{"title":"Performing Childhood: Maddie Ziegler and the Presentation of Young Girls in Video Clips","authors":"Sophia Mehrbrey","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0025","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1980s, the production of video clips has been on the rise. Over the past couple of years, clips showing dance choreographies, often embedded within a rather conceptual fictional framework, have greatly increased in popularity. Although the musicians are usually adults, it is not uncommon to cast children and young adults to perform in the videos. At the same time, multiple reality TV formats in which children and young adults compete performing dance choreographies to famous pop songs have become a popular form of entertainment. The American TV series Dance Moms is a prominent example of this phenomenon. One of the best known young artists in the field is Maddie Ziegler, who made her debut in this show and subsequently appeared in several music videos by the singer Sia. Maddie, born in 2002, was twelve years old when she first performed in a video clip. Her career is emblematic of the presentation of young girls in a popular culture and media that is dominated by the deliberate play with expectations of age and the blurring of categorical distinctions. Drawing on Maddie Ziegler as an example, the following article provides a close analysis of the presentation of young girls in video clips and reality shows. Special attention is given to the atemporal image of adolescence in these adult reconstructions, which, instead of celebrating the rebellious potential of youth, oscillate between the angelic outer appearance of the child and the serious demeanour of the adult.","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44960845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film","authors":"J. Duggan","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques’s edited collection Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film aims to intervene in discourses that see adults and children at odds with one another and thus children as relatively powerless in influencing and producing children’s culture. With a focus on literature and film specifically, the volume seeks to illuminate various ways in which children and adults have cooperated and continue to cooperate when producing children’s cultural texts, as well as the ways in which children’s texts encourage intergenerational solidarity. The volume opens with an introduction in which Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques convincingly argue that we must pay closer attention to moments of intergenerational solidarity rather than to tensions between adults and children in and surrounding children’s texts. The body of the book is divided into five thematic parts. The first part, “Tradition of Interage Kinships in Children’s Books,” demonstrates that some children’s texts emphasize intergenerational cooperation. It opens with an incisive chapter by Clémentine Beauvais, who examines texts in which entire lives are depicted, including both biographies and other types of texts. Beauvais first reflects on what the lack of full lives in children’s literary texts means for intergenerationality, then considers how protagonists’ attitudes toward younger and older characters are depicted in the texts she examines, arguing that intergenerationality appears through protagonists’ being mentored when they are young themselves and then acting as mentors to children as they age. The second chapter, by Ashley N. Reese, presents a digital humanist examination of Pollyanna’s encouragement of intergenerational solidarity in Pollyanna (1913) and Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). Reese used the digital tool Voyant to produce word frequency graphs, word clouds, and word correlations, applying corpus techniques and close reading to the text in a “combinatorial” approach (20) in order to be able to closely consider uses of the word “glad” in the two texts, as well as what these uses demonstrate about intergenerational relationships in context. The third chapter in this section, by Björn Sundmark, considers reciprocal aid between adults and children in Astrid Lindgren’s Emil books. Sundmark argues that Lindgren questions normative hierarchies between adults and children, in part due to “changing perceptions of childhood in the Nordic countries” at the time she was writing (33).","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43539648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Navigating Death and Grief: Identity and Diversity in Young People's Grief Narratives","authors":"Shuya Su","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0017","url":null,"abstract":"Gabriela Lee Gabriela Lee teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. Her second collection of short stories, A Playlist for the End of the World (University of the Philippines Press, 2022), was just released. She recently received a National Children’s Book Award in the Philippines for her children’s book, Cely’s Crocodile: The Story and Art of Araceli Limcaco Dans (Tahanan Books, 2020). She is currently a PhD student with the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work at www.sundialgirl.com","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44646795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial Introduction: Children's Literature in Japan","authors":"Sarah Olive","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2023-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2023-0003","url":null,"abstract":"As this issue reaches readers, my time as a Megumi Kai Visiting Professor at Kobe College is coming to a close. In this editorial, I share the insights into children’s literature in Japan that I have gleaned