Bullets, Bites, and Bros: Corporate Constructions of Adult Desire as “Deviant” Adolescent Sexuality in “Monstrous” Teenagers

• In Event: The Monstrous Other: Exploring the Intersections of Youth Culture and Critical Pedagogy in a Monster-Making World

Abstract

Purpose(s): This paper will:

1. Discuss the construction of “never-ending adolescence” as it exists in adult fantasies of eternal youth projected as romanticized depictions of adolescent angst in several dominant, corporatized pieces of popular culture that turn teenagers into monstrous Others: Twilight, MTV’s Teen Wolf, HBO’s True Blood, CW’s Vampire Diaries.

2. Analyze these corporate texts for their capitalist-oriented depictions of youth as engaged in reproducing adult roles and responsibilities not as tactics through which their own identity can develop, but in normalizing adult-only heterosexual, White discourses of sexuality (de Certeau, 1984).

3. Interrogate the ambiguity that subverts organic youth desires under the gaze of adults-as-teenagers, noting genealogical constructions of adolescence as an adult invention (Lesko, 1997).

4. Advocate for resisting the disappearance of youth-oriented social worlds for adolescents as co-opted by corporate constructions of adolescent fantasies by adults in the examples above (Giroux, 2003).

Perspectives:

The theoretical framework will be a cultural studies framework. The paper problematizes how popular television and film renders teenagers into sexualized, monstrous Others for fulfilling adult fantasies. It proceeds from an understanding that to become sexual is to turn into a monster (the hyper-masculizined sexual energy of werewolves in Twilight and Teen Wolf and the immortal adult-as-teenager trope in Twilight and Vampire Diaries). While these for-profit texts, constructed by corporate interests, attempt to legitimate sexual identities and behaviors in teenagers, they often serve only to reinscribe adult expectations of safe or normalized sexual desires onto the bodies of these adolescent characters, preventing authentic sexual fantasy development in youth, and, in the process, heightening pedagogies of paranoid and fear in teachers, librarians, and other adults engaged in intellectual and cultural censorship and gatekeeping. This complex process created by corporate media forces and deployed by adults, often including educators, what de Certeau describes as:
“the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power [a teenager] can be isolated from an environment [sexual exploration] by a strategy [an educator]…that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it…“ (de Certeau, 1984, pp. xix).


Modes of Inquiry: The major mode of inquiry for this paper will be postmodern cultural studies with a focus on television and film, much adapted from mass market paperback fiction, marketed towards youth-centric audiences, yet consumed and mediated by a heavily adult-based audience.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, Michigan State University