Cranked Up and Pushed: Threatening and Monstrous Children

• 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. Will discuss the inadequacies of modernist notions of childhood characterized as stages in childhood development and suggest some postmodern conceptualizations of childhood.
2. Will provide examples of current pop “adolescent literature” that portrays children (youth) as threatening, abused, abusers, sexually sophisticated and othered.
3. Will discuss these “othered” in terms of gender, race and class within the framework of the literature discussed (i.e., Crank, Push, and The Film Club).
4. Will advocate for the use of popular literature that is outside the “canon” for enhancing our understandings of childhood and youth.

Perspectives: The theoretical framework will be a post-structural cultural studies framework. The paper problematizes children’s and young adult’s literature. It will also focus on understanding the use of literature to examine childhood and young adult culture and their needs. Literature will facilitate the analysis of the current conditions of youth in different areas of the world. Instead of reading different genres and traditional childhood and young adult literature, the essay will specifically focus on the pathologization of children and young adults by dominant culture and the issues and needs that those children and young adults feel through different types of alienation. Consequently, the paper will be deeply immersed in questions like: Why are today’s children and young adults different than in other eras? What is the postmodern child or young adult? How is childhood identity constructed through literature and popular culture? How does literature assist us in placing children and young adults in our society?

Modes of Inquiry: The major mode of inquiry for this paper will be post-structural, cultural studies with a focus on young adult pop literature and youth culture.

Scholarly Significance: This paper will add to the new research in youth studies. The uniqueness will be its focus on popular young adult literature and the focus on identity and othering that takes place in that takes place in that literature and how that contributes to the representations presented to youth and formation of identity in youth culture and the larger popular culture as well.

Author

• William M. Reynolds, Georgia Southern University