through the past year’s teaching, research, and tourism. I was invited to this historic women’s university in Japan’s Kansai region primarily to teach Shakespeare, theatre, and an introductory literature survey course. This opportunity allowed me the scope to explore with students aspects of Anglophone children’s culture, including Little Angel Theatre’s pandemic puppet theatre shows streamed on YouTube and the use of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books by Anglophone adult visitors to Japan to make sense of their experiences. The latter session was thanks to the English department sponsoring a visit from Catherine Butler (Cardiff University) to share research from her forthcoming book British Children’s Literature in Japan: Wonderlands and Looking Glasses (Bloomsbury). I ran a panto season before Christmas, exploring some traditions and critiques of this peculiar British theatre form through productions by CBeebies and Peter Duncan’s lockdown-originating Panto Online (Ohh no, you didn’t! Oh yes, we did!). I also taught a “special lecture” course on children’s literature. We explored Australian, English, European, and Japanese picture books, comics, manga, fan cultures (since character merchandise is ubiquitous in Japan, across generations and genders), stage and animated adaptations—not neglecting the work of Japan’s most beloved animation studio, Studio Ghibli! Fortunately, since teaching contemporary children’s literature can easily become an expensive business, Kobe College has an excellent collection of picture books in Japanese, by Japanese authors, and in translation: I did not want out-of-copyright texts to be the backbone of the course, and web comics were a blessing. My students were particularly struck by web comics’ use of colour throughout, since they are used to reading manga printed in black and white. Exhibitions centred on children’s literature are a staple of local museums and galleries in Japan, often focused on illustrations from European children’s literature. In the autumn, my host institution held its own successful children’s literature exhibition, open to the public. Kobe College, with its strong reputation for translation and English programs, was the alma mater of one of Japan’s great children’s librarians and translators of children’s literature, Kyoko Matsuoka. This exhibition celebrated her life, study, and work: she passed away in March 2022. Her firm place in Japanese hearts and minds was demonstrated by the steady trickle of visitors onto campus during the exhibition, which took place in the stunning space of the main library, one of the Spanish mission-style buildings designed by American missionary and architect William Merrell Vories. My students were given a guided tour by librarian Yoshie Makita. She showed them","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69366481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modern-Day Magic: Stories of Growing Up between the Mundane and the Magical","authors":"Gabriela Lee","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Jennifer Duggan Jennifer Duggan is Associate Professor and Head of English at the University of SouthEastern Norway and is one of the editors at Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Her research focuses on the online cultures surrounding children’s and young adult literature and media. She is most interested in how the digital present affects children’s and young adult literature, including readers’ modes of reading, reception of texts, and identitybuilding practices.","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42508370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cultural Stakes of Intimacy in the Contemporary Young Adult Romance","authors":"Katherine Bell","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0022","url":null,"abstract":"In his classic survey of young adult (YA) literature, Michael Cart traces the infiltration of the romance genre into the YA market in the 1980s. He accounts for this trend by citing an interview with prolific author Jane Yolen for Seventeen magazine in 1983, where she argues that the rising popularity of the romance is “a teenager’s way of saying ’enough.’ Teenagers have seen their adolescence taken away by graphic television shows and movies and books. The return to romance is a way to return to the mystery and the beauty of love, even if only on a superficial level” (in Cart 43).1 Many critics agree that the romance novel is escapist, with opinions on the genre’s merits ranging from praiseworthy to pejorative. When Louise Rennison’s humorous romance novel Angus, Thongs and Full Fron tal Snogging became an honor book for the Printz Award, critics were surprised","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47104720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Textual Instability around Gendered and Sexual Violence in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Midnight Sun","authors":"Sarah Olive","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores Stephenie Meyer's Twilight alongside the partial, leaked PDF and authorized book of Midnight Sun using textual studies approaches to analyzing multiple versions of a text. These methods are coupled with feminist media effects theory to consider the significance of textual variants in Meyer's representations of sexual and gendered violence in teenage romantic relationships. The international notoriety of Twilight has afforded her the opportunity to respond to commentary, critiques, and adulation from readers, fans, critics, and film adaptations, as well as to react to evolving feminist zeitgeists. Her multiple, publicly available rewritings of the same story could be viewed as one such response. These include Life and Death (2015), the Midnight Sun PDF (2008) and