes to YA fiction, I'm becoming more and more concerned that perhaps, in fact, teenage boys don't read YA lit.

The question arose last fall, in Representing Adolescence, and it stumped me: What do adolescent boys actually read? Which books?

When I was in high school, the guys of my acquaintance (if they read at all) were into Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Maybe James Patterson, maybe Thomas Harris. Maybe the early, errant John Grisham. One or two standouts read Robert Jordan (in particular, a boy I sat next to in AP European history, who somehow managed to read Robert Jordan almost every day in class yet still pay attention, respond to the teacher, and get staggeringly high grades on tests. In that nerdy way I had and have, I was smitten).
These seem, still, to be the go-to books for teenage boys; at least, at the bookstore where I worked from 2008-2010, Patterson, King, Clancy were still in high demand. The only YA titles I remember any male readers asking for - aside from ones assigned for school reading - were Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak.

So what ARE teenage boys reading? Or, more accurately, what YA books are they reading? Or, more to the point: Where are the really good YA books for YA boys?

Because of my own interests, I know some of the titles and authors that gay teenage boys read; those tend to deal with LGBTQ issues, which - alas for our culture of compulsory heterosexuality/homophobia - are not likely to be picked up by straight teenage boys.

There's something really girly about a lot of YA fiction that's out there, even the good stuff. I try, whenever I can, to resist gender normativity and all that, but the fact is: the publishing world thinks in terms of male/female, and they go all out for the girls in the YA department. All those miserable supernatural romances, all those fancypants girls with scads of money serials, all those books about friends and trauma and first loves and music - all have a girl-oriented feel to them. It may be just in packaging - Natalie Standiford's mind-bendingly great How to Say Goodbye in Robot, while narrated by a female, is not an overly girly book. Yet some jackass decided to give it a vivid bubblegum pink dustjacket, thus dooming it to a life of female-only readership.

The teenage-culture world seems to skew heavily female, in ways that strike me as troubling. There are junior-girl versions of lots of things; magazines make this most vividly clear. You have Teen Vogue and People, Seventeen, and that host of tweenybopper magazines (Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc). But there's no comparable set of junior versions of magazines for teenage boys; there's no Teen GQ, no Teen Esquire. The concerns and interests of adolescent boys are imagined to be identical to the concerns and interests of adult men. How can this be?

It used to be that girlhood and womanhood were collapsed into each other (and in many ways, still are), while boyhood (short pants! living in the nursery!) and manhood were two distinct things. Now there's a "training" stage for girls as they grow up into adult women, a phase of life when clothes, makeup and boys are all the rage (as reflected by the teen-girl magazines). This is distinct from women's periodicals mainly by the absence of home decor and organization from the teen mags; women's magazines are mainly concerned with clothes, makeup, Your Man, and your home.  Teenage girls get juniors magazines, junior clothes, junior makeup, even training bras (training for what? it's not like training wheels on a bike, or training a plant to grow in a certain way - is the "training" just a weak effort at desexualizing fairly young girls' foundation garments?). But there are not similar "training" things for teenage boys. Why? Is the teenage boy meant to be read, meant to be, identical to the adult male?

There are heaps of great books with male protagonists; M.T. Anderson's excellent Feed and Octavian Nothing books; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Frank Portman's King Dork; K.L. Going's King of the Screwups and Fat Kid Rules the World.  But it is not at all clear to me that teenage boys are reading them unless forced to by a teacher. 

Among my undergrads, when I ask what the (sadly few) boys in the class read as adolescents, mostly they say - Clancy, King, Patterson.  A few read fantasy: Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman. In the YA world, only two authors get mentioned: one boy was passionate about Neil Shusterman, and several had read and enjoyed John Green's books.

So what's going on here? Where is the abundance of good YA books for guys? Where are the YA guys to read those books? Why is YA somehow the province of teenage girls?

Popularity: I really want to know about this

omehow, today's planned discussion of Speak devolved into a weak conversation about popularity and unpopularity in adolescence. Since this is one of THE MAJOR themes of lots of YA realist fiction, it's worth talking about. It's also, as far as I can tell, a major theme among high schoolers.

