Teens on screens: Girls’ negotiations of representations of texting in teen film

Teen film is a space where stories about young people’s engagement with technology are told and where relationships and communication are represented. How do girls engage with such stories? This article draws on material from two focus groups held with girls at high schools located in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2019 and places this in the context of other representations of image sharing and texting in teen films over the past 25 years. Participants were shown a scene from Netflix teen film Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018), in which Sierra receives a shirtless selfie from Jamey and contemplates how to respond, before finally replying with a picture of a seated elephant. The participants’ discussion illustrates some of the ways girls navigate technology use in their lives and relationships and the complex ways they negotiate popular culture representations of intimacy in teen film.

The "sell-out girl" in contemporary Hollywood cinema : training future generations of capitalist consumers

Contemporary Hollywood teen films are laden with ideological themes that advertise socially appropriate behaviours for young women. The following study, using a theoretical foundation in Marxism, presents a critical examination of the naturalized codes of consumerism, femininity, and adolescent subcultures found within the medium of film. The study of "alternative" female characters in Clueless (1995), 10 things I hate about you (1999), She's all that (1999), Ghost world (2001), Thirteen (2003), Mean girls(2004) and The perfect score (2004), reveals some of the hegemonic processes of capitalism that commodify potential forms of social opposition while reinforcing dominant norms about gender expectations, class status, and conspicuous consumption.

The "sell-out girl" in contemporary Hollywood cinema : training future generations of capitalist consumers

Contemporary Hollywood teen films are laden with ideological themes that advertise socially appropriate behaviours for young women. The following study, using a theoretical foundation in Marxism, presents a critical examination of the naturalized codes of consumerism, femininity, and adolescent subcultures found within the medium of film. The study of "alternative" female characters in Clueless (1995), 10 things I hate about you (1999), She's all that (1999), Ghost world (2001), Thirteen (2003), Mean girls(2004) and The perfect score (2004), reveals some of the hegemonic processes of capitalism that commodify potential forms of social opposition while reinforcing dominant norms about gender expectations, class status, and conspicuous consumption.

Exposing Flaws of Affirmative Consent through Contemporary American Teen Films

The discursive shift during the twenty-first century from “no means no” to “yes means yes” clearly had an impact on contemporary American teen films. While teen films of the 1970s and 1980s often epitomized rape culture, teen films of the 2010s and later adopted consent culture actively. Such films now routinely highlight how obtaining a girl’s “yes” is equally important to respecting her “no.” However, the framework of affirmative consent is not without its flaws. In this article, I highlight how recent teen movies expose some of these shortcomings, in particular how affirmative consent remains a highly gendered discourse that prioritizes verbal consent over desire.

Breaking into Soundtrack in 1980s Teen Films

From Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear in Risky Business (1983) to John Cusack blasting a love song on his boombox below his girlfriend’s bedroom window in Say Anything . . . (1989), characters “breaking into soundtrack” are some of the most iconic moments in teen films of the 1980s. This essay examines these sequences as a discrete mode of musical performance with aesthetic conventions and narrative functions that are largely consistent throughout the decade. The author argues that teen characters tend to break into soundtrack at strategic moments in the narrative in order to try out potential identities and to express strong, often subversive feelings without negative consequences. These performances allow teens to test the waters without committing to a course of action. That the music is all commercially available popular music only highlights the fact that these are appropriated, rather than spontaneous, songs that can be tried on like a new outfit. Thus, in these films, teens break into soundtrack in order to try out different voices as they search to find their own.

My Most Prized Possession, an American Obsession. Virginity and the Sexual Politics of the American Teen Film.

American "teen films" and TV series can be regarded as mass consumerculture's version of literature's "bildungsroman". Their main trope isthe adolescent individual's search for identity and independence,narrated via the personal and social initiation associated with acoming-of-age experience, often ignited and/or epitomized by a sexualinitiation, most commonly in the form of virginity loss. Thus, manyteen films are negotiations of purity, chastity, and virginity—withquite mixed messages.With recourses to Jean Paul Sartre, Barrington Moore Jr., MichelFoucault, Sigmund Freud, Laura M. Carpenter and others, this paperaddresses how the transitional in-between state of adolescence isevaluated in American (popular) culture, the sexual politics of manyof these narratives, and their agency in reflecting as well as shapingadolescent sexual identities.