MEDICALIZING EDUTAINMENT: ENFORCING DISABILITY IN THE TEEN BODY, 1970-2000
by Julie Passanante Elman
B.A. English Literature and Hispanic Languages and Literatures, May 2001, Stony Brook University
A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
January 31, 2009
Dissertation directed by
Melani McAlister Associate Professor of American Studies and of International Affairs
Robert McRuer Associate Professor of English
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Julie Passanante Elman has passed the Final Examination for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy as of August 18, 2008. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.
MEDICALIZING EDUTAINMENT: ENFORCING DISABILITY IN THE
TEEN BODY, 1970-2000
Julie Passanante Elman
Dissertation Research Committee:
Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and of
International Affairs, Dissertation Co-Director
Robert McRuer, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director
Gayle Freda Wald, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member
Abby L. Wilkerson, Assistant Professor of Writing, Committee Member
ii
© Copyright 2008 by Julie Passanante Elman All rights reserved
iii Dedication
I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Kathleen, whose unique hands taught mine to
grasp stars; to my grandfather, Joseph, who taught me the value of hard work; and to
David, whose gentleness, support and unfailing love continue to teach me.
iv Acknowledgments
Adequately expressing gratitude for all of the intellectual and personal support I have received is a daunting task, and brevity has never been my strongest suit, especially when it comes to giving thanks. My dissertation committee provided me with thoughtful critique as well as vital personal and professional mentoring. I can’t adequately thank Melani McAlister for her guidance, careful reading, creative energy, and indispensable yoga allegories; her unshakeable confidence in my work emboldened me in many moments of self-doubt. Bob McRuer first introduced me to disability studies, and his trenchant yet reassuring style of critique, optimism, and energetic community-building will be a model for me forever. I am thankful for Gayle Wald’s vital refocusing of each chapter’s core arguments and for Abby Wilkerson’s gentle insistence that I consider the activist voice(s) of and within my work. Kip Kosek pushed me to consider important questions of spirituality, while the fabulous Todd
Ramlow forced me to be more theoretically rigorous and makes me laugh often. I’ll endeavor to be as wonderful a mentor to my future students as you all have been to me.
The George Washington University American Studies Department will always be my template for scholarly community, collegiality, humility and vibrant intellectual culture. While I wrote this dissertation, the department provided me with thorough instruction, institutional support, funding, travel grants, and a dissertation
v writing fellowship. Thanks especially to Chad Heap, Jim Miller, and Terry Murphy for teaching me more than I could ever encapsulate here. Outside of American Studies,
I was also privileged to be a member of a DC-area disability studies faculty-student reading group whose lively conversations really enhanced my work. I am also indebted to many wonderful teachers I encountered at Stony Brook University, including Lee
Edelman, Benigno Trigo, Bente Videbaek, Missy Bradshaw, and the extraordinary Ira
Livingston, who encouraged this vivacious-but-undirected undergrad to get a Ph.D. in
American Studies in the first place.
My energetic GWU colleagues spark at the synapses of this work. I had formative barroom conversations with Katie Brian, Ramzi Fawaz, and Dave Kieran; beloved rooftop ramblings drenched in starlight with Jeremy Hill; and many desperate coffee breaks with Jedi-master, jam partner, and Goon Squad captain, Kevin Strait.
Thanks most especially to my dissertation writing group for their fierce friendship, diligent critique, and baking prowess; this dissertation is filled with as much of their passion and creativity as mine. Laura Cook Kenna constantly forced me to sophisticate my theoretical arguments while reassuring me, with words and pasta, that everything will be okay. Kyle Riismandel patiently kept my feet on firm historical ground while staving off despair with unrivaled hilarity. Laurel Clark’s incomparable ability to see the big picture of my work was matched only by her unique capacity for reminding me, at strategic moments, why my work was (still) exciting and for plying me with
vi homemade cake. Finally, I thank Stephanie Ricker Schulte, a rare and brilliant
treasure, for her diligence in pruning my overly-long sentences, for selflessly telling me
the truth, and for helping me to become a stronger person. I am ever brimming with
awe and gratitude for all of you, my chosen family.
Many other scholars, archivists, and industry professionals also enriched this
work. In particular, I would like to thank producer Martin Tahse for two personal
interviews filled with incredible stories. Thanks also to Bret Schulte for helping with
interview preparation. The Paley Center for New Media’s archivists thoroughly
helped me navigate their un-indexed collection of ABC’s After School Specials. Elana
Levine generously read a draft of Chapter 2 and offered thorough feedback, while
Alison Perlman provided me with her expertise in the history of public television.
Finally, this dissertation—and my entire intellectual life—has been truly a family affair. Elle Elman translated neuroscience jargon, while Cheryl Elman pampered me with homemade chicken soup for long writing days. Michael Cain walked this path before me and shepherded me through—how wonderful for us to have shared the
“dialectical unfolding” of this dream. Tom, Chris, and Doug gave me much-needed relaxation and red wine. Rick and Ro-Ro always asked questions about my work
(more substantive than the inescapable “When will you finish?”) that made me feel loved and supported. My beloved Broadway-bound sister, Amanda, proofread chapters
with obsessive precision and continually enriches my life with her generosity and sense
vii of humor. My father, Dennis, has never missed a moment to proudly cheer me on from every sideline, while my mother, Kathleen, eagerly read multiple drafts of this
entire dissertation and wrote in the margins. My amazing family has allowed me to
dare to dream any of this. Finally, Dave Elman, my greatest friend, love, and bass
player, lived and breathed this project with me while reminding me to eat, breathe,
take walks, and even (gasp) be frivolous from time to time. The depths of your love,
generosity, and sense of wonder continually astound me; “you’re the magic that holds
the sky up from the ground.”
viii Abstract of Dissertation
Medicalizing Edutainment: Enforcing Disability in the Teen Body, 1970-2000
This study investigates shifting cultural meanings of teenagers in the postwar period by examining linkages among cultural representations, citizenship, nation, youth and the body. This dissertation argues that cultural representations of teenagers mapped narratives of overcoming disability metaphorically onto coming-of-age stories, constructing adolescence as a temporary disability. Bringing disability and queer studies perspectives to a discursive history of the teen, this study traces how national health and the individual health of teen citizen-subjects fused biopolitically through the co- dependent tropes of rebelliousness and overcoming. Throughout, this dissertation highlights broader notions of American democratic citizenship and questions of compulsory able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, technology, the body, and affect in cultural analysis.
Integrating analyses of films, television, novels, government policy, and medical technology, this study historicizes “medicalized edutainment,” my term for a range of teen-focused narratives which emerged in the late twentieth century alongside governmental initiatives to encourage teen health through popular culture. This edutainment not only medicalized teen development but also figured teen rebellion as internal and embodied rather than externally- or environmentally-incited. Addressing
ix teen citizen-subjects proactively rather than protectively, medicalized edutainment promoted “rehabilitative citizenship,” that is, edutainment promised to rehabilitate developing teen citizens into stable adults while concomitantly rehabilitating the image of popular culture as productive rather than damaging. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 2000s, this study examines representations of disease and disability in emergent televisual and literary forms for teens. This includes “disease-of- the-week” made-for-TV movies, such as ABC’s After School Specials (1972-1996) and The
Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), and “teen sick-lit” novels by Lurlene McDaniel, which narrated and disciplined teens through the affective labor of sadness. It also examines popular neuroscience publishing, parenting books, and news coverage of school-shooting and superpredator epidemics from 1990 to 2000 to chart the emergence of
“neuroparenting”—a parenting model that constructed teen brains as disabled by blaming neurology for “symptoms” of adolescence. Overall, this study historicizes how the joint tactics of policing sexuality and fostering bodily normativity operated through the affective labor of sadness and fear to construct teens as always-already emotionally- excessive, disabled, and under-construction.
x Table of Contents
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgments ...... v
Abstract of Dissertation ...... viii
Table of Contents ...... ix
Introduction: Enforcing Disability in the Teen Body ...... 1
Chapter 1: "Medicine is Magical and Magical is Art:"
Exploring Space and Sex from a Plastic Bubble ...... 59
Chapter 2: After School Special Education:
The Emergence of Rehabilitative Teen TV ...... 117
Chapter 3: Feeling Real, Real Feeling:
Six Months to Live in the Age of Aliteracy ...... 181
Chapter 4: "Crazy by Design:"
Neuroparenting Teens in the Decade of the Brain ...... 255
Conclusion: On Feathers, Windows, and Queer/Disabled Alliances ...... 344
Bibliography ...... 391
xi
Introduction: Enforcing Disability in the Teen Body
The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body. --Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83.
In Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind (2003),
which won awards from Parents’ Choice and The National Parenting Center, Michael
Bradley joked about how difficult it was to raise teens in the 21st century. Bradley cited
a psychologists’ longstanding joke in order to drive home his titular truth, that teens
were inherently and always-already crazy. The joke begins with a concerned parent’s
arrival to a psychologist’s office to ask that the psychologist evaluate his 13-year-old
son.1 Without examining the prospective teen patient, the doctor replies, “‘OK. He’s suffering from a transient psychosis with an intermittent rage disorder, punctuated by episodic radical mood swings, but his prognosis is good for a full recovery.’” The confused parent requests a clarification, so the doctor simplifies his explanation: “‘He’s
13.’” Stunned by the doctor’s clairvoyance, the parent persists, “‘How can you say all that without even meeting him?” The doctor confidently replies, “‘He’s 13.’” Bradley asserts that this “tired old joke” turned out to be a “dead-on prophecy” with the advent
1 Michael J. Bradley, Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind. (Gig Harbor: Harbor Press, 2003), 5. 1 of adolescent neuroscience, which made the emotionally-tumultuous condition of
adolescence neurologically-rooted for the first time in history. At the core of this
dissertation is the story of how such a medicalized image of adolescence—as a
diagnosable “condition” or as the embodied problem and solution of youth
citizenship—emerged as intelligible and dominant since the 1970s. Medicalizing
representations worked to construct teens as “brain damaged” or temporarily disabled
individuals whose successful rehabilitation would culminate in both healthy adulthood
and toward the larger-scale health of the American body politic. This project maintains
that disability, rather than being ancillary or marginal within teen culture, has been a
central trope through which the coming-of-age of teen bodies and teen citizens have
been conceptualized and narrated.2
In my project, I historicize the partnership of heteronormativity and able-
bodiedness in cultural representations of and for teenagers to analyze the historically-
shifting role this partnership has played in defining adolescence and the teen body.3
My work situates the body as a cathexis of cultural texts, scientific discourses, activist impulses, and individual experiences, or in the words of Michel Foucault, at the
2 For a selective compendium of scholars of “the body” see Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco, eds. The Body: A Reader. (New York: Routledge, 2005). 3 In doing so, I expand on the work of queer/crip theorist Robert McRuer, who theorized “compulsory able-bodiedness” as a discursive formation in which “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things” (1). As a result, heterosexuality and health often seamlessly imply one another, while queerness and disability exist as epitomes of abnormality. Thus, systems of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness buttress one another “by covering over, with the appearance of a choice, a system in which there is actually no choice” (Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability [New York: New York University Press], 1-8). 2 “articulation of the body and history.”4 The main argument of this dissertation is that,
beginning in the 1970s, cultural productions specifically designed for teenagers—rather than children—emerged in a variety of media and pop cultural forms and used stories of overcoming disability as a metaphor for coming-of-age. This strategy helped to
produce a medicalized image of teenagers as “under construction” and increasingly
threatened by the inherent flux or incompleteness of their bodies. Simultaneously, this
type of cultural production, which I have named “medicalized edutainment,”
positioned teenagers centrally in the health and futurity of the nation by mapping
stories of overcoming disability metaphorically and didactically onto the process of
coming-of-age into productive adult citizens.