As I have in past classes, I asked this gaggle to put up hands if you considered yourself popular in high school. A goodly number raised their hands; I wasn't surprised by any of them. I asked who would identify themselves as distinctly unpopular, and got a few hands (I always put mine up for this as well; the older I get, the more relieved I feel that I wasn't well-liked by my classmates). So I tried to get them to analyze what it means to be popular. Is it being well-known? Well-liked? does it have to do with class? Why are so few people ready and willing to cop to being popular in high school?  I have some thoughts of my own on all of these subjects, but I really am extremely curious about this as a topic, and I was hoping to get some decent responses from my students.
As usual, they mostly just sat there and looked vaguely at me, or possibly into space, or "secretly" at the phones in their hands, "hidden" under their desks [industry secret: those desks have no fronts. i can SEE your phone in your lap]. A handful responded with various things, some more thoughtful than others, some more anecdote-laden than others.
The idea of popularity as relational came up, as did the phrase "people who would talk to you," which, when extracted from the high school context, kind of sounds awful. The point being made there had to do with proximity. Take random Popular Girl A. Put her in, say, English class without her normal Popular friends. Who will she talk to? A hierarchy organizes itself then, based on that class; Girl A may talk to you in English, but she won't sit with you in lunch when her other friends are there.  This really needs to be mapped visually, but I don't have the time or talent for it now, but it makes a lot of sense.

But what I really want to know - and I sincerely, devoutly hope that people, someone, anyone, will post a comment about this - is how popularity was defined or organized in YOUR high school experience. One remark that was mentioned today - and affirmed by about half a dozen students in this class - was the "everyone in my class was friends, we all got along, no one was unpopular." I have heard this remark before, and every single time I hear it I want to shake my head and sigh.  I suspect this often means "No one I knew was unpopular," or "None of my friends was unpopular." Because there's a swath of kids in every high school, I imagine, who are largely invisible. They might just be quiet kids; they might be weird, they might just be so average as to disappear. Maybe they don't join any clubs or sports; maybe they work two jobs, or have some weird out-of-school hobby. Maybe they simply don't fit into any readily identifiable archetype or social group and thus, uncategorizable, become invisible. There are people like this in every environment I've ever been in - high school, college, grad schools, workplaces - people who seem to never be talked about, never seem to draw attention. People who fade in and fade out and have very little to do with anyone as far as you can tell (and when you ask your friends about that person, often many of them don't really know who you mean; or maybe one does and has a tiny tidbit of information, like: he eats lunch in fourth period, or I think he used to work in Communications.

I just cannot believe in the existence of any high school in America where everyone's friendly and kind to everyone else. Where there's no one who's the weirdo loser. Where there's no small band of uber-nerds, clinging together for safety, but generally the butt of everyone else's jokes. Someone who no one likes.  ALL group environments seem to resolve themselves into hierarchies of some kind, even hippie quasi-communes like my undergraduate institution.  There's always at least that one kid that no one you know has ever seen speaking to anyone.

One girl, in class today, put forth the intensely troubling idea (especially in the context of Speak) that anyone who isn't "friends with everyone in the class" has brought it on themselves. That they don't want to be happy. That they don't join things, or "put themselves out there."  Implied in her remarks was a negative judgment: if you don't join in, then you kind of suck.  But then I think of Melinda, in Speak, and her silence and what it conceals and reveals. I think of all the troubled fictional teenagers who have no or few friends because of a perceived issue that is actually a symptom of some truly grave problem.

I know the terms popular and unpopular are simplistic and reductive and possibly not useful. What I mean, I think, is whether you perceived yourself to be unpopular, or popular, in high school. Not what other people thought of you; not what you think of other people. But how you felt, or feel, as a high-schooler.

Two easy criteria: were you ever picked last, or nearly-last, for teams in gym class?  Did you ever have to eat lunch alone because you had no one to sit with?
And a third, a corollary of these two: Did you ever have to worry about the likelihood of either of these things happening?

teenage dream: Glee and gay boys

I watch Glee with a mix of delight and frustration; it's inconsistent, it has an infuriating habit of starting, then dropping, plotlines, it has an obnoxious tendency toward "special" episodes of guest stars or themes that disrupt any momentum the show may have developed. But it also has some great secondary characters (ones who chew up that scenery like crazy), some thoughtful and captivating plotlines, and the best parent on TV.

A couple of weeks ago, Glee hit it out of the ballpark with "Never Been Kissed." I've been thinking about this episode a lot, and not just because it introduces a new location, an all-boys high school that I have been referring to as gay hogwarts (it's the blazers and the senior common room that got me).

THE moment of that episode is Kurt's visit to gay Hogwarts, when he meets adorable Blaine, who sings with the Warblers, the school glee club. In this delirious alternate-reality, the Warblers are "like, rockstars" who stage impromptu performances in the aforementioned common room. Blaine and his cohorts launch into a cover of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," sung to Kurt (played with even more than usual aplomb by the staggeringly fantastic Chris Colfer, about whom I cannot say enough in praise).

Watching the episode the first time, I kind of groaned; I don't really like the song and so that made the moment less charming than hoped for.
But then I read the post Tom and Lorenzo wrote about the episode. And ever since reading that post, I can't stop thinking about "Never Been Kissed."

