Consumption

http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php?journal=yptc&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=26

Parental mediation, YouTube’s networked public, and the baby-iPad encounter:mobilizing digital dexterity

This study collected a sample of YouTube videos in which parents recorded their young children utilizing mobile touchscreen devices. Focusing on the more frequently viewed and highly-discussed videos, the paper analyzes the ways in which babies’ ‘digital dexterity’ is coded and understood in terms of contested notions of ‘naturalness’, and how the display of these capabilities is produced for a networked public. This reading of the ‘baby-iPad encounter’ helps expand existing scholarly concepts such as parental mediation and technology domestication. Recruiting several theoretical frameworks, the paper seeks to go beyond concerns of mobile devices and immobile children by analyzing children’s digital dexterity not just as a kind of mobility, but also as a set of reciprocal mobilizations that work across domestic, virtual and publically networked spaces

The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies

In the opening pages of her groundbreaking book Dependent States, cultural historian Karen Sánchez-Eppler clears a path for children’s literature critics interested in challenging the notion that children function solely as passive recipients of culture. Without dismissing the key insights generated by Jacqueline Rose and other literary critics who treat childhood strictly “as a discourse among adults” (xvi), Sánchez-Eppler nevertheless announces her intention to regard children not merely as objects of socialization but also as “individuals inhabiting and negotiating” societal conceptions of what it means to be a child (xv). She thus sets out to analyze not just how American adults in the nineteenth century represented children but also how children represented themselves. To pay attention to children’s diaries and other similar sources, she stresses carefully, “is not to pretend that children are fully independent actors, unhampered by the constraints of adult regulation and desire; but neither is it to see children as incapable of defining their own terms and grounds of power and meaning” (xxviii)

"Difference That Is Actually Sameness Mass-Reproduced": Barbie Joins the Princess Convergence

Disney’s phenomenally successful princess line inspired Mattel to give Barbie a crown. Barbie’s variations on the princess theme make her seem more independent and modern than her Disney counterparts. Ultimately, however, both Barbie and Disney princesses reveal the coherence, power, and social conservatism of the princess industry.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2010.002

Toward a Zeroth Voice: Theorizing Voice in Children’s Literature with Deleuze

Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze, this paper explores the rhizome of voices in children’s texts and postulates that voice may be considered as something created through a Deleuzian becoming. Looking in turn at the coming together of book and reader, this rhizome of voices, and the complexity of authorship of children’s literature, this paper shows how the simulacral nature of voices present in children’s literature can lead to what Deleuze terms a collective assemblage of enunciation with its own voice, a zeroth voice. It is my contention that this zeroth voice liberates the reader from all the voices present in the creation of the text.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2010.0025 &nbsp

Mille Pompons! Fantômette, the Famous, Unknown, Schoolgirl Superhero of France

One significant character in French and Francophone literature aimed at young girls is completely absent from English language culture.  The books and other media about crime fighting schoolgirl Françoise Dupont / Fantômette have not been translated into English and are very sparsely represented in American and British libraries.  She is ubiquitous enough in Francophone culture to be referred to without any explanation (much as English publications would reference a detective named Nancy or Hermione the witch).  Who is this heroine and why have we never heard of her?   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.001

Where are the Girls? Locating Girlhood in Game Studies

Review of: Cunningham, Carolyn M. Games Girls Play: Contexts of Girls and Video Games. Lexington Books, 2018.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.001

Black Lives Matter – Statement of Solidarity

DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.000

Pretty Sweet? Hegemonic Masculinity, Female Physicality, and the Regulation of Gender in a Vintage Book Series for Girls

The Girls of Central High series, published over a century ago, provides a unique opportunity to investigate crucial intersections of gender, class, and institutionalized schooling that impact on competitive female sporting activities. In this article, these intersections are explored through a detailed examination of two characters in the series whose lives are affected by sport in very different ways. Although this book series served to reproduce and reinforce conventional attitudes and beliefs about femininity and masculinity, it also succeeded in reassuring young women that the desire to participate in vigorous competitive team sport was reasonable, feminine, and beneficial for other aspects of their lives.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2010.000

“Always Becoming”: Posthuman Subjectivity in Young Adult Fiction

Review of: Tarr, Anita, and Donna R. White, editors. Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World. UP of Mississippi, 2018.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.001