By “medicalized edutainment,” I mean a style and set of popular texts that
digested, transmitted, and constructed images of medical knowledge for public
entertainment and education. Historically, this form of entertainment arose
contemporaneously with an ascension of science journalism and popular science
writing, a staple of newspapers and news magazines by the 1970s that would later
provide an impetus for a publishing industry of popular science books, including the
parenting books I survey in Chapter 4.5 Although I do not collapse science journalism
4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 83. 5 There is no single history of “science journalism” in the United States, but according to an article in The Columbia Journalism Review, the 1970s was a key decade in the history of the field. Although the profession began in the late nineteen century, it could be said to have been formalized as a discipline in the 1930s, with the establishment of the National Association of Science Writers. According to Boyce Rensberger, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships (a program brings mid-career 3 into medicalized edutainment wholesale, I note that both experienced growth in the same period, functioned as new didactic and entertaining media for a presumed- nontechnical audience, and aspired to present scientific knowledge in a culturally- embedded way. Medicalized edutainment served a pedagogical and entertaining function simultaneously and often actively blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.6 Examples of medicalized edutainment include fictional portrayals of disease or disability in “disease of the week” television shows, such as The Boy in the
Plastic Bubble (1976) or some of ABC’s After School Specials (1972-1995) and the subgenre of the young adult “problem novel” that I term “teen sick-lit.”7 These cultural representations of teenagers presented the teen body as constantly “under construction” through a relationship among health, completeness, and
professional science writers to MIT for a year of concentrated study in the field), the period between the 1930s until the 1970s represented the “‘cheerleader or gee-whiz age of science journalism.’” However, the 1970s represented a shift in the field’s purpose practice, and visibility, which Rensberger characterized as a transition of science journalism from “‘science lapdog to public watchdog.’” This new visibility in the 1970s was due in part to the environmental movement and science writing’s institutionalization in the form the permanent addition of a weekly science section to The New York Times. See Curtis Brainard, “Science Journalism: Past, Present, and Future.” Columbia Journalism Review. February 22, 2008
This study is interdisciplinary in methodology, theoretical approach, and materials, and analyzes a diverse range of sources, including news media, film, television programs, young adult literature, policy debates, government initiatives, political activism, neuroscientific discoveries, parenting books, and technology.8 This project’s analytical framework has been heavily-influenced by technological history, disability studies, and feminist science studies scholarship, all of which have critiqued the impacts of medical and scientific knowledge and its implication in the cultural formation of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and national identity.9 I draw heavily on
8 This dissertation does not discuss youth and popular music, but much critical and productive work has been done on the subject. See Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place (New York: Routledge, 1992); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002). There is also much scholarly literature on punk and youth subculture formation around music, the most famous of which has been Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1981). 9 For analyses of the interplay of cultural constructions of gender roles and medical and scientific discourse and technology, see Anne Fausto Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1998); Emily 5 recent work that investigates the history of the body and technology, especially David
Serlin’s Replaceable You and Anne Fausto Sterling’s Sexing the Body, both of which discuss the interplay among scientific meaning-making, the body, heteronormativity, and the complex relationship of individual and national health.10 Positioning my work
at the intersection of the body and technology, I articulate the history of media technology with that of medical technologies to critique the ways in which medical knowledge and medicalized edutainment have participated in constructing, visualizing, and medicalizing adolescence.11 Although medicalized edutainment targeted more than
Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (New York: Beacon Press, 1992); Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley, eds. The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Abby L Wilkerson, Diagnosis: Difference: The Moral Authority of Medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk, eds. Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine, and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2000). For discussions of the relationship of medical knowledge and the construction of race, see Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. (New York: Doubleday, 2007) and Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). For foundational theoretical texts in science studies, see Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Bruno LaTour, We Have Never Been Modern. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For analyses of germs and other microbes and American national identity, see Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Priscilla Wald, Contagious Cultures: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Nancy Tomes, The Gospel Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For analyses of the connections between medical technology and representations of medicine within the realm of film and television, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Jose van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, Paula A. Treichler, eds. Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 10 Serlin’s concept of “medical consumerism,” which emerged in the postwar period was particularly influential in my thoughts on rehabilitative citizenship. However, neither Serlin’s nor Sterling’s text examine the specific ways in which medical discourses have influenced cultural meanings about the teen body, sexuality, and the able-bodiedness presumed of “adult” citizenship. See David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2004); Carolyn de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Sterling, Sexing the Body. 11 In this regard, my work is indebted to Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body, which positions the history of film technology within the history of medical imaging and the study of the body. 6 a youth audience, this dissertation traces the way in which a teen-specific brand of medicalized edutainment emerged in the 1970s, and by the 1990s, had prevailed as a predominant and particular mode of address to “normal” adolescent citizen-subjects.
This mode of address found cultural and political traction because it imagined an impressionable and angst-ridden youth audience, whose exposure to the “problems” of disability, disease, and death—even if only in a fictional universe—would instantiate emotional growth into a stable and responsible adulthood.
By the 1970s, teens had been configured as dually threatening to society and threatened by violent and immoral popular culture industries, lowbrow popular literature, and in some cases, the legacies of the sexual liberation and civil rights movements of the previous decade. An unparalleled explosion of youth activism in the
1960s and 1970s also had contributed to a fundamental reimagining of the category of youth from one of leisure-seeking consumers to one of politically- and socially-engaged movers, who were critical of restrictive social and cultural norms. In the wake of an unprecedented period of youth activism in the 1960s and a military draft that pressed young soldiers into military service which often culminated in death or disability, notions of loss, reintegration, and maladjustment became central to conceptualizing the development of rehabilitation in the 20th century. These notions were also particularly applicable to the cultural construction of adolescence that existed at the core of rehabilitative citizenship projects. Within the always-already embattled
7 relationship of youth to popular entertainment, regulatory discourses betrayed a
nostalgic sense of “loss” of youth innocence, possessed in a prior cultural moment
before teens had been exposed to the dangers of war, societal instability, sexual
liberation, or the ills of mass media and popular literature. Popular representations of and for teens began offering models and advice for overcoming these dangerous exposures or, at the very least, for navigating them in a manner that would keep the teen on course for “normal” development, physiologically and socially, as citizen- subjects. Although based on a conservative political argument, a liberal pedagogical project, which I have named rehabilitative citizenship, also arose in response to this perceived loss of innocence. Instead of eliminating corrupting influences to remedy the loss, liberal pedagogues dealt with this loss through the rehabilitation of mass entertainment like television or popular literature into healthy edutainment that promised to rehabilitate teens into responsible adults.
Medicalized edutainment also rose in popularity and prevalence amid the uneven processes of American deinstitutionalization, the Vietnam War, and the
“depathologizing movements” of the 1970s, including LGBT, feminist, and disability rights activism, during which people with diseases and disabilities became culturally visible in entirely new ways.12 This project incorporates a disability studies perspective
12 Robert McRuer categorizes this type of activism as “depathologizing movements.” See McRuer, Crip Theory, 12. On the disability rights movement see Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994) and Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000). For an overview of LGBT activism that led to the removal of homosexuality from 8 to imagine how medicalized edutainment persisted in constructing people with diseases
or disabilities as medical subjects, in spite of the contemporaneous cultural work of
disability activists and disability studies scholars to demedicalize disability.13 However,
although medicalized edutainment often featured stereotypical representations of
people with diseases or disabilities, I also argue that series such as ABC’s After School
Specials offered a way of processing a new inclusion and toleration (if not tolerance) of
people with disabilities, even while it further consolidated an image of
heteronormativity and able-bodiedness as the ideal citizenship norm to which all
youth should aspire.14 Finally, I consider some of the ways in which dominant culture
has appropriated the liberatory disability rhetoric of disability rights activism and
employed it to discipline teens rehabilitatively and productively. For instance, by the
end of the 1990s, an understanding of neurological abnormalities characteristic of
“normal” adolescence and an explanation of how such abnormalities affect teens’
perception of the world ushered in a discourse of acceptance of undesirable teen
behavior by describing adolescence using the language of disability and difference. The
the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders, see Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 13 The disability studies listserv, DS-HUM has hosted debates about the relationship between disability studies and other fields engaging in science studies, such as bioethics and medical humanities. A few disability scholars, including Stephen Drake and Timothy Lillie remarked that they felt their perspective was unwelcome on medical humanities/bioethics listservs due to their critique of the assumed authority, rationality, and impartiality of medicine. Timothy H. Lillie, “Bioethics & Disabilities,” 24 March 2006,
As I examine pop cultural representations of disability alongside scientific discourses involved in creating a medicalized understanding of the teen body, I focus on two common representations of disability in particular that pervade cultural productions for teens: disability as either a penalty for deviant behavior or a “rite of passage.”15 In both cases, overcoming disability culminates in maturity and stability.
Meanwhile, since disability narratives in medicalized edutainment are often visually
and rhetorically connected to national iconography, they link overcoming disability
and/or individual triumph over adversity to national citizenship, thus constructing
15 My dissertation only takes up the “penalty for deviant behavior” representational trope to a limited degree, mainly because I did not focus on youth drug and alcohol prevention campaigns. However, this trope was a staple feature of many such prevention campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. Arguably, the most famous anti-drug commercial of the 1980s, “This is your brain on drugs,” which featured an egg frying in a pan to depict the ravages of drugs on the brain, mobilized an image of neurological impairment as a threat for drug use. The PSA was produced by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and can be viewed on YouTube
Ultimately, this dissertation evidences the productive power of ideas and cultural representations, excavating the sometimes complicated, indirect, and shifting
“uncoordinated conjunctures” that interweave to shape the very category of adolescence.16
Drawing on histories of disability and rehabilitation, my study shows that a new “rehabilitative” approach to teen development emerged in the 1970s as edutainment. This form of entertainment grew and specifically targeted adolescents and their coming-of-age process, amid a parallel rise in “therapeutic culture” and self- help movements for adults.17 Medicalized edutainment, as the primary mechanism for framing rehabilitative mode of teen citizenship since the 1970s, has functioned in three
16 My understanding of the productive power of ideas in shaping the cultural construction of adolescence and adolescent’s interactions with media technologies draws on Melani McAlister’s examination of cultural representations of the Middle East and their interaction with U.S. foreign policy. McAlister argues that her “animating assumption” was that “culture matters,” while her work analyzes the historical and cultural contingence of cultural representations, or “how culture has mattered to specific groups of people in particular moments.” See Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 307. 17 In 1979, Christopher Lasch described the climate of the 1970s as “therapeutic, not religious,” arguing that people wanted “not…personal salvation” nor “the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security” (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979], 7. For other histories of therapeutic and self-help culture, see Dana Becker, The Myth of Empowerment: Women and Therapeutic Culture in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). On the history of adolescent medicine, see Heather Munro Prescott, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998). 11 co-constitutive ways. First, as a cultural product partially formed through a marriage
of popular science, popular culture, and policy, medicalized edutainment created an
image of the teenager as disabled by the “condition” of adolescence, configuring
adolescence as an embodied deficiency that would be overcome through healthy
growth into adulthood. This constructive process of “rehabilitative citizenship” thus
mobilizes the categories of able-bodiedness and disability to chart the American
teenager’s journey from physiologically-challenged body to moral, adult citizen. This discourse operates by mapping “immaturity” onto disability and “maturity” onto rehabilitation, a problematic association that continues to limit the ways in which disability and disabled people are culturally represented.