TLo write:

Sure, teenage romantic fantasies are inherently silly to adults because they come from a place of such inexperience and naivete, but they serve an important function in the sexual development of kids. They train them to dream about the best possible outcome. Just as they've been trained their whole lives as to how to make that outcome happen.

Which is some incredibly astute theorizing on adolescent fantasies about romance.
And then, because they're amazing, TLo go on to say:

Teenagers see thousands of murders depicted onscreen by the time they reach 18 but most of them never see a boy kiss another boy or sing him a sweet love song. You want to prevent gay kids from killing themselves? Push for more scenes like the above. Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

And even though I spend my days thinking about queerness, thinking about adolescence and childhood and queerness, even though I was more aware (and I sincerely hope, more sensitive) of queer issues when I was in high school - despite all that, TLo are absolutely right: I cannot imagine. I simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

Because of the way criticism works, though, and because I think about what I read, I am beginning to both imagine and understand how revolutionary such a thing is.
even if Glee falls apart again, even if the show goes downhill from here, I will be thoughtful and thankful for this episode that shows us - not in a jokey dream sequence, not in a way we giggle or sneer at - the teenage dreams of a gay boy.

spring semester, planned!

I bit the bullet and slapped together my spring booklist/rough schedule for the adolescence class. This sounds much more haphazard than it really was; I've been musing for weeks now what to add, what to subtract, what to recycle, what to try new for the spring version of this course. I've read and read, I've made lists, I've informally polled my students. Finally, I realized I can't fiddle with the list forever - book orders were due three weeks ago - and so I just went ahead and put down the books that, for today anyway, seem most interesting/useful/engaging.

The list, in roughly the order in which we will tackle them:

The Breakfast Club
Freaks & Geeks
King Dork
Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Speak
Huge (TV show)
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
King of the Screwups by K.L. Going
I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader by Kieran Scott

along the way we'll read an introductory bit of queer theory, and an introductory bit of fat studies from Marilyn Wann.

It's a little trauma-heavy, but then so is the entire YA catalog. LIAR absolutely broke my mind, and I'm very keen to try it out on unsuspecting undergrads. The non-blonde cheerleader has the huge advantage of being set in Florida (a deliciously weird place), and is relatively trauma-free. It's a girl-centric book without being TOO annoying, and it - like King of the Screwups - turns the idea of "the outsider" on its head [sometimes literally, in non-blonde cheerleader].
Cracked Up to Be was pretty great, though it uses some of the same old cliches and tropes, but it does some interesting things as well, and is very dark. I think it'll be a nice trio with Speak and Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I'm excited about this semester.

Now, I just need to get my Myth & Folktale class organized, which - of course - is the real challenge.

reading Madapple

After trawling the lists of best books at the YALSA website, I collected a pile of teen fiction at my library on monday. Last night I started reading Christina Meldrum's Madapple, and it's thoroughly fascinating.
It's a terribly strange premise: girl raised by brilliant but wacky mother, kept isolated from modern life, essentially: no electricity, no running water, no mirrors, no television, no contact with other humans. Homeschooling - heavy on the science and botany/herbalism, other books with many passages redacted. Girl beaten for reading a hidden copy of The Scarlet Letter. Mother dies, girl has to cope.
Meldrum's got BIG themes and issues going on - metaphysics, theology, mysticism, along with all the other good stuff about family and identity and being that one finds in a really good YA novel.
I stayed up far too late last night reading, and I'm a little sulky now because I have to go to school, where I'll be busy all day and unable to read more.


In other news, I think I've decided on a general "theme" for my adolescence class in the spring, a theme so broad it's practically no theme at all. But the organizing principle is going to be .... difference.
I think I am going to put I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader on the booklist. *cackle* *cackle* *cackle*

now, off to teach grammar, and then day one of discussing K.L. Going's King of the Screw-Ups.

adolescence, again

Book orders for the spring semester are due in a week, and I'm teaching Representing Adolescence again. Because I like to mix it up, and because it feels a little shocking to me to teach the same syllabus twice in a row (like cheating, somehow), I'm going to do a mostly new booklist.

BUT WHICH BOOKS????

So far, the only title I have settled on for sure is Justine Larbalestier's LIAR.

But what else would be good? I haven't organized a theme or anything yet, I just know that I need to teach Liar.  I'm contemplating Courtney Summers' Cracked Up to Be and/or Peter Cameron's Someday this pain will be useful to you, because they are books I like a lot, but I'm not quite sure that I really know what to do with them.