book (2020), in addition to spin-offs like The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (2010). This analysis across retellings of the Twilight story considers variations in representations of what many critics have articulated as the male protagonist Edward's abusive attitudes and behaviours toward the female protagonist Bella. It elucidates change and continuity in these representations and identifies a trajectory of increasingly misogynistic attitudes and behaviours expressed by Edward's character. The article concludes that the availability of multiple versions of the story offers readers, fans, and educators an unusual opportunity to understand Edward as a literary construct and to engage further with representations of abuse in relationships.","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44468692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Formative Young Adult Literature: Negotiating the Terms of Reading","authors":"Margaret Mackey","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Joshua Landy says \"formative fictions\" help us fine-tune our mental capacities. This article looks at how novels for young adults may challenge readers to fine-tune their capacities as readers of more complex fiction. Three sample titles (I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy, and Slay by Brittney Morris) make use of character-authors to invite readers to negotiate the terms of reading. Young readers normally have extensive childhood experience in the social negotiation of the terms of make-believe games (\"You be the daddy\") and can apply this expertise to the challenge of these novels as they interact with the explicit observations of the heroines about the making of stories. This article takes up Aidan Chambers' challenge to analyze materials for youth as a separate literature. By exploring the work of three novels published over a 70-year span, (the titles were published in 1948, 1986, and 2019), it meets his demand to include the history of youth literature in our considerations. In these sample texts, young readers are invited to turn back to early childhood in order to make use of the skills and experience of fictional engagement as first developed in pretend games; as a consequence, they develop more subtle capacities as interpreters of complex fiction, thus addressing a major challenge of what Chambers calls \"the age between.\"","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41639610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transfeminism for Children","authors":"A. Sansonetti","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This hybrid research article/three-act play introduces what the author calls \"transfeminism for children\"—both its practices and its makers—as material for art-based research, criticism, and pedagogy in queer- and trans-affirming childhood studies. It stages three contemporary acts of transfeminism for children to consider how girl friendships refuse cis-normative knowing in favour of making girlhood possible for feminine boys and trans girls: Act 1, a 2018 painting by punk artist and writer Sybil Lamb; Act 2, a 2015 children's novel by writer Alex Gino; and Act 3, a poem by junior high school student Averi Laskey featured in the 2013 documentary Valentine Road. In these performances, cis and trans women and children share the space, time, and feeling of girlhood without its inhospitable racism, biological essentialism, and bourgeois politics of respectability and with the promise of its reenchantment in transfeminist sorority. It is the work of the following three acts of transfeminism for children to further evidence this claim.","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45317387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le rayonnement de la nuit – la symbolique du bleu dans l’album pour enfants","authors":"Sophia Mehrbrey","doi":"10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse-2022-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Dans la littérature pour enfants, le thème de la nuit a longtemps été associé à la menace et à la peur. L’histoire du coucher, devenue un sous-genre de la littérature enfantine, représente un tournant à cet égard. Dans l’album pour enfants, le texte et l’image coopèrent à l’élaboration d’un univers nocturne qui cherche à faciliter l’endormissement des jeunes lecteurs et lectrices. L’utilisation de différentes nuances de bleu y joue un rôle décisif. L’intérêt de cet article est de mettre en évidence la signification de la couleur bleue dans un corpus de livres d’images français et européens (1989–1919). En effet, l’utilisation du bleu dans un contexte nocturne soulève d’abord un paradoxe : alors que dans la symbolique occidentale, le bleu a traditionnellement été associé au ciel et à l’air et donc établi comme couleur contrastant avec la lune et les étoiles, dans la nature, la couleur déploie sa véritable intensité comme résultat de la réfraction de la lumière et est donc particulièrement dépendante de la lumière du jour. La couleur bleue se révèle ainsi doublement tournée vers l’imaginaire : d’un point de vue physique, la nuit bleue est une illusion ; d’un point de vue métaphysique, le bleu renvoie au divin. Dans le livre d’images, ces deux composantes se fondent en une nouvelle esthétique. Dans le contexte de l’histoire du coucher, le bleu invite à un voyage imaginaire, à une expérience qui brouille les frontières entre la fiction et la réalité. La transformation du bleu du symbole de la spiritualité céleste à une métaphore du besoin de fiction de l’enfant sera le fil conducteur de cette étude.","PeriodicalId":42169,"journal":{"name":"Jeunesse-Young People Texts Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46060202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}