Second, medicalized edutainment addressed teenagers rehabilitatively—that is to
say, proactively rather than protectively. The narratives imaged teens to have a
participatory role in rehabilitating themselves into responsible adulthood rather than
being subject first and foremost to parental or governmental intervention. For
example, one of the few “rules” governing the creation of medicalized edutainment
such as ABC’s After School Specials was that teen protagonists had to solve problems
without the intervention of adults, who were often obstacles rather than guides.
Finally, “rehabilitation” came to be seen as an entertaining and socially-
responsible mode of programming and writing. In light of this development, forms of
entertainment like television and popular literature, which had long been scorned as
12 damaging to children, rehabilitated their own images, casting themselves as productive
and educational influences on teenagers.18 Rather than lamenting that teens watched
too much television or read vapid popular YA novels rather than the classics, proponents of medicalized edutainment championed these entertainments as socially responsible and effective—a means of conveying important moral lessons through an entertaining and financially lucrative, commercial format.
Spotlighting the operations and logics of rehabilitative citizenship, my work argues that disability became an enforced category for youth, whose marginal citizen- position had (and has) been marked by its imaginary and requisite disabling. A
discourse of rehabilitative citizenship sought to actively and productively involve
teenagers in their own decision-making and self-fashioning through the work of
pedagogical popular culture. Thus, disability increasingly became a fundamental
modality for understanding and constructing teenagers, a transformative process by
which medicalized edutainment, alongside scientific and policy discourses, mobilized
18 Forms of popular entertainment, such as comic books, television, film, and popular literature were thought to be a poor, and sometimes, dangerous influence on society in general and youth consumers, specifically. This was an idea popularized by The Frankfurt School, which included neo- Marxists such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. See Gilbert, Boddy, and Wright; see also Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of- the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). For studies of girl consumers, specifically, see Joan Jacob Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1998) and Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994). For primary source material on the linkage of juvenile delinquency and popular culture, see the documents pertaining to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which was formed in 1953. 13 an image of “disabling adolescence.”19 As a body in need of rehabilitation, or not-yet- fully-able, the teen body was produced as knowable and rehabilitatable through a constant maintenance of an image of the teen as threatened and threatening.
In this study, I am working with two important categories and the scholarship
that has already worked to historicize them: “adolescence” and “disability.” Cultural notions of juvenile delinquency, a prevalent and persistent image of the teen from the
1950s, form a “residual” portion of the rehabilitative discourse I am tracing. Although
G. Stanley Hall is largely credited with theorizing adolescence as a stage of “storm and stress” in his book, Adolescence (1904), the term “teenager” only came into popular usage in the 1940s. Prior to 1930, most teenagers worked jobs to support their families, while “adolescence,” which was defined by luxury and leisure time in opposition to
“adult” work, remained limited to the upper classes.20 Historians have established a
linkage of the emergence of the teenager and the workings of capitalist market segmentation and consumption patterns. For instance, Grace Palladino argues that the idea of teen life as a distinct and recognizable stage of development or culture matured
19 My thinking on the relationship of disability to the category of adolescence has been greatly influenced by Todd Ramlow’s theoretical work on queerness, disability, adolescence, and deviance. Here, I invoke his notion of “disabling adolescence.” See Todd Ramlow, “Bad Boys: Abstractions of Difference and the Politics of Youth Deviance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1-2. (2003): 107-132. 20 Scholars are beginning to complicate the previously held truth that the “birth” of the category “teen” began in the 1950s, as they became a commercial market. See Jon Savage, Teenage, which proclaims itself as a transnational “prehistory of the teen.” Also, Sarah Chinn’s forthcoming manuscript, New Americans, New Identities: Immigration and the Invention of Adolescence in the United States 1880-1930 complicates the notion that adolescence was devised in the 1930s or the 20th century, for that matter. Rather, Chinn connects the birth of the identity “adolescent” at the end of the 19th century with the ways in which new immigrants and their American-born children were described by dominant culture and described themselves. 14 amid a growing affluence of American families in the postwar period.21 Palladino notes
a point of origin in the teen consumer market within the 1944 launch of Seventeen magazine, after which others quickly capitalized on the emergent teen market.
Likewise, Jon Savage argues that the “invention of the teenager” occurred with
American victory in World War II and was a marketing term devised by advertisers and manufacturers “that reflected the newly visible spending power of adolescents.”22
This historical scholarship on teens importantly suggests that the category “teenager” is historically-contingent rather than transhistorical.
This dissertation, a discursive history of adolescence, suggests that “teenager,” rather than constructed solely by biology or the workings of the market, is a capacious, ever-shifting cultural formation that emerged in certain historical moments to perform certain functions.23 To be clear, just as metaphors of disability are often
more a projection of cultural producers than representative of people with disabilities
themselves, images of teenagers in popular culture, news media, and policy are, more
often than not, constructed by adults and thus are unreliable as indicators of the actual feelings or opinions of teens. Examining cultural productions and their moral
21 Grace Palladino, Teenagers. 22 Savage, Teenage, xv. Savage notes that in the first week in January 1945, The New York Times Magazine published a “Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” which was a “‘ten point charter framed to meet the problems of growing youth.’” Invoking the American Bill of Rights, the “Teen Commandments” included items such as “the right to let childhood be forgotten,” “the right to struggle toward his own philosophy of life,” and “the right to have rules explained, not imposed.” Savage argues that the “Bill of Rights assumed teenagers were part of the mainstream of American life…not just because of their purchasing power but because they appeared to epitomize America’s democratic ideals” (455). 15 presuppositions then, means understanding cultural representation as a productive process. I am arguing that by constructing a certain way of reading teenage behaviors, cultural representations of and for teenagers also discursively produce and refashion the category of “teen.” While the biological and hormonal process that sociologists, psychologists, and medical doctors have named “adolescence” certainly exists, this project imagines “teen” as a floating signifier, a cultural construction that serves as a paradigmatic crisis to be overcome in order to achieve adult citizenship, a stable and rational citizen-subject position formed in contrast to the volatile instability and irrationality of the teen.
While I differentiate here between the bodily process of adolescence and the citizenship process produced within representations of teenagers, this dissertation argues that this new rehabilitative approach relocated the source of—and the solution to— teen problems from the environment to the teen’s body itself.24 This represents a
23 Another discursive history of adolescence is Leerom Medovoi’s Rebel: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 24 External force arguments were a consistent feature of arguments about juvenile delinquency. For primary documents on juvenile delinquency, which often cite external force arguments for juvenile delinquency such as television, bad neighborhoods, or familial turmoil, see U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Juvenile Delinquency (District of Columbia). 83rd Cong., 2d sess., 1954; U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Juvenile Delinquency (Motion Pictures), Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books), and Juvenile Delinquency (Television Programs). (Three separate volumes.) 83rd Cong., 2d sess., 1954; U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency Juvenile Delinquency (Television Programs), 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955. For secondary scholarship on “external force” arguments about teen deviance, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Boddy, “Senator Dodd Goes to Hollywood: Investigating Video Violence,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, eds. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, 161- 185 (New York: Routledge, 1997); Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 16 departure from earlier juvenile delinquency narratives such as Rebel Without a Cause
(1955), which situated deviance in external environmental forces such as community or
family. Although external force arguments (the timeworn “nature versus nurture”
debate) never entirely disappeared, by the twentieth century’s close, the familiar
cultural figure of the wayward teen (or of the teen as always-already wayward) became
grounded in the very physiology rather than the environment of teens, while
attributes such as ennui, emotional explosiveness, or poor decision-making became
mapped indelibly on the teenaged brain, especially the teen male brain. Neurological
explanations for the “condition” of adolescence emerged as dominant by the twentieth
century’s close. This biologization of male rebelliousness gained even greater force
amid the school shooting epidemic of the 1990s and alongside other racialized
neuroscience projects that attempted to biologize criminality while eliding social and
structural inequities and racism. Thus, the discourse about teen bodies that I historicize produces all teen bodies that do not conform as always-already deviant, pathologized, subjected, and cripped, even while it spotlights some teens—such as school shooters and superpredators—as figures of excess that bear the brunt of that cripping.25
Although historians have often spotlighted the 1950s as a key decade in the
history of the teen, I argue that the seventies, notoriously named the “Me Decade” by
Tom Wolfe, are a key decade in the history of adolescence, because the decade has
25 Here I invoke Robert McRuer’s notion of “crip” to suggest that, while all teenagers are constructed through the metaphorics of disability and queerness, this process of discursive construction is 17 often been construed in cultural histories as the collective adolescence of the nation itself.26 Christopher Lasch’s bestselling A Culture of Narcissism (1979) was perhaps the first and most complete iteration of what eventually became an historical tendency.27
As the 1970s, rambled like a wayward, id-driven teenager, privatization, or a national
“turn inward” was fueled by what Lasch named a “therapeutic sensibility,” in which the drive to overcome adversity and connect with others was replaced by a desire to cope, survive, and connect with oneself.28 For Lasch, the cultural narcissism of the seventies also involved a fetishization of youth; rather than “guiding the children,” the narcissistic “older generation” of the seventies, in pursuit of eternal youth, “struggl[ed]
not applied equally or homogenously to all teens in all cultural moments. 26 Lasch, Narcissim, 37. Lasch’s characterization of the 1970s abounds with characteristics that traditionally crop up in relation to adolescence. In a portion that might have been drawn from a neuroparenting manual of the 1990s, Lasch also diagnostically describes the narcissistic culture of the 1970s as follows: “Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy—of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence—the narcissist is promiscuous and often pan sexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity. The bad images he has internalized also make him chronically uneasy about his health, and hypochondria in turn gives him a special affinity for therapy and for therapeutic groups and movements. As a psychiatric patient, the narcissist is a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in Therapeutic relationship external support for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth” (Lasch, 40). Interestingly, in a way, it seems like Lasch describes the narcisstic seventies as characterized by the linkage of (a pathologized) queerness (“polymorphous perversity”) and disability (hypochondria and an insatiable need for therapy) as much as with adolescence itself. 27 Lasch linked the psychological diagnosis of “pathological narcissism” (and an alleged increase in diagnoses and visibility of personality disorders such as narcissism in the 1970s) to the social conditions of the seventies, arguing that while the “rugged individualist” saw the world as “an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design,” the 1970s narcissist saw “the world [a]s a mirror” in which “all forms of patriarchal authority” had become “eroded” (10-11). 28 Ibid. Lasch argued that even a shift in psychiatric patients had occurred in the 1970s that seemed like a regression from mature adult neuroses to immature adolescent angst: “Psychoanalysis…[which] …grew out of experience with severely repressed and morally rigid individuals who needed to come to terms with a rigorous inner ‘censor,’ today finds itself confronted more…often with a ‘chaotic and impulse-ridden character.’” Historian Bruce Schulman also associates an “inward turn” with the 1970s when he argues that sixties radicals “bequeathed their crusade for self-liberation to the nation” (70); the phenomenon of personal transformation became broader but also more inwardly focused;” Schulman 18 to ‘keep up with the kids,’ to master their incomprehensible jargon, and even to
imitate their dress and manners.”29
This idea of the 1970s as the nation’s collective adolescence has also been omnipresent in discourses about AIDS as a penalty for the immature sexual excesses
that occurred in the wake of sexual liberation.30 As late as 1992, Marilyn Quayle
reiterated this sentiment of the 1970s as the nation’s adolescence in her Republican
National Convention Speech, when she lambasted political rival Bill Clinton’s
immaturity and irresponsibility, refuting his claim to new generation of leadership by
arguing that “[n]ot everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the
sexual revolution or dodged the draft” in the late sixties and seventies.31
In addition to historicizing shifting conceptions of adolescence and the teen
body, my dissertation also analyzes shifting representations and cultural meanings of
disability and able-bodiedness. My dissertation follows from disability studies
scholarship and activism in their joint goal of cultivating a social rather than medical
refers to this cultural transformation as “privatized spirituality” (100). See Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: De Capo Press, 2002). 29 Lasch, Narcissism, 169. 30 See Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002), 4-5; and Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 31 Todd S. Purdum, “What They’re Really Fighting About.” The New York Times Online , August 24, 2004.
