Motion pictures have been one of the forces that have both shaped and reproduced adolescent femininity. Films not only reflect culture—they help to create it. So it is worth looking at films to see what messages they gave girls—and adults—about what girls were and should be like. Scheiner uses film as a window into the cultural meanings of female adolescence, and explores how those meanings changed over time. She looks at how female adolescence has been constructed in film, focusing on the period from 1920 to 1950. She contextualizes representations of female adolescence by looking at the actual experience of adolescence in each period and by examining the material conditions and film industry processes that contributed to these portrayals. As Scheiner makes clear, historical interpretations of film messages must be expanded to determine what conclusions girls themselves reached from film images. Girls are hardly passive consumers of film. Rather, they choose how to respond to the films they see. This is perhaps best illustrated by fan activities, where girls actively define what is important about films and film stars, and create their own understandings of female adolescence. Scheiner also looks specifically at adolescent girls as fans to decode their responses to filmic representations of adolescence. She uses some nontraditional sources such as fan columns in fan magazines, fan publications of various stars, reviews in young women's literature, fan mail, and letters to film companies to find evidence of audience reception. Scheiner opens up a world often at odds with the actual experience of female adolescents, and she makes clear that films about adolescent girls are not only a formative part of the nation's history in the early 20th century, but a formative part of becoming a girl. Scholars, students, and other researchers of American film and women's studies, popular culture, and 20th-century history will find this study of particular interest.

This work provides scholars, instructors, and students with influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, the volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body.

Teen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films, Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexuality in US cinema and examines how several films from the 2000s, including Blockers, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, and Alex Strangelove, take consent into account. Yet, at the same time, Meek reveals that teen films expose how affirmative consent ("yes means yes") fails to protect youth from unwanted and unpleasant sexual encounters. By highlighting ambiguous sexual interactions in teen films--such as girls' failure to obtain consent from boys, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults--Meek unravels some of consent's intricacies rather than relying on oversimplification. By exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered, Consent Culture and Teen Films suggests we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.

In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.

This book presents an innovative comparative view of how the issue of adolescent sexuality and consent is differently treated in various media. Analyzing teenage sexual encounters with adults across a variety of media, including films, television, novels, and podcasts, the volume takes a positive stance on the expression of teenage sexuality, while remaining sensitive to the power of adults to abuse and manipulate. The anthology treats these representations as negotiations between conflicting forces: desire, sexual self-knowledge, unequal power, and the law, the latter both actual legal statutes and internalized law in the philosophical and psychoanalytic sense. Questions of unequal power inherent in such relations are theorized. The authors examine variations of this configuration of sexual relations between teenagers and adults from different perspectives, to consider how various forms of expression rework it formally. These essays are attuned to both nuances of presentation and contexts of reception, and they consider how aesthetics play a role. Contributing to the general debate about the ways that societies construct and regulate adolescent sexuality, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, sociology, and gender studies

Teenage girls seem to have been discovered by American pop culture in the 1930s. From that time until the present day, they have appeared in books and films, comics and television, as the embodied fantasies and nightmares of youth, women, and sexual maturation. Looking at such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Gidget, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Britney Spears, American Sweethearts shows how popular culture has shaped our view of the adolescent girl as an individual who is simultaneously sexualized and infantilized. While young women have received some positive lessons from these cultural icons, the overwhelming message conveyed by the characters and stories they inhabit stresses the dominance of the father and the teenage girl's otherness, subordination, and ineptitude. As sweet as a cherry lollipop and as tangy as a Sweetart, this book is an entertaining yet thoughtful exploration of the image of the American girl.