I'd like to stick to mainly realist fiction, novels or films. I may do some TV again - some Glee, perhaps, maybe some bowing to the inevitable and some Freaks & Geeks.
But the books are the essential, and I'm just not sure which to choose. The course, after all, is about representing adolescence, so the books need to lend themselves to thinking about the ways in which adolescence is represented, regulated, etc.

Any suggestions? I'm vaguely tempted to do some of the books I have real problems with: Twilight, 13 Reasons Why, Like the Red Panda because I think they'd provide good discussion. At the same time, do I really want to read any of those books again?

Suggestions?
Ideas?
Advice?

adolescence, stereotypes and cliques

My Adolescence class is picking up steam, I think (I hope). We started in on actual primary texts this week (the introductory classes were reading various contemporary news/opinion articles on teenagers, "emerging adults" etc, and some fun with G. Stanley Hall); today's topic was the John Hughes' film THE BREAKFAST CLUB.

Somehow I managed to never see the entire film all the way through until about seven or eight weeks ago. My sister was a fan of the movie when we were younger, and I frankly cannot grasp how I managed to never see the movie in its entirety before now, but there you have it. I've seen it twice now, in a span of about seven weeks, and it's pretty fantastic for a lot of reasons.

But today - and the reason I put it on the syllabus - we talked in class about stereotypes. The students had a lot to say (which was joyous, and a number of them raised points that I hadn't thought of, which always delights me), and I'm looking forward to talking more on Wednesday. In the interim, I got to thinking (as I drove home from school) about the kind of stereotypes in the movie: the jock, the basket case, the brain, the delinquent, the jock ("Sporto"!).

And I wonder if these kinds of stereotypes really only manifest during adolescence. The kinds of cliques Melinda identifies at the start of Speak, for instance; it's a more comprehensive and updated list than Hughes's collection of types, but it's essentially the same kind of stratification.
Now, stereotypes run rampant across the adult world, of course, but it seems to me, on intial thought, that those tend to be organized around some relatively fixed aspect of a person's identity. That is: racial, ethnic, gender, sex/sexuality, religious (which can cross over with ethnic, for example: Jews and Muslims, where it's not just religion that's being singled out but a kind of ethnic or at the very least cultural identity). There are other "character types," - the Boss, the Soccer Mom, types within professions - the Lawyer, the Account Exec, the Secretary - but those are only visible when the person is inhabiting that role. For instance, once The Secretary gets in her car and drives home or goes to the supermarket, that Secretaryish type is almost or entirely invisible to everyone else. Ditto Soccer Mom, who, alone at the library or at Hot Yoga or the supermarket sans children, could just appear to be a woman.

Put another way: in my first year of grad school in Pittsburgh, a co-student of mine said (as we discussed clothing): "you're not really subculturally aligned."
At the time (and admittedly still) that comment rankled, for some reason; possibly because I was then 25 and it seemed to me that the time for subcultural alignment had come and gone long ago, and my acquaintance's remark (and her own persistence in subcultural alignment) struck me as silly and childish.

In retrospect, I was never subculturally aligned, primarily because I was never aligned. I was odd-girl-out through most of my high school years, and then in college, surrounded by a seething mass of mostly-hippies, I was again un-aligned except by virtue of my non-hippie-ness.

BUT. Subcultural identities and/or stereotypes seem to hold strongest and truest in adolescent and/or young adult life. I'm sure there are exceptions - bikers are one, I think, where there is a distinct "look" that accompanies biker life that makes bikers far more visible away from their bikes than for other kinds of subcultures.

The question is: WHY?
why do you get cliques? Why do you get jocks and princesses and brains and criminals and goths and hippies and hipsters and headbangers and stoners in high school, maybe in college, and then - somehow - they seem to seep away into the larger, less obviously differentiated mass of adulthood.
And when you do see vestigial subculturally aligned adults, they seem....well....sort of sad. The adult man who presents as Jock seems kind of like a joke, reliving (possibly imaginary) glory days of his youth. Adult (and old) hippies just seem out of it, kind of very worn and faded and disconnected from reality (though they probably seemed like that as young hippies too). Adult Goths seem sort of pathetic. In each case, encountering the older version of these younger identities always feels like the older version is either 1) immature/not really grown up  2) sad  3) trying to remain young and cool and/or 4) desperate for attention.

These visible marks of difference and identity that we put on as teenagers, and which are then used (by us and against us) to sort us into stereotyped categories, somehow shouldn't be necessary as an adult. You shouldn't need to wear lots of black eye makeup and petticoats to make your personality, your individuality, known. Ditto with the jock attitudes, or the hipster glasses, or whatever group you like. There is a point, it seems, by which one ought to have grown out of these stereotypes. How often do you walk into a gathering of adults and group them off into "jocks" and "cool kids" and "nerds" and "delinquents" and "goths" and "brains"???
you may get tech geeks drifting together, you may have a group of Beautiful People, but you can't tell by looking who those people are (even, sometimes especially, the Beautiful People).