“impairment” to connote a physiological or psychological condition and “disability” to connote the structural limitations placed on people with impairments by an inaccessible environment combined with social stigma.33 Influenced not only by disability activism but also by cultural studies, disability studies scholars since have convincingly argued that when disability is used as metaphor, it has very little to do with the real, lived experiences of disabled people; these scholars conceptualize disability as an “attribution of corporeal deviance” or floating signifier that is “not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.”34 Likewise, scholars in disability studies have rightfully critiqued the way in which the process of making disability into metaphor also results in ableist stories of
32 Disability studies has argued that disability and impairment are socially constructed consistently since the discipline’s inception. On social constructionism and disability, see Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. (New York: Routledge, 1996) and Linton, Claiming Disability. On crip theory, see Robert McRuer, Crip Theory. See also Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance” in Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson, eds. “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies.” Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9.1-2 (2003), 25-56. Also within this issue of GLQ, see Robert McRuer, “As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability,” Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson, “Introduction” and Todd Ramlow “Bad Boys: Abstractions of Difference and the Politics of Youth Deviance.” 33 More recently, disability scholars have critiqued the social model’s division of impairment and disability, because it moves the material concerns of the body (“impairment”) from the social and discursive practices of marginalization (“disability”). This critique is part of a larger disability studies critique of social constructionism’s inattentiveness to the material realities of disabled people and disabled bodies. 34 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6. Likewise, David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that to examine the sociopolitical and discursive logics of disability is not to “deny the reality of physical incapacity or cognitive difference” but rather to analyze the cultural reception and disqualification of “those labeled deviant on ideological as well as on physical planes.” (Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000], 7). 20 overcoming, “cure-or-kill,” and the “supercrip,” all of which marginalize and oppress people with disabilities while circumscribing cultural meanings of disability.35
Disability studies’ dual task is to simultaneously study disability as an embodied experience of disabled people and a diffuse, unevenly-applied and historically- contingent cultural logic of social disqualification. Although I historicize the cultural use of disability within a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, my work attempts to show the stakes of ableist discourses for disabled youth, who are marginalized when disability is used as a metaphor to characterize all adolescence, writ large.36 The inverse of this logic is also true—that disability’s association with immaturity or dependence continues to oppress disabled adults, configuring them as non-sexual, unproductive,
and burdensome. Thus, in historicizing the cultural representation of overcoming
35 Simi Linton describes the erasure of disability, “the mechanisms by which disability is covered over, layered with meaning, and rendered invisible” (Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 6). Eli Clare defines some of the dominant cultural models—the “medical model,” “charity model,” “supercrip model,” and “moral model” as follows: “The medical model insists on disability as a disease or condition that is curable and/or treatable. The charity model declares disability to be a tragedy, a misfortune, that must be tempered or erased by generous giving. The supercrip model frames disability as a challenge to overcome and disabled people as superheroes just for living our daily lives. The moral model transforms disability into a sign of moral weakness” (“Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness,” Public Culture 13.3, Fall 2001: 360). Likewise, Martin F. Norden devises ten visual and narrative tropes within which disability continues to be represented in film, which are: “Civilian Superstar,” “Comic Misadventurer,” “Elderly Dupe,” “Noble Warrior,” “Obsessive Avenger,” “Saintly Sage,” “Sweet Innocent,” “Tragic Victim,” “High Tech Guru,” and “Techno Marvel” (The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994].) For analyses of the metaphoric use of disability, see also Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Queerness, Disability, and Liberation (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999); Robert McRuer, Crip Theory. 36 As Todd Ramlow notes, studying the ways in which disability and queerness operate metaphorically in characterizing forms of social conflict is essential “if we are to understand how our bodies and identities are made to do social and political work that seems to have little or nothing to do with us.” Ramlow, “Bad Boys,” 110. See also Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment,” Public Culture 13 (2001): 369. 21 narratives in the maintenance of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness, I also mean to critique the ways in which narratives of overcoming and paternalistic images of disability are used in modes of political, social, and cultural address to the detriment of disabled people.
In its concern with the sociocultural position, exclusion, and marginalization of people with disabilities, disability studies has already critiqued disability’s relationship to youth culture in two important ways. Disability theorists and activists have consistently problematized the figure of the poster child—its infantilization of people with disabilities and its elision of disabled adults. I further augment such analysis through my use of queer theory, which occasions a critique of the heteronormative
“reproductive futurity” that the poster child embodies. Additionally, disability studies and activism have often used discourses of youth and age to conceptualize disability as something that will eventually affect all people as they age. Rather than positioning able-bodiedness as an inherently youthful affair, this project reveals how discourses of disability shape representations of American teenagers and their bodies.37
37 Working in an earlier period than Ramlow, Michael Rembis’s work on eugenics and juvenile delinquency is extremely productive and filling a much-needed gap in disability studies discussions of youth and histories of adolescents more generally. See Michael Rembis, “‘Explaining Sexual Life to Your Daughter:’ Gender and Eugenic Education in the United States During the 1930s,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, eds. Susan Currell and Christina Codgell, 91- 119, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). Rembis also has a book manuscript under review, called Disabling Sex: Gender, Power, Eugenics, and Female Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, 1890-1960. On cognitive disability, culture, and youth, see Michael Berubè, Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (New York: Pantheon, 1996) and James W. Trent, Jr. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 22 The social constructionist model of disability also makes it possible to
historicize able-bodiedness as “not so much as a property of bodies” but as a set of
“cultural rules” about bodies that provide the firmament for social, cultural, and bodily
hierarchies. In examining representations of disability, I analyze and historicize the
complex ways in which cultural representations of disability and able-bodiedness
produced normative images of coming-of-age, citizenship, gender, race, and sexuality
for able-bodied teens, in part, by imagining them as disabled citizen-subjects. In doing
so, I first refine the rigid binaristic construction of “disability” and “ability” that has
figured as central to many disability studies projects. Building from disability studies
scholar Lennard J. Davis’s notion of the “enforcement of normalcy,” my dissertation
suggests that able-bodiedness and disability are often produced in and projected on the
teen body simultaneously rather than mutually-exclusively.38 Rehabilitative citizenship
works to produce adolescence as a transitory, and thus, “normal” condition that is
nonetheless a pathological, bodily abnormality that needs to be overcome. Thus,
neither disability nor normalcy is erased, rather they overlap and rely upon one
another for their legibility as they are projected simultaneously onto the American
teenaged body.
Just as queer studies scholarship has undertaken a history of heterosexuality
and heteronormativity, my work historicizes able-bodiedness alongside and within
38 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995). 23 heteronormativity by analyzing representations of disability to illuminate a history of
compulsory able-bodiedness alongside and within a history of teenagers.39 Anxieties
about fostering the normative development of “healthy” sexuality, sexual identity, and
“appropriate” sexual expression saturate medicalized edutainment for teens. It is indeed
the “problems” of sex and sexuality that divide cultural representations of and for teens
from those of and for children. Thus, my dissertation is heavily indebted to recent
disability studies/crip theory projects that suggest the maintenance of heteronormativity rests on the maintenance of able-bodiedness through a cultural process that Robert McRuer has named “compulsory able-bodiedness,” which theorizes the reciprocality and mutual reinforcement of heterosexuality, health, and able-bodiedness as an ideal for bodies and selves.40 Compulsory able-bodiedness also
works to suture queerness and disability. In his study of youth and deviance,
queer/disability studies scholar Todd Ramlow has theorized “metaphoric abstraction,” or the process by which the category of youth is “marked by the rhetorics of disability and queerness as objects both of discipline…and of pity and social concern.”41 I am
39 I am thinking specifically of Jonathan Ned Katz’s work in this regard. See Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995). See also John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 40 See Robert McRuer, Crip Theory; Alison Kafer, “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-Bodiedness.” Journal of Women’s History 15.3 (Autumn 2003): 77-89; Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson, eds. “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies.” Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9.1-2 (2003); Eli Clare, Exile and Pride; and Serlin, Replaceable You. 41 Ramlow, “Bad Boys,” 115. Ramlow carefully draws a distinction, as I do, that he does not share the opinion that disability should be evocative of pity or denigration, but that he analyzes the cultural imaginings that construct it as such. Moreover, while Ramlow focuses on boys and the co-constituitive operations of heteronormativity, ableism, and masculinity, my analysis of rehabilitative citizenship focuses 24 indebted to Ramlow’s indispensable theoretical work on metaphoric abstraction and
his analysis of the intersectionality of discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, age,
and (dis)ability in constructing contemporary teen boys within film, music, and news
media. My work expands on this important theoretical scholarship about compulsory
able-bodiedness by considering the historical specificity of the cooperative logics of
heteronormativity and ableism, as I trace the linkages of compulsory able-bodiedness
to historically-contingent discourses of rehabilitation, coming-of-age, and sexual
liberation. Likewise, this dissertation uses Ramlow’s concept of metaphoric abstraction
to determine the ways in which its logics of social disqualification are historically-
contingent and specific, rather than all-encompassing and transhistorical. In examining
discourses of disability within representations of teenagers, I am arguing that
compulsory able-bodiedness is historically- shifting and unequally applied within
different cultural and historical moments, arising alongside and within a compulsory
heterosexuality that was coterminous with sexual liberation.
