Julie Passanante Elman, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation

Many books have been written about youth culture, and the ways in which the “troubled teen” has functioned as both a pop cultural trope and a site of medical, juridical, and governmental intervention (e.g., Breggin & Breggin, 1998; Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Kidd, 2004; Prescott, 1998; Rembis, 2011; Savage, 2007). However, few books on this topic have shown how the ongoing normalization of teenagers has been mobilized by cultural producers, policy makers, and medical professionals alike, in discourses of disability that relocate adolescence in a culture of rehabilitation. Julie Passanante Elman’s Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation offers a provocative new analysis of the rehabilitative cultural narratives that shape knowledge about youth, sexuality, disability, and policies that attempt to regulate teen behavior. Elman argues that rehabilitative discourses targeting young people do more than pathologize them; these discourses recast adolescence as a treatable “condition” which must be carefully diagnosed, prescribed, and (hopefully) cured.