So how does this work, this stereotyping, this subcultural aligning? WHY does it work? Is it part of that "trying on identities" thing the developmental psychologists talk about? How come most people only try on one other identity? I don't know anyone, personally, who went through multiple of these disguises. You went from Generic Girl to Goth, or from Brain to Cool Kid, but there wasn't much movement after that. Angela Chase's season-starting transformation in My So-Called Life makes this very visible; she switches it up, dyes her hair red, starts wearing plaid and funky skirts and shoes. But she doesn't try on yet another new persona.

I'm intrigued by this, and by how it works, and how it lingers, and if that's even a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe carrying the external, visible marks of your subcultural alignment is a useful, important, disruptive thing. I'm not sure.

It's unexamined territory, for my brain anyway, which is pretty content to be un-aligned and (consequently) always observing.

adolescence will be represented thus

I've made my decisions, for the most part, for my Representing Adolescence Class.

Novels to be read:
Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
The Boy Book - E. Lockhart
Someone Like You - Sarah Dessen (I finally picked a girl book!)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green & David Levithan
King Dork - Frank Portman
King of the Screw-Ups - K.L. Going

We will watch The Breakfast Club at the start of the term, as a way to just leap right in and also as a way to talk about stereotypes, adult/teenager power differentials, and the rise of teen-oriented media.

Television shows:

My So-Called Life: two of the first three episodes, and "Life of Brian" (which is focalized by that adorable Brian Krakow and is the one where they go to the school dance).

Glee: "Preggers" (the "single ladies" episode; Kurt joins the football team & comes out to his dad); "Wheels" (about life in a wheelchair; fundraising; Artie) and "The power of Madonna."

Daria: episodes TBA

Huge (if available): episodes TBA. I may only use one, maybe two episodes of Huge, but probably the very first episode.

We'll do some secondary reading as well - I may force them to read some of G. Stanley Hall's insanity-inducing Adolescence (he coined the term! and believes in Lamarckian evolution! and eugenics!). But we'll definitely read some other stuff: if I can find them, good essays on Fat Acceptance, Queer adolescence, Music & Adolescence. 

I discovered a truly astonishing pop culture blog recently (made more astonishing by the fact that its incredibly prolific and talented writer was in college when he began it) with a brilliant essay on Brian Krakow as the best teenage loser of all time; it deals nicely with Brian in the context of the show, and in the larger context of teenage losers in media.

I have a jolly article from a few years ago about "Kids Today get an A+ in Narcissism," which should provoke SOME decent discussion. Unless the Kids Today in my class are so narcissistic that they can't even discuss something so....not about them, personally.

In the books and such we've got:
teen pregnancy

death of teenager

death of parent

rape

coming out to parents, friends, self

Relationship Angst of the highest order

girls being accused of being sluts

girls being pressured to have sex

girls having all their friends (and the whole school, even!) turn on them

bullying of varying degrees of physicality, up to and including braining our protagonist and landing him in the hospital with possible (very minor) brain damage

Fat Camp

Body Image Issues
Queerness, queerness and more queerness
Disability
the perils of being Hot
the perils of being a Dork
Guns in School
Smoking pot


and more.

it's a fiesta of Issues. 

For quite awhile, at New college, there was a dumpster behind the cafeteria. someone had spray-painted on it: WE'VE GOT ISSUES.


I think of this often. And it essentially sums up the Young Adult genre as a whole.


I am delighted and excited and absolutely, 100% geeked-out over my class. I haven't finished ordering the readings/viewings or selecting secondary readings, but the bulk of the class is in place, and I'm ecstatic.


let's hope the Kids Today don't let me down.....

Reading Girl Books

Since early July, I've been on a mission to find suitable girl-protagonist novels to teach in my Representing Adolescence class. I decided early on that I would use Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, because it is amazing and because it always gets good reception when I teach it. Then I read E. Lockhart's The Boy Book, and decided to teach that, because it seemed to be realistic and fairly well-written, and had several things worth talking about. I'm also interested in the way that both Melinda and Ruby end up as outsiders, exiled from their groups of friends for dubious (at best) reasons. And The Boy Book will make for good discussion about gender.

And then came the true Mission: finding a realist novel from the last 25 years or so, with a female protagonist, that wasn't a Trauma Novel, and/or wasn't about Boys.

