Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults

This book presents an innovative comparative view of how the issue of adolescent sexuality and consent is differently treated in various media. Analyzing teenage sexual encounters with adults across a variety of media, including films, television, novels, and podcasts, the volume takes a positive stance on the expression of teenage sexuality, while remaining sensitive to the power of adults to abuse and manipulate. The anthology treats these representations as negotiations between conflicting forces: desire, sexual self-knowledge, unequal power, and the law, the latter both actual legal statutes and internalized law in the philosophical and psychoanalytic sense. Questions of unequal power inherent in such relations are theorized. The authors examine variations of this configuration of sexual relations between teenagers and adults from different perspectives, to consider how various forms of expression rework it formally. These essays are attuned to both nuances of presentation and contexts of reception, and they consider how aesthetics play a role. Contributing to the general debate about the ways that societies construct and regulate adolescent sexuality, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, sociology, and gender studies

Maureen Turim is Professor Emerita at the University of Florida Diane Waldman is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Denver

1.Legal, Theoretical, and Ethical Issues in the Debates over Adolescent/Adult Sexuality: An Introduction to the Volume; Industry History and Practices; 2. Willing Clay: Female Adolescence, Consent, and Stardom in Early Hollywood; 3. Age-Transgressive Relations Between Teens and Adults in 1970s Cinema; 4. Discursive Responses to an Underage Porn Star: The Traci Lords Scandal; Adaptation: Literary Sources and Filmic Specificity; 5. Lolita and The Lover: Pederosis and the Child; 6. Silencing Incest Survivors: The Erasure of Shame-Inducing Sexual Arousal in the Adaptations Precious and Bastard Out of Carolina; 7. Coming of Age in Post-Holocaust Hungary: Love and Healing in Those Who Remained; Comparative International Textual Analysis; 8. Hunger, Discipline, and Order: Queer Adolescent Desire in Mädchen in Uniform and Otra vueltra de tuerca; 9. The Search for a Happy Ending: Adolescent Sexuality in Indian Cinema from Balika Badhu to the Present; 10. Exploitation of Adolescent Girls by Adult Men in La niña santa and Madeinusa; 11. From the Beach to the Bach: Female Coming-of-Age Film in France and New Zealand Psychoanalytic Theory and its Discontents; 12. Oedipus Rex at Eve's Bayou or the Little Black Girl Who Left Sigmund Freud in the Swamp; 13. Film Aesthetics, Fantasy, and the Expression of Adolescent Desire in Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart) and Call Me by Your Name; Contemporary Television Series; 14. Criminalization of Teen Sexuality in Law & Order: SVU; 15. "Maybe if it's animated...": The Affordances and Limitations of Animated Adolescent Sexuality