Building from disability studies’ important critiques of exclusion and
marginalization of disabled people, I attempt to chart a change in the conception of
disability that formed at the end of the 20th century, in which a new neoliberal vision
of disability emerged and discursively positioned disability as an identity-position that
on teen boys and girls while consistently establishing metaphoric abstraction as an historically-contingent process that has been practiced since the 1970s and continues to shift over time in relation to systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality. 25 could lead to liberation rather than serve as its antithesis.42 Though often employing stereotypical representations of disability, the discursive construction of disability I trace historically does not always operate to exclude or marginalize people with disabilities. The disability rights movement has demonstrated how “disability is socially-constructed to serve certain ends,” and my analysis of the mutually- constitutive nature of disability and adolescence means to historicize and analyze “how knowledge about disability is socially produced to uphold existing practices.”43
Disability studies scholars such as Douglas Baynton, Sharon L. Snyder, and David T.
Mitchell have thoroughly and convincingly argued that the discursive location of disability in modernity is one in which various marginalized groups have sought
“liberation” by positioning themselves in opposition to disability, configured as the
“real” aberration.44 However, by the Decade of the Brain at the century’s close, discourses of disability not only began to define marginalized groups, such as adolescents, gay men, and people of color, but also were sometimes actively invoked
42 Devon W. Carbado, analyzing the paradoxical nature of black American identity, argues that black American citizens undergo “an inclusionary form of exclusion,” because they are imagined as belonging to America but also excluded from the nation through racial hierarchies that render them subordinate and marginalized. While I am not suggesting the experiences of marginalization has been identical for black Americans and disabled people, I believe this model could also be useful in theorizing a post-ADA experience of American national citizenship for disabled people, in that the state power of ADA legislation symbolically “included” disabled people as state citizens but social stigma and ableism still function as modes of exclusion and marginalization. See Devon W. Carbado, “Racial Naturalization,” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 638. 43 Simi Linton, Claiming Disability, 4. 44 David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s call this process “methodological distancing.” See David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 2-3. See also Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, edited by Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33-57 (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 26 by them to demand and legitimate a new acceptance or toleration for their inherent physical or biological differences from the norm. What Simi Linton famously called
“claiming disability” as an identity and base of political action for disabled people increasingly became a process through which other marginalized groups and nondisabled people sought tolerance and inclusion. Thus, discourses of rehabilitation did not (and do not) always operate by repression and exclusion, but rather by strategic and productive inclusion.
Ultimately, in using crip theory to articulate histories of dis/ability and teenagers, I demonstrate how both disability and adolescence are linked in this period in ways that attempt to discipline both. The transgressive potential of “crip,” like queer, rests in its fluidity and ever-shifting cultural meaning; crip can never wholly define identity but rather disrupt it.45 In queering and cripping the history of teenagers,
I treat “disability” and “teen” as categories that are always “becoming,” always being constituted historically through multiple contesting valences within any given cultural moment rather than being transhistorical essences or biological givens. When I argue that teenagers have been constructed as disabled pre-adults whose exposure to medicalized edutainment will help them reach true adulthood, I am also necessarily arguing that such a process parasitically relies upon and reinforces a notion that disabled people are not fully mature adults or “normal” citizens. As a discursive
45 Here, I am using Lee Edelman’s characterization of “queer” to define “crip.” See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 17. 27 history of adolescence—itself a shifting category, characterization, and visualization in this era—this project treats both disability and teen as capacious discursive formations rather than essential, prediscursive, biological identities.
Finally, in historicizing the national investment in and its linkage of teen health and the overall well-being of American democracy and the body politic, I am analyzing the process by which teens become affectively and biopolitically constituted as citizen-
subjects. In doing so, I am working within recent scholarship in American studies that
has analyzed the category of citizenship as it relates to American identity, the state, and
the nation.46 Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp argue that “American identity and
democracy are fused,” so that American notions of “law” as “the guarantor of
democracy, equality, and freedom” consistently become conflated with American
national identity and national citizenship.47 Moreover, scholars have distinguished
between state citizenship as legal membership in a particular society and national
citizenship as mode of identity, kinship, or belonging. In analyzing teen citizens, I am
analyzing a form of national citizenship that refers to a matter of American identity, or
what Siobhan Somerville has described as a “substantive” kinship bond or “a relation of
46 Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders.” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005). 47 Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders.” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 602. Nikhil Pal Singh has also discussed the conflation of American national citizenship, American universalism, and democracy. See Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 28 belonging…not reducible to the state.”48 Likewise, Jacqueline Stevens describes the
“familial nation,” arguing that “the ‘state’ and ‘nation’ are two sides of the same familial
coin” that “exists through practices and often legal documents that set out the kinship
rules for particular political societies.”49 With respect to teen citizens, a “familial
nation” often mobilizes paternalistic state power, such as media regulation or health
initiatives, that configure state intervention as fostering the “health” and “good” of
teen citizens, a form of biopolitical state disciplinary power that regulates and
produces teen subjects affectively, or through its appearance as a form of depoliticized
“caring labor.”50
Through rehabilitative citizenship, teen citizens are embedded in two quintessentially American (which is also to say, democractic) national narratives: one, a narrative of rebellious dissent, and the other, a narrative of overcoming. This dissertation argues that the health of the nation is biopolitically fused to the health of teen citizens through the co-dependent tropes of rebelliousness and overcoming, both of which are key to coming-of-age narratives and likewise to broader notions of American democratic citizenship. Both narratives, rebellion and overcoming, are united by their
48 Siobhan Somerville, “Notes Toward a Queer History of Naturalization.” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 671. 49 Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 108. 50 Benedict Anderson once wrote that "nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love,” an affective relationship. However, within the logic of teen citizenship, teens must overcome adolescence (connoted as disability and emotional immaturity, among other things) in order to be capable of the “profoundly self-sacrificing love” that national citizenship requires. See Benedict Anderson, 29 affective appeal to the preservation of American “health,” which is produced by
encouraging and disciplining rebellion in teen citizens (and likewise, in disabled
subjects) by channeling self-discipline through rehabilitation and overcoming.51
As Leerom Medovoi argues, the figure of the rebel, epitomized by the adolescent
“bad boy,” was crucial to Cold War America rather than antithetical to it, because the figure of the rebel maintained America’s image as a democratic space of self-expression and self-fashioning even while narratives performed rebellion’s containment by disciplining and reabsorbing bad boys (and girls) into the conventions of suburban life, heteronormativity, and traditional gender roles.52 The rebel is essential to notions of
participatory democracy and to democracy’s conflation with Americanness. However,
teen rebelliousness is configured as both essential and potentially dangerous to the
realization of adult citizenship. Thus, rehabilitative citizenship involves a differentiation
between the instability, immaturity, and selfishness of adolescents, which is an
indispensable step in the development of liberal individualism, but nonetheless is figured
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; London: Verso, 1991), 141. 51 Siobhan Somerville and Lauren Berlant investigate the affective power of the state and the affective investments of American citizenship. See Somerville’s “Queer History” and Berlant’s Queen of America and The Female Complaint. 52 See especially Medovoi’s extremely useful introduction to Rebels. Cultural theorist and media scholar Toby Miller also argues that cultural capitalism produces a form of bifurcated subjectivity and mode of citizenship when he contends that the “ideal citizen” is formed by two seemingly-opposed subjectivities: one, a selfless community-minded individual and the other, a selfish and ravenous consumer. These opposing impulses are “tempered” by civility as a prized virtue that produces “well-tempered,” self- surveilling citizen-selves, but both are necessary to the maintenance of democracy and consumer capitalism as mutually-reinforcing. Concomitantly, I am suggesting that the tension between rebelliousness and selflessness I am tracing in representations of teenagers is constitutive of American notions of democracy. See Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 30 as an obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve the stable, mature, restrained, unselfish
civic responsibility connoted by adult citizenship. To put it another way, adulthood
becomes linked with the emotional, physical, and mental “capacity” for participatory
citizenship while adolescence represents an “incapacity” to be overcome.
As a result, democracy, Americanness, adulthood, heteronormativity, and able-
bodiedness become fused, as they are traced on and anxiously realized within the very
body of the teen citizen. This dissertation builds on recent queer and literary analyses of
affect to argue that an “intimate public” is formed through medicalized edutainment by
imagining empathy and an intense feeling of sadness and suffering as modes of teen citizenship training and as a mode of disciplinary power that constructs the “teen” as an embodied category. What some scholars have called an “affective turn” in scholarship
has profoundly impacted studies of citizenship.53 While scholars have begun to analyze
the operations of affective labor in relation to a population of citizens and cultural
consumers presumed “adult,” they have yet to apply the theoretical insights of affect
scholarship to the study of teen culture and youth citizenship more generally.
Constructing heteronormativity and able-bodiedness as mutually-constitutive
ideal aspirations for teen citizens, this intimate teen public is produced through a process
53 See the many texts on affect published within the last two years, including Patricia Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 31 that unites emotional instruction and a notion of participatory democracy through
engagement with cultural productions. The rehabilitative mode of address and modality
of citizenship that I trace in medicalized edutainment involves a partnership of “affective
labor” (i.e. “caring labor”) and disciplinary power, as theorized by Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri and Michel Foucault, respectively. Not synonymous with emotions
themselves, affective labor is the production and manipulation of affects, such as a
feelings of comfort, fear, or excitement; Hardt and Negri also argue that affects have
been a staple of the new service economy of the late twentieth century, so that affective
labor represents a form of biopolitical “caring labor…entirely immersed in the corporeal, and the somatic.”54
Foucault’s concept of biopolitical power—and likewise the affective labor of
biopolitics—is essential to historicizing the rehabilitative logics that have invested the
category of adolescence since the 1970s, as teens have been consistently and increasingly
subjected to medical, educational, and hygienic “management” that made their bodies
docile and flexible. 55 I argue that, working within the heteronormatively gendered logic
of dis/ability narratives, medicalized edutainment performs a form of “affective labor” in
54 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), 108 and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 292-293. 55 For Foucault, biopolitical power produced the body as an object of knowledge, while the productivity of the body became measured by its ability to comply with and be re-formed by knowledge- gathering processes, ranging from individualized tactics of information gathering, like the census or individual “diagnosis,” to larger institutions of knowledge about the body like modern medical standards of health and disease, asylums, and prisons. What Foucault called a new “microphysics of power” produced a body that was flexible, malleable, and docile—constantly under construction and self-surveillance.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 26-27. 32 which the biopolitical manipulation of emotions, especially sadness, empathy, and
sometimes even fear, work through the cultural productions to produce normal,
“healthy,” adolescent bodies through the “caring labor” process of rehabilitative
citizenship. As Lauren Berlant convincingly argues, this form of participation and belonging is not political but rather “juxtapolitical.”56 It imagines teen citizens both
outside of politics and “under construction” rather than as fully self-actualized, stable
“adult” citizens. In so doing, it shores up a normative developmental (read: teenaged)
identity via “structures of feeling.”57 These structures link individual emotional responses
of teen subjects to larger pedagogical and national projects, such as cultural
consumption’s place in gauging the health of nation and democracy and the place of
“grimness” or sadness in constructing developmental narratives about the “condition” of
teenagerness as one of angst.