I still have not settled on my third title. I skimmed bestseller lists and some blogs (teenreads, etc), always eliminating the Twilight related crap (it's fantasy, after all) and used that, plus my knowledge of what teenage girls buy at the bookstore to compile my collection of titles. Here, in no particular order, are the Girl YA books I have read since July:
Greengage Summer - Rumer Godden
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Fly on the Wall - E. Lockhart
The Boy Book - E. Lockhart
Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Hexwood - Diana Wynne Jones
The Boyfriend List - E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys - E. Lockhart
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
Pop Princess - Rachel Cohn
The A-List - Zoey Dean
The Clique - Lisi Harrison
Keeping the Moon - Sarah Dessen
Sweethearts - Sara Zarr
Cracked Up to Be - Courtney Summers
Story of a Girl - Sara Zarr
Chasing Boys - Karen Tayleur
Getting Lost with Boys - Hailey Abbott
I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader - Kieran Scott

None of these satisfy me. the Judy Blume is, admittedly, a classic, but I felt mortified reading it - all the talk of bras and periods! ook. NOT my cup of tea, and almost certainly guaranteed to make everyone in my class uncomfortable (I have a lot of freshmen). On top of that, I don't know, really, what to DO with it, and it feels outdated. I don't want to spend half my life explaining tiny details about being alive in the 70s and grappling with my students' protests of "it's not relatable!!!"

Cracked Up to Be was surprisingly good, but was a whanger of a Trauma Book. Keeping the Moon was all right, and not a trauma story (not really, though in part it was about getting over Being Fat). It's just not as meaty as I'd like it to be. I'm contemplating a Dessen novel, though, because they're very popular, and while they are often about Boys, they are also (in my limited experience) also about friendships and family and self-discovery.
Tam Lin was incredible, absolutely fantastic, and helped me to (finally) truly understand and appreciate Fire & Hemlock. Both are out of the running due to length and complexity, and the fact that the source text(s) will break brains.
The A-List, The Clique and Getting Lost with Boys were absolutely reprehensible. Appalling. Badly written, hideously plotted, full of nasty unpleasant characters. Grrrrross.

I wanted to like Nick & Norah, but I felt irritated by it instead. I thought Norah was kind of a bitch, and Nick oddly emptied of personality.

The rest were all mediocre to middling. Chasing Boys wasn't especially about chasing boys, and that ended up making it relatively decent. Sweethearts was very odd and more than a little creepy; Story of a Girl was depressing, but valuable in that it concerns lower-class protagonists (which, frankly, after the A-List and the Clique, I was happy to encounter).

But there are certain formulae, certain tropes, that show up over and over and over and over, even in the best of these books: a New, Attractive Boy shows up, the protagonist fights with friends, the protagonist relocates and is the New, Attractive Girl, the protagonist struggles over some mysterious past trauma that is revealed slowly in flashbacks, or not until the very end of the book.  The Journey Of Self-Discovery, in all of these books, happens through relationships - friends and Boys, occasionally formerly-estranged parents - with very little introspection. The characters live through events and dialogue, not through narration (think of Speak, then imagine the opposite).
By contrast, the Boy books I've read seem to focus much more on that interior monologue introspective narration. Events are important, and people are important, but it isn't through their relationships that the boys really change or learn anything. I hate to say this, and I hope I am making a gross generalization, but the Boy books seem more intellectual, while the Girl books are more emotional.

So I'm now reaching the end of my rope. I've read scads of mostly-terrible books, I've encountered way too many cute boys with hair falling into their eyes, eyes which are always blue or green (as are protagonist's eyes, when described), boys who somehow manage to be wise and caring and empathic and helpful to Protagonist girls with serious Issues. Often the boys are named Jake, or they have slightly more hip or nontraditional names: Tyler, Noel, Ethan, Cameron, Dylan, Liam. It's a fluke or a freak when a nice normal Paul or Daniel or Jason turns up.
I can rattle off Trauma scenarios in my sleep, I can identify love triangles before they've been formed, I can spot the Boy Who Turns Out to be A Jerk from a mile off, I can spot the Nice but Nerdy Boy who Turns Hot over a summer from several miles off. I know the Girl Heroine will learn to have Self-Confidence, will Patch Things Up with her siblings/parents/step-parents, will learn valuable lessons about living in the today because of her dead sibling/parent/friend, will stop drinking or cutting or skipping school, will, with the Love of the Nice, Cute Boy whose hair falls into his eyes, turn an eager, happy face to a shining future of awesomeness.

PUKE PUKE PUKE.