Of the many consequences advanced by the rise of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, North Carolina forcibly sterilized more than 2,000 women and girls in between 1929 and 1950. This extreme measure reflects how pseudoscience justified widespread gender, race, and class discrimination in the Jim Crow South. In Bad Girls at Samarcand Karin L. Zipf dissects a dark episode in North Carolina's eugenics campaign through a detailed study of the State Home and Industrial School in Eagle Springs, referred to as Samarcand Manor, and the school's infamous 1931 arson case. The people and events surrounding both the institution and the court case sparked a public debate about the expectations of white womanhood, the nature of contemporary science and medicine, and the role of the juvenile justice system that resonated throughout the succeeding decades. Designed to reform and educate unwed poor white girls who were suspected of deviant behavior or victims of sexual abuse, Samarcand Manor allowed for strict disciplinary measures -- including corporal punishment -- in an attempt to instill Victorian ideals of female purity. The harsh treatment fostered a hostile environment and tensions boiled over when several girls set Samarcand on fire, destroying two residence halls. Zipf argues that the subsequent arson trial, which carried the possibility of the death penalty, represented an important turning point in the public characterizations of poor white women; aided by the lobbying efforts of eugenics advocates, the trial helped usher in dramatic policy changes, including the forced sterilization of female juvenile delinquents. In addition to the interplay between gender ideals and the eugenics movement, Zipf also investigates the girls who were housed at Samarcand and those specifically charged in the 1931 trial. She explores their negotiation of Jazz Age stereotypes, their strategies of resistance, and their relationship with defense attorney Nell Battle Lewis during the trial. The resultant policy changes -- intelligence testing, sterilization, and parole -- are also explored, providing further insight into why these young women preferred prison to reformatories. A fascinating story that grapples with gender bias, sexuality, science, and the justice system all within the context of the Great Depression--era South, Bad Girls at Samarcand makes a compelling contribution to multiple fields of study.

When teenagers began hanging out at the mall in the early 1980s, the movies followed. Multiplex theaters offered teens a wide array of perspectives on the coming-of-age experience, as well as an escape into the alternative worlds of science fiction and horror. Youth films remained a popular and profitable genre through the 1990s, offering teens a place to reflect on their evolving identities from adolescence to adulthood while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities. Drawing examples from hundreds of popular and lesser-known youth-themed films, Timothy Shary here offers a comprehensive examination of the representation of teenagers in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. He focuses on five subgenres—school, delinquency, horror, science, and romance/sexuality—to explore how they represent teens and their concerns, how these representations change over time, and how youth movies both mirror and shape societal expectations and fears about teen identities and roles. He concludes that while some teen films continue to exploit various notions of youth sexuality and violence, most teen films of the past generation have shown an increasing diversity of adolescent experiences and have been sympathetic to the particular challenges that teens face.

An outpouring of memorial tributes and public expressions of grief followed the death of the Tejana recording artist Selena Quintanilla Pérez in 1995. The Latina superstar was remembered and mourned in documentaries, magazines, websites, monuments, biographies, murals, look-alike contests, musicals, drag shows, and more. Deborah Paredez explores the significance and broader meanings of this posthumous celebration of Selena, which she labels “Selenidad.” She considers the performer’s career and emergence as an icon within the political and cultural transformations in the United States during the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a “Latin explosion” in culture and commerce alongside a resurgence of anti-immigrant discourse and policy. Paredez argues that Selena’s death galvanized Latina/o efforts to publicly mourn collective tragedies (such as the murders of young women along the U.S.-Mexico border) and to envision a brighter future. At the same time, reactions to the star’s death catalyzed political jockeying for the Latino vote and corporate attempts to corner the Latino market. Foregrounding the role of performance in the politics of remembering, Paredez unravels the cultural, political, and economic dynamics at work in specific commemorations of Selena. She analyzes Selena’s final concert, the controversy surrounding the memorial erected in the star’s hometown of Corpus Christi, and the political climate that served as the backdrop to the touring musicals Selena Forever and Selena: A Musical Celebration of Life. Paredez considers what “becoming” Selena meant to the young Latinas who auditioned for the biopic Selena, released in 1997, and she surveys a range of Latina/o queer engagements with Selena, including Latina lesbian readings of the star’s death scene and queer Selena drag. Selenidad is a provocative exploration of how commemorations of Selena reflected and changed Latinidad.

Celebrated as new consumers and condemned for their growing delinquencies, teenage girls emerged as one of the most visible segments of American society during and after World War II. Contrary to the generally accepted view that teenagers grew more alienated from adults during this period, Rachel Devlin argues that postwar culture fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism. According to Devlin, psychiatric professionals turned to the Oedipus complex during World War II to explain girls' delinquencies and antisocial acts. Fathers were encouraged to become actively involved in the clothing and makeup choices of their teenage daughters, thus domesticating and keeping under paternal authority their sexual maturation. In Broadway plays, girls' and women's magazines, and works of literature, fathers often appeared as governing figures in their daughters' sexual coming of age. It became the common sense of the era that adolescent girls were fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers' romantic lives. As Devlin demonstrates, the pervasiveness of depictions of father-adolescent daughter eroticism on all levels of culture raises questions about the extent of girls' independence in modern American society and the character of fatherhood during America's fabled embrace of domesticity in the 1940s and 1950s.