This affective labor not only operated as a pedagogical tool but also as a mode of
representing teen citizens as overly emotional or as desiring excessive emotion. Thus, the
cultivation of an intimate public of teen subjects, which is characterized by over-
emotionality and the experience of suffering, is also necessarily implicated in
constituting the very category of adolescence itself, constructing it as a passing stage of
emotional volatility that must be overcome to achieve the inherent emotional stability
56 Berlant, Female Complaint, x. 57 This term is Raymond Williams’s. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 33 and normalcy promised by adulthood. By focusing on the affective labor of medicalized edutainment, I argue the process of rehabilitative citizenship—a focus on the teen body rather than the environment---derived from a broader neoliberal privatization of citizenship.58 Working affectively, the complex process of rehabilitative citizenship not only individuated and embodied presumed teenage qualities, such as angst, moodiness, or rebelliousness but also medicalized the teen body.
The transition I trace, from environmental explanations for teen deviance to a neurologically-rooted symptomology of adolescence was part of a larger historical shift toward privatizing citizenship that commenced in the 1970s—a crucial period in the history of neoliberalism.59 Queer theorists and cultural historians have examined privatization’s tactics of power on a citizenry presumed “adult,” but I argue that this
58 Lasch’s characterization of the culture of the 1970s is of a piece with 1990s adolescent neuroparenting models and government initiatives that were concerned with the “impulsiveness” and bad decision-making of teens. Lasch also highlights the “current fascination with the life cycle,” which establishes a schedule for reaching certain goals and “the emergence of a therapeutic ideology that upholds a normative schedule of psychosocial development and thus gives further encouragement to anxious self- scrutiny,” linking the rise of medical technology for the healthy (“the cult of the periodic checkup”) to privatization and self-surveillance (Lasch, Narcissism, 48). 59 Various queer theory projects have theorized the implications of a post-1970s American privatization of citizenship. See Lauren Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999); and John D’Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-16. Other scholars, outside of queer theory, have also analyzed the phenomenon of privatized citizenship, although unlike queer scholars, they do not link it to the project of heteronormativity. See Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Likewise, disability studies scholar Simi Linton, though not explicitly engaging with the historical or theoretical project of charting the privatization of citizenship, argues that the medical model of disability and institutionalized medicine functioned to “keep [disability] a personal matter and ‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating’ the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives” (11). See Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Likewise, Todd Ramlow argues that “individuation and isolation of physical, racial, and sexual difference has been experienced historically by people with disabilities, queers, and racial minorities 34 cultural moment of privatization had specific implications for teens. The notion of the
emergence of a “therapeutic sensibility” and its linkage with a more privatized, self- surveilling citizenship in the 1970s can definitely be seen within my work on rehabilitative citizenship and a new medicalized cultural image of teens that took hold amid the perceived “collective adolescence” of the nation.60 This process of self-
surveilling individuation is core to the ethos of rehabilitative citizenship, as an ethic of
teen self-making or self-care as a mode of coming of age into responsible adult citizens.
Just as the state recedes from view in democracy predicated on self-negation and self-
surveillance, so the parent recedes from view as a teen comes of age. With respect to teen
citizenship and its relationship to larger modes of privatization, I argue that an
increasing emphasis on the teen body, as opposed to only external stimuli arguments for
teen deviance, increasingly mapped deviant behavior from a finite group of delinquent
“troublemakers”—or select “adolescents”—onto “adolescence” as a category.
Undertaking a critical analysis of how biopolitical and affective power shapes teenagers’ bodies and lives, this project conceptualizes teen bodies as both a text and a site on and through which culture not only enforces normalcy but also enforces
in America as the disavowal of the dominant culture’s responsibility for the disciplining of difference” (Ramlow, “Bad Boys,” 112). 60 I am not treating Lasch’s work as definitive of the 1970s, but part of making sense of the 1970s involves looking at histories that were written during the period. Moreover, his critique of the 1970s as an era of self-absorption is interesting in its dismissal of gay and lesbian activism and disability activism of the era, since both movements have often been accused of self-centeredness and an unfair demand for special privileges. 35 disability.61 This disability is enforced by constructing teen bodies as constantly “under construction”—simultaneously already normal and on the way to normal. This enforcement of disability in scientific and pop cultural representations perpetually offers the promise of eventual normalcy through endless rehabilitation and packages it as
“coming of age.”
Cripping Cultural History and Teen Citizenship
Although American studies projects have fruitfully examined the intersections and collisions of multiple socially-constructed valences of identity, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and national belonging, scholars in the field have only begun to address the categories of dis/ability and youth.62 My project positions itself within burgeoning American studies scholarship on childhood and youth studies while it answers recent calls by American studies scholars for cultural studies of technology and a
61 My dissertation title references Davis’ foundational disability studies text Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, which argues, using Lacanian psychoanalysis, that although disabled bodies are usually thought to be incomplete and fragmented in contrast to a normal, able body, the attribution of wholeness and completeness to the “normal (able) body” is only ever a “hallucination.” Davis asserts that actually the normal’s body is always already a fragmented body that engages in willful imagining of its own wholeness, while the disabled body functions as a “visual echo of the primal fragmented body,” an unwanted reminder that bodies—able or disabled—are never truly whole and unified. Like Davis, I believe that such a system of ableism requires constant renegotiations of normalcy and disability, but unlike Davis, I believe the process of disciplining and producing teen bodies often does not produce only either able-bodiedness or disability. See Davis, Enforcing Normalcy. 62 Disability studies remains consistently underrepresented in American studies departments, partially since it has largely been an institutional outgrowth of literature and history departments. Within the last two years, the American Studies Association (ASA) recently formed a Children and Youth Studies caucus to sustain the growth of youth studies projects in American Studies, but American studies projects have only begun to address children and youth studies issues overall. 36 greater engagement with policy.63 Thus, this project situates cultural representations of coming-of-age within the cultural history of various policy decisions regarding teens, including media regulation, technological assessment (TA), state and federal campaigns to promote youth reading, and finally, teen mental health initiatives as they emerged in the late 20th century. In doing so, I trace teen citizenship, as it is constituted through state power and the affective labor of nation, within policy, technological history, and cultural representation.
Intervening at the nexus of feminist science scholarship, American studies, and the study of citizenship, my approach differs from traditional cultural histories of teenagers, many of which have been histories about the post-WWII “teen market” or research on the resistive potential or agency of teen consumers.64 Additionally, within
63 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 2, 2004,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 17-58; Carolyn de la Pena and Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Special Issue: Rewiring the ‘Nation:’ The Place of Technology in American Studies,” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 2006). 64 Examples of the market-driven analysis of the rise of the teenager abound. In one of the first and few historical studies of teenagers, Grace Palladino maintains the linkage between the etymology of “teenager” and the rise of the teen market. She analyzes the production of subcultures in high schools while analyzing the social power and leverage gained by teens as they increasingly became targeted as consumers. She also establishes generational conflict between adults and teens to be a transhistorical trend, for example, likening the bobby soxers of the 1940s to the Beatlemania of the 1960s. (Teenagers: An American History. [New York: Basic Books, 1996]). Liz Cohen briefly mentions the growth of the teen market in Consumer’s Republic as she discusses the rise in market segmentation by age, ethnicity, and a whole host of other particularities that characterizes the post-WWII period approach to advertising and politics (A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. [New York: Random House, 2003], 318-319.) See also Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). On commodification and youth, see Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Alissa Quart, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Murray Milner, Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption. (New York: Routledge, 2006). Some examples of analyses which identify the resistive or liberatory qualities of the teen market or the agency that teens express as consumers include the following: Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson, eds. Teen TV: Genre, Consumption, and Identity. (London: British Film Institute, 2008); Lauraine LeBlanc, 37 scholarship about youth history and culture, teenagers are often subsumed into catch-all categories like “children” and “youth,” designations which do not address the specific ways in which teens have been culturally defined and addressed, strategically as sexual, often deviant, pre-adult subjects or as innocent, pre-sexual children depending on the context and mode of address.65
Thus, teen life becomes understood, predominantly, as an effect of capitalism, for the familial financial stability that emerged in the postwar period facilitated the growth of teen consumerism after World War II and empowered teens to rebel, via their
Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Susan Driver, Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Anita Harris, ed., All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity. (New York: Routledge, 2004). Susan Douglas’s Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with Mass Media tries to present the liberatory and repressive ways in which media affects the lives of growing girls. 65 Finding histories of teenagers, apart from Grace Palladino’s foundational (Teenagers: An American History. [New York: Basic Books, 1997].) is a difficult task, as many texts on “youth culture” and “childhood” blur distinctions between children and teens, collapsing them into the catch-all designiations “youth” and “children.” Other useful cultural histories of teenagers include, Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Harper Collins, 1999); Donna Gains, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Medevoi, Rebel: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity; Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875-1845 (New York: Penguin, 2008); Charles Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of “Youth in Crisis” (New York: Westview Press, 1994); and Mike Males, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1999). For definitive histories of childhood, see Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America. (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. (Boston: Belknap Press, 2004); Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See also Paula Fass, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization. (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Joe Austin and Michael Willard, eds. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth Century America. (New York: New York University Press, 1998). For childhood in a more global, transnational context, see Sunaina Mara and Elisbath Soep, Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On the cultural history of girlhood, see Sherrie A. Inness, ed. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Lorraine Delia Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000); and Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 38 consuming power, against the dominant order set forth by adults. Generational conflict thus becomes stitched into the very fabric of cultural histories of teenagers— simultaneously a unique effect of the market and a transhistorical attribute of adolescence itself—as it becomes a staple feature of defining teens’ place in history through a perpetual opposition to an adult “norm.”66 This implicitly keeps adults in the picture as a foil, so that the history of teen culture often resembles a simple ahistorical narrative of rebellion against adults.67 Such histories—those that grant exclusive power to the market or presume transhistorical generational conflict—“externalize” teen identity as something teens express in the marketplace of mainstream culture or in their presupposed embattled status with adults.