Obviously, these very cliches and stereotypes are worth thinking about, and it's making me root for Dessen, though frankly, Cracked Up to Be was probably the most interesting/best written of the list.
But this experience has made me think seriously about the bildungsroman, and its maleness; male protagonists come of age regardless of the relationships around them. Girls come of age because of those relationships. I also felt a tiny bit of shock when I tried to think historically, pre-1900, of representations of adolescents. Other than the occasional Little Women, or The Daisy Chain, the single strong protagonist bildungsroman seems to be a very exclusively male genre. Even Little Women and The Daisy Chain track the progress of a group of siblings, not a single strong character. But teenaged women go from child to debutante/wife in a turn of a page - they don't get their own bildungsroman, they just figure in someone else's.

I have a lot more to say on this subject - in fact, I could go on forever - but I'll draw my line now. Maybe I'll flip a coin to decide my third Girl Protagonist book - between Cracked Up to Be and a Dessen.

Course planning

I've been obsessed with my Representing Adolescence syllabus. What was supposed to be a week of intensive reading and planning turned into most of the month of July with my head stuck between the pink covers of girl books (and a handful of others, including Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, possibly the best YA book I've ever read).

The Ongoing Problem of the Teen Girl Novel has yet to be resolved, though I'm rapidly approaching my absolute deadline for submitting my book order, so resolution is also rapidly approaching. So - a book with a female protagonist WILL be chosen by week's end.

I have decided, definitely now, to teach at least one episode of Huge. I've been dabbling in reading some Fat Acceptance/Fat politics stuff, on and off for over a year (pointed in that direction, actually, by Rebecca Rabinowitz's blog), and my reading of the stunningly smart and insightful Fatshionista has led me to be much more Fat-aware. Because of the Fatshionista's blog, I started watching Huge online (new episodes go up Tuesday mornings, following TV airing on Monday nights).

And it's great. The show is fantastic. There are some aspects of it that I don't care for (mainly concerning Hayley Hasselhof's acting ability or lack thereof, and her relationship with the boys' counselor), but on the whole - this is a great show. As of episode six, we've had a character who identifies as asexual; we've had an anatomical-boy (who is clearly queer) select a female name for his spirit name; we have some LARPing; we have Fat Pride (body fascism!); we have more queerness in about six different ways; we have a girl shamed for sexual activity with no mention of the boy's responsibility; we have a character in a 12-step recovery program; we have a mixed-race family.

And that's not even getting to any of the plot.

Part of what pushed me to give Huge a try was the discovery that it is developed and produced by the mother-daughter team of Winnie Holzman and Savannah Dooley.  Holzman is the genius who brought us My So-Called Life, which should be all anyone has to say to convince people to give Huge a chance. Dooley clearly has talent of her own, in addition to being openly gay and engaged with queer issues.

It would have been really easy to make this show a catastrophe, but it's not. Part of what it does - as Fatshionista points out - is "normalize" fatness: we see a bunch of fat kids doing what every other set of kids in America does. There's lots of onscreen fat, no real fat-shame, unless it's part of the character's personality. Fat kids kissing, fat kids crushing on each other. Fat girls wearing tank tops unashamedly. Even more, fat kids standing around in bathing suits on the first day. And we're not meant to be grossed out by, or pitying of, these kids because of their fatness. Our empathies are engaged by who they are as characters, not by how they look, which is amazing.
Along with it's kickass politics (fat & queer especially), the show is very well written (with only a few slip-ups) and, aside from Hayley Hasselhof, very well acted. Nikki Blonsky is the lead as Will (who is misread as gay by the very boy on whom she has a crush), and she's phenomenal. I never did get around to seeing Hairspray, but this girl's got skills.
Gina Torres and Paul Dooley (Winnie's husband, Savannah's father, and the dad in Sixteen Candles) play the camp director and her long-estranged father.
But the kids are the real stars, of course - the teenagers, I should say [god, I'm old. Everyone under the age of 25 had become a "kid" to me].
Raven Goodwin plays Becca, who is a LARPing nerd (she's actually created an entire, complex role-playing fantasy world) and is constantly reading [in one episode, she's reading The Hunger Games, which is kind of a funny, ironic joke]. Raven Goodwin is also absolutely one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen, far more attractive than Hayley Hasselhof's Amber.

My personal favorite, though, is Alistair, played by Harvey Guillen. Alistair is the queer boy, the one who knits and loves LARPing and selects a cat-hybrid as his character for the role play. Alistair's sexual identity is not clearly spelled out at this point, but he is breaking binaries every time he turns around. It's Alistair who selects a female name as his spirit name (he chooses Athena, goddess of wisdom), and insists on being who he wants to be, regardless of societal norms and expectations. This doesn't make life easy for Alistair, who is mostly an object of teasing and torment to the other (male) campers. But he's an adorable boy, a wonderful, wonderful character, and I really, really, really wish we'd get more of him. I want to know more about him as a character. Also, he sleeps with a stuffed animal, what appears to be a duck. Which is awesome.


There are so many things going on in Huge that my brain almost can't stand it. I think it'll give us, as a class, a lot to talk about, and I also think (and kind of hope) it will shake things up a bit. If nothing else, the first episode, with all those fantastic fat kids in their bathing suits, will make everyone a little uncomfortable, which is a good place to start.

comparative YA

I'm bingeing on YA novels this week, in a mad effort to read, or re-read, everything in order to plan my syllabus and get my book order submitted for my Representing Adolescence class. It's very hard to decide how one wants to represent Representing Adolescence, and I have far more ideas than I do weeks in the semester. Winnowing out, and developing some coherence from what remains, is the real challenge.

I just finished The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, which is and is not a YA book, but certainly does represent a certain kind of adolescence. I enjoyed the book but don't plan teaching it; other considerations aside, I know my students would just fall apart at all the British slang (and this despite the American edition "glossary" in the back of the book).

Not much to say about Adrian Mole at the moment except the experience of reading it was very like my experience of reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The britishness, yes, the split-parents sideplot, but more than anything, the painfully naive narrators. Any book where the reader knows more than the narrator - or rather, understands more than the narrator - is both endlessly fascinating to me, and intensely painful. it makes me feel dreadfully sorry for the narrators, because it's so clear that they don't get what's going on, and everyone else around them does. And so the narrators become unwitting butts of every joke imaginable.

Cringe-worthy and empathy-inducing. But still good, and fascinating, because of all the codes and nuances that the reader must be able to decipher to produce the effect of the unknowing narrator.  These kinds of books are maybe the clearest example, to my mind, of the way that both author and reader construct the novel - because the effect of the book depends on the reader knowing more than the narrator. If she doesn't, if she and the narrator are precisely in the same place, then the book is entirely different.

amazing, amazing. But now I have to scurry into reading some girlie girl books - I have The A-List and The Boyfriend Book on tap. I'm learning an awful lot about YA and gender: books with boy protagonists are all about the boy protagonists; books with girl protagonists are all about boys, in one way or another. This is obviously not an absolute, brightline categorization; but it does seem to be an awfully substantial trend. We'll pick it apart in class. I'm so excited about teaching this class it is almost pathetic.

notes on a syllabus: ADOLESCENCE

for kicks, I plan syllabi. In fact, making up courses and syllabi (all in my head, never committed to paper) is how I discovered/decided that I was interested in teaching in the first place. I got all geeked out and excited about planning how I would teach certain books, what kinds of assignments I'd create, and I realized that - though all my life I'd resisted the idea of teaching [in large part, I think, because both of my parents were teachers, and I saw firsthand the nonsense they had to put up with] - I was actually really excited by and attracted to the possibilities of teaching.

Now that I have taught for five years - a total of thirteen classes, I think, all but two of them entirely of my own design - I get to make real syllabi. At present, my future teaching opportunities while still in grad school are uncertain, so I'm kind of back to making up imaginary classes and syllabi. Which is fun.

I've been thinking seriously about an adolescence/YA syllabus - there's a course at Pitt called Representing Adolescence that I'd love to teach. So I'm jotting down some ideas here, in the event that this - or some other - YA class comes my way. Because it's "representing" adolescence, I'm thinking film, television, etc in addition to YA books.

Representing Adolescence:

My So-Called Life (selected episodes, at least 2)
King Dork by Frank Portman
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (?)

something from the Judy Blume oeuvre
I haven't read/seen any, but Gossip Girls, I think
Slam by Nick Hornsby (?)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, maybe

what movies would work? I keep thinking of Labyrinth, because I really do think that's quite a good female-adolescence - coming-of-age story. The movie Thirteen is hugely obnoxious and problematic, and therefore pretty interesting to talk about, though painful to watch. It would be awesome to include some MTV - shows like Beavis & Butthead, or my personal favorite Daria; there are also the "Doug" sketches on the old MTV show "The State" - Doug is the rebellious teenager who has nothing to rebel against.
Catcher in the Rye seems like an obvious choice.
I really, really, really want to include at least one queer title - maybe Will Grayson, Will Grayson
I could just do representing adolescence in my childhood and throw in Heathers, or Pump up the Volume.

I wonder, too, how fantasy would or could fit in to a course on representing adolescence. I keep thinking - horrifically enough - of Disney's A Little Mermaid, which is a movie I hate, but which really insists on the teenageriness of Ariel.

I'd need to include some secondary/critical sources. G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence, of course, excerpted, but what else?? I'd LOVE to have a collection of newspaper or periodical editorials and such about Kids These Days that would cross a broad historical period.

what else?