In contrast, I argue that it is important to consider the medicalized construction
of the teenage body and how it is positioned in culture—because the teen body’s status as
an object of knowledge within medicalized edutainment continues to affect the way in which adolescence is conceptualized, in consumer culture, policy, and journalism. This focus on the body is not entirely absent in the history of teens, especially in the
66 On the figure of the rebel, see Stephen Tropiano, Rebels and Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie. (New York: Back Stage Books, 2006) and Medovoi, Rebel. 67 Two reviewers criticized this tendency to essentialize generational conflict as a prediscursive feature of adolescence in Palladino’s text. See Ruth M. Alexander, review of Teenagers: An American History, by Grace Palladino, The American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998): 292-293; and Diana West, review of Teenagers: An American History, by Grace Palladino, New Criterion 15, no. 1 (1996): 138-141. Palladino’s text identifies the 1940s as the era of “young adults” (who might eventually deviate into swing/bobby-soxer culture); the 1950s, juvenile delinquents; the 1960s, a sexually-liberated counterculture; the 1970s, anyone’s guess; and finally, a post-1985 explosion of teen culture that coincides with the rise of the computer, arcades, and MTV. Palladino’s text also ignores the 1970s almost entirely to postulate a post- 1985 explosion of teen culture. I argue that this completely erasing the 1970s as Palladino does, occludes important cultural events, such as the important rise in educational programming in the 1970s, which has had a lasting effect on the cultural work and form of teen television to the present day. 39 contributions of feminist science scholars who have emphasized the operation of a
“body project” on teen girls and detrimental cultural trends that impact the body image of developing girls. These types of histories, like Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body
Project, represent a notable exception to what I am calling “externalized histories” of teenagers.68 Brumberg examines the shifting representations and cultural meanings of female bodily processes such as menarche to argue that over the last century, the teen girl’s body has become increasingly an “all-consuming ‘project’” that has distracted teen girls from worthier pursuits like careers and higher education due to the self-hatred and inadequacy foisted upon them by the relentless media.69 A similar engagement with the representation of gendered biological processes through education, scientific, and
popular culture is really at the heart of my project.
68 Although not explicitly about teens, Emily Martin’s work also inspires this dissertation See Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). A sociology of the body, Martin’s text contributes to the feminist critiques of scientific and medical constructions of women. She chronicles cultural assumptions about menstruation, childbirth, and menopause, often looking directly into medical discourse to contend that the “production metaphor” governs much of the way in which female reproductive processes are depicted and narrated, so that “labor” becomes “productive” while other female processes are rendered “unproductive.” Again, I believe that my dissertation stems from the scholarly need to talk about how men are also disciplined by medical knowledge rather than always the ones wielding the power to subject others. 69 Brumberg laments that, as girls mature younger and are sexualized by the media at increasingly younger ages, they receive a substantially decreased amount of adult guidance, most regrettably for her, from older female mentors. I am wary, however, of the conservative moral opprobrium that invests her conclusions about her media. Brumberg laments what she sees as a diminishing bond between mothers and daughters, or between teen girls and older female role models—a bond that she nostalgically views as much stronger in earlier times. Thus, a large emphasis of her text is imagining ways of strengthening this mentorship in order to resist the “body project” foisted upon young girls by an uncompromisingly superficial media. Although she historicizes the body project with incisive readings of a variety of cultural texts and cultural meanings about the female body, such a conclusion about media is ultimately reductive. Moreover, her text suffers from the same heterosexist presumptions of some feminist science historians’ texts, and while such heterosexism is clearly present in the culture she’s analyzing, she does not question the primacy of heterosexism or how it plays out in multiple bodies, diverse ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds. 40 However, I argue that medicalized edutainment has also created a body project
that constructs and disciplines teen boys.70 Teen boys and their bodies are also subject to
biopolitical power, albeit in different but equally significant ways than teen girls. For
example, in tracing the stakes of disabled martyrdom, I argue that teen boys’ self-sacrifice
to science was construed as a noble entrance into manhood, especially within the
backdrop of the Vietnam War’s images of manly soldiers’ self-sacrifice for the nation.
Though some of these mechanisms surely have been gender-specific, an account of the logics of medicalization on boys has been critically neglected. My work demonstrates that teen boys and girls are disciplined and managed by a culture that constantly reproduces teens’ bodily inferiority, producing adolescence as the condition of being
“under construction” and neurologically-abnormal.
This dissertation also intervenes in literary studies and literary history, by reconceptualizing “illness narratives” to include popular literature and by historicizing the understudied emergence of YA literature and contemporaneous governmental initiatives to encourage youth reading by linking reading to citizenship and the nation.
Although literary studies has fruitfully analyzed the figure of the “invalid woman” and
70 While there is recent work in masculinity studies, it is still a relatively new field. For an overview of the field, See R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd Editions. (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2005) and Rachel Adams and David Savaran, eds. The Masculinity Studies Reader. (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). There is some work on medicine and men, specifically histories of public health programs such as Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divide: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2001), which also engages the interconnectedness of hygiene and the maintenance of proper heterosexuality. However, there is a paucity of scholarship on teen boys and even less about their relationship to medical knowledge. Among the most famous work on teen boys is Carol Clover’s classic chapter “Her Body, Himself” in Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the 41 the genre of illness narratives, many studies have focused exclusively on classic literature to the exclusion of popular literature, and none have included YA novels about illness within this genre.71 As an interdisciplinary project, my work connects teen sick-lit’s emergence historically with the manifestations of medicalized edutainment exhibited contemporaneously in other media. I offer an image of the co-constitutive history of television and literature, in that the rehabilitation of television through edutainment and public broadcasting was often achieved through its promotion and marketing of the unquestioned value of literature through edutainment series like Reading Rainbow and
ABC’s After School Specials.
Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also C.J. Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 71 Only one article addresses the literature I survey in Chapter 3 (Alana Kumbier, “The Chronic Popularity of Illness Lit” in Bitch Magazine [Winter 2005]: 72-77). However, the “invalid woman” has been a pervasive figure in American literature since at least the 1840s. Currently, much of the scholarly work on illness lit focuses on classic literature, such as Jane Eyre, Little Women, and The Secret Garden, or non-fictional memoirs about illness. For discussions of illness in classic literature, see Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Lois Keith, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies. For discussions of literature about mental illness, femininity and literature, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) and Sandra M. Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). See also Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). For works that analyze non-fictional narratives of illness, see Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Kathy Charmaz, Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1998). For literary theory about illness and its relationship to narrative, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Synder, Narrative Prosthesis. 42 As I situate literary works in their historical and cultural contexts and within a
history of reading initiatives and regulation, my work on popular young adult literature is in conversation with the Jamesonian imperative to “always historicize.”72 Compiling
even a modest history of the young adult (YA) novel was no easy task, as no definitive history of YA publishing exists.73 Moreover, YA literature as a genre is often collapsed
into the “problem novel,” its first and most familiar incarnation. However, I argue that
the emergence of the problem novel in the 1970s, as an instructive and entertaining form
for teens, also necessarily participated in and was indicative of an emergent cultural
construction of the teen as a problem, whose rehabilitation would occur through
experiencing “difficult” emotional responses to literary and other cultural texts.74 Thus, I position YA literature and the history of reading discursively within the rehabilitative ethos of medicalized edutainment occurring within other sites, such as film, television, and science writing.
Moreover, although I perform close readings of Lurlene McDaniel’s and Jean
Ferris’s novels in Chapter 3, I examine them within a 1980s history of reading initiatives and crises that spotlighted youth reading as a litmus test for the health of the nation. In
72 On New Historicism, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially-Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 73 For a partial history of YA publishing and the problem novel, see Marc Aronson, Exploding the Myths: The Truth About Teenagers and Reading (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2001) and Sheila Egoff, “The Problem Novel” in Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, Second Edition, eds. Sheila Egoff, G.T. Stubbs, and L.F. Ashley, 356-369 (Toronto and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 43 linking the actual texts to the history of reading practice, I am influenced by Janice
Radway’s foundational Reading the Romance, which not only emphasized the
importance of popular literature as an object of scholarly study but also articulated
literary analysis with the books’ cultural context of intended readers.75 Like Radway, my
work is interested in the specific positionality of female readers; however, I link the
affective labor of sadness to the gendering of reading (especially reading sad literature)
and writing. Teen sick-lit was produced largely by female authors for imagined teen
female readers, and thus, the affective labor of care in teen sick-lit is not only a
relationship produced between reader and text but also between cultural producers and
audiences. This chapter firmly establishes linkages between a healthy nation, embodied
by a healthy—which is to say, literate and reading—public and the emergence of the literary subgenre of teen sick lit. In examining these intersections, I argue that the
palliative function of literature itself was also manifested thematically in the
rehabilitative modes of teen sick-lit texts that were pressed into the service of national reading programs. Although I am not doing reader response like Radway, my work is in conversation with current literary studies scholarship that combines affect and literary
theory; in doing so, I imagine the affective labor not only of the text but also of the
74 Charles Acland argued that the category of youth has “‘no fundamental essence except as a problem; as a crisis of value; of economics and of resources” (24). See Charles Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of ‘Youth in Crisis’ (New York: Westview Press, 1995). 75 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (New York: Verso, 1987). 44 practice of reading.76 As I argue in Chapter 3, a linkage exists between the presumed rehabilitative function of the affective labor of intense sadness, which meant to provide a salve for the apathy and immaturity of aliteracy, and the emergence of “teen sick lit” as literary form.
In its engagement with disability studies, this project strives to imagine one understudied aspect of dis/ability history—the impact of the history of rehabilitation on able-bodied people and on the history of compulsory able-bodiedness—and to critique and resist one recent theoretical emergence in the field—a growing critique of social constructionism in favor of “realism.”77 Although disability studies scholars continue to provide important critiques of the “cure or kill” model of disability, more work is needed to imagine how discourses of rehabilitation not only make disabled bodies
76 Marxist literary scholar Raymond William’s work on “structures of feeling,” has been key to the development of affect theory. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Although the affective turn is a recent one in literary studies (and media studies as well), the field has long been engaged with the study of trauma, which definitely falls within the geneaology of affect theory. See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and Cathy Caruth, ed. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). On affect theory, see also Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Lauren Berlant, ed. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Brian Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Literary studies is increasingly taking up the question of affect and affective labor. See Charles Altieri, “The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory,” in New Literary History 38, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 71- 98; Rachel Riedner, “Affective Encounters: Writing Zapatismo,” in JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition, Forthcoming; Robyn Wiegman, “Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood,” American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 859-885; Daniel Smith, “Ethics and ‘Bad Writing’: Dialectics, Reading, and Affective Pedagogy.” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 23 (2003): 525-52; Jennifer Edbauer, “(Meta)Physical Graffitti: ‘Getting Up’ as Affective Writing Model.” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 25, no. 1 (2005): 131-59. 45 productive (rather than only oppressed) but also mark and affect the histories and representations of able-bodiedness.78
My use of the term “rehabilitative” draws most directly from Henri Jacques
Stiker’s A History of Disability. Stiker argues that reintegration of people with
disabilities—or the promise of rehabilitation—eventually dominated the idea of cure, as
rehabilitation became a function undertaken within a sociocultural sphere rather than
just within medical institutions.79 The demedicalization of disability was made possible through this new ethos of rehabilitation, which meant in liberal society that the disabled
“no longer appear[ed] different” but rather were granted admittance to “reoccupy” a position among the normal, provided that they were “perfectly assimilated” to their able-bodied peers.80 Creating a society in which “identicalness” (but not equality) governed, rehabilitation also worked to negate disability by “fusing abnormality with
77 Tobin Siebers names what he perceives as two opposing poles in disability studies: “social- constructionists” and “realists.” See Siebers, Disability Theory (Athens: University of Michigan Press, 2008) 78 “Cure or kill” has been the name given to one traditional thematic approach to disability in narratives, in which “worthy” disabled characters are rewarded with cures for their maladies while “unworthy” ones (often including those who challenge predominant stereotypes) are literally or figuratively killed off or otherwise eradicated from the narrative. One example of the “cure or kill” mode of disability representation was Clint Eastwood’s recent Million Dollar Baby (2004), which was staunchly protested by disability rights activists for its “death rather than disability” depiction of spinal cord injury. 79 Defining demedicalization as the process by which rehabilitation moved “out in front of the hospital,” Stiker differentiates between “cure” and “rehabilitation” by arguing that cure was “a removal and relates to health” while rehabilitation was embedded inextricably not only in a medical but also in a “social sphere,” while it involved “replacement for a deficit” and “reintegration” (124) See Henri Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 80 Stiker, History, 132. Lennard Davis conflates the medical model with the rehabilitation model, situating both as the antithesis to the social constructionist model of disability (“Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies.” American Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3 [Autumn, 1999], 506.) However, while the rehabilitation model emerged in response to returning soldiers, as Stiker argues, it also ushered in a more social understanding and disciplining of disability, as it became inextricably linked to social welfare programs. 46 the normality that is established and recognized by social consensus.”81 In other words,
Stiker argues that the project of rehabilitation collapsed distinctions among people with
different disabilities to create a “single class” of the disabled. This class was increasingly
characterized simply by its “maladjustment,” coded as the failure to adhere to the tenets
of rehabilitation which demand the covering over and repair of disability while
“behav[ing] ‘as if nothing is wrong.’”82 Thus, rehabilitation implies a former loss that
must be repaired and covered over, and a way, not of curing and thus rendering stagnant
a disordered or disabled body, but instead of consistently caring for and maintaining the
disabled body to make it culturally productive and constantly “under-construction.”
However, this collapse of disability into “maladjustment”—and likewise, the relocation of regimes of rehabilitation from the hospital to the realm of the cultural and the social— also had implications for the construction of able-bodiedness and heteronormativity as
citizenship ideals by figuring certain “developing” bodies, like those of teenagers, as
rehabilitation projects. With respect to teens, a rehabilitative model of citizenship worked to rehabilitate rebellion, figured as crucial to the functioning of democracy, by
disciplining it not only into “maturity” but also into participatory democratic
citizenship.
Furthermore, my work offers both a critique and a potential solution to what I
perceive as a fundamental theoretical divide in disability studies of the 21st century. Some
81 Ibid., 136. 47 recent work in disability studies can be characterized as participating in what I will call an “anti-social constructionist turn” within the field, as many disability studies scholars
have begun to question the utility of the social constructionist model in valuing
individual experiences of disability, disabled embodiment, and diverse experiences of
corporealized perception.83 Perhaps the fraught position of discursive analyses of the body within disability studies stems in part from the activist impulse in disability studies to reclaim the disabled body as a source of pride rather than shame. Since “the disabled body” has so often been construed in culture as a source of shame, perhaps social constructionism, Foucauldian or otherwise, seems like an evasion or abstraction of the
“real” body and all of its messiness so that discursive historians appear to participate in reifying this shame by abstracting the body through biopolitical discursive analyses.84 A phenomenological approach to disability studies usefully recuperates and validates
82 Ibid., 136-160. 83 Such disability theorists are indebted to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, specifically his Phenomenology of Perception (1962), which discusses lived experience as “embodied perception.” In his text, Merleau-Ponty engages directly with other philosophers such as Heidegger and Sarte but also draws on the work of contemporary psychology and neuroscience to examine how people corporeally, rather than spiritually or intellectually, experience the world. For an idea of disability studies’ (fraught) relationship to Foucauldian social constructionism and theories of the body and power, see Shelly Tremain, ed. Foucault and the Government of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). In this collection, discursive analysis’ alleged lack of attentiveness to the “reality of the body” comes under fire by phenomenologist Bill Hughes, and most of the other applications of Foucault are projects invested in “proving” Foucault, for instance, his model of disciplinary/panoptic power as it manifests itself in rehabilitation settings for paraplegics and quadriplegics. Additionally, see Siebers, Disability Theory and Lennard Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2002), in which I believe he overemphasizes the repressive mode, or what he deems the “sadomasochism” of Foucault. Disability studies’ relationship to social constructionism has been hotly debated, often in the context of phenomenology. See Mark Sherry, “Can Social Constructionism Be Oppressive?” 8 March 2006.
of the world, which complicate sensory regimes like vision or touch that reify ableist
norms of perception.
Though this anti-social constructionist strand of disability studies has
characterized phenomenology as providing the coveted “return to the body” and an
analysis of bodily experiences such as pain and suffering, it rests on the flawed
presupposition that discursive constructionism has been inattentive to the body. My work cautions that the alleged “return to the body” championed by some phenomenologically-inflected projects in disability studies dangerously assumes a prediscursive and ahistorical body that is completely knowable and anterior to discourse. Such a claim of a return to the body also holds within it the danger of choosing representative bodies while marginalizing others. Just as Judith Butler defends her theorization of the body when she writes that question is not “What is the materiality of sex?” but “What is the sex of materiality?,” this project assumes that disability is experienced through discourse. By arguing that all materiality is an effect of power, Butler disputes the possibility of a prediscursive body, because asserting a body as natural (or “normal”) is still a discursive construction and represents, for me, the apotheosis of disciplinary power’s success. Disability studies holds a fruitful position to critique the ableism inherent in agency rather than railing against the powerlessness of the body within discursive histories, a position which harbors an implicit ableism by
49 keeping firmly in place the ableism of agency by often assuming a perceiving subject
with power over his perception or validating certain forms of sensory perception.
Recent work in disability studies has critiqued the limits of discursive analysis
in attending to the bodily realities and experiences of pain and suffering.85 While I believe that a greater attention to pain and suffering is certainly needed in disability studies projects, the phenomenological model risks sacrificing the potency of making collective structural critiques about inequities that have always been among the most central and valuable core principles and contributions of disability studies. My dissertation attempts to offer one solution to this theoretical and historical problematic by using insights from affect theory to imagine the cultural work and effects of feelings like pain, suffering, pity and empathy, among others. Although few disability scholars address “affect theory” explicitly, disability studies and disability activism have long critiqued the articulation, operation, and manipulation of emotional responses to disability, especially the role of pity.86 Thus, this dissertation reflects my desire that
disability studies more fully work within affect theory to address the limits of social
85 See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Bill Hughes, “What Can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” and Barry Allen, “Foucault’s Nominalism” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 86 See Shapiro, No Pity; Eli Clare, Exile and Pride; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2009); and Paul Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Synder, 134-160 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 50 constructionism in addressing pain and suffering, without sacrificing its forceful mode
of collective and structural critique.
Furthermore, although I examine the ramifications of body projects from
American Studies, literary studies, and disability studies perspectives, my project is also
heavily indebted to recent queer theory that critiques the entanglement of American
citizenship, national identity, and heteronormativity.87 I contribute to the discipline of
queer theory not only by forging a partnership between queer and disability studies, but
also in examining the specific implications of a post-1970s privatization of citizenship
and the linkages of sexual liberation and overcoming for teenage (rather than only adult)
citizens.88
In imagining adolescents’ position within the nation, my project shares a similar
critique of the project of nationalism, the disciplines of citizenship, and the figure of the
child as theorized by current work in queer studies. My work is very much indebted to
Lauren Berlant’s concept of the “infantile citizen.” In her account of post-Reagan
America, Berlant suggests that American culture’s obsession with the fetus became part
of a national imaginary in which the “infantile citizen,” prized for its innocence and
unquestioning patriotism, was considered the ideal, emblematized most powerfully by
87 See Lauren Berlant, Queen of America; Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); David Serlin, Replaceable You. 88 Christopher Lasch remarked on the diminishing private sphere, arguing that institutions like the family and the household had become the province of experts rather than individuals. He noted that 51 the figure of the fetus and also by (predominantly female) children.89 Surveying
“pilgrimage to Washington” narratives and a discourse of the “celebrity fetus,” Berlant
argues that the once-valued democratic public sphere was remolded into an “intimate private sphere” in which governmental power increasingly became privatized and individualized.90 This construction of the citizen opens private lives up to public scrutiny while instituting a hegemonic norm of heterosexuality, emblematized in the fetus, the most ideal citizen as it represents inevitable human progress, futurity, and possibility without the pesky complications of collective action or critique of the structural inequities of society or government.
Like Berlant, I position popular medical images as central to the processes of citizenship training. My work expands the implications of Berlant’s and Edelman’s theoretical and historical frame to suggest that the complicity of national citizenship is not only with heteronormativity but with “health” and able-bodiedness.91 Though
the 1970s was characterized by the “reced[ing]” of the “possibility of genuine privacy” (Lasch, Narcissism, 9). 89 Berlant, Queen of America. 90 Berlant argues that the infantile citizen’s inherent and required naïveté legitimates paternalistic governmental protections, which are established through popular consent to the privatization of citizenship. Foucault makes a similar argument about the transition from public displays of power, through torture, to a more individualized “microphysics of power” that catalogues and probes the body on an individual level. However, Foucault argues that this transition is characteristic of modernity. See Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. 91 Like Berlant, while Edelman examines the heteronormativity of politics invested in reproduction, he deemphasizes the investment of politics in producing a healthy nation via healthy reproductive bodies and healthy children. Edelman leaves himself open to performing a critique of how disability functions in the political investment in futurity, making a case for a new reading of Dicken’s classic, A Christmas Carol, with his queering of Ebenezer Scrooge. While Edelman establishes Scrooge as a queered character in his insensitivity toward children, his bachelorhood, and his eventual spiritual recuperation via his charity to the Cratchits, Edelman fails to examine the “promise” embodied in curing ill Tiny Tim’s disability—the investment of futurity not only in reproduction but also in ability and health. 52 Berlant’s and Edelman’s projects mobilize queer theory to critique the exclusions (and
strategic inclusions) of heteronormativity, their attention to the bodily standards of
entry into American citizenship put their work into conversation with disability studies,
which has sought to problematize notions of the normal body.92
While I establish that the development of “proper” heterosexuality is thoroughly
embedded in teen culture, I also maintain that teen sexuality is always figured as a
problem—simultaneously normal and pathological, future and failure. Thus, teens are
less hospitable figures for the tactics of reproductive futurism and infantile citizenship,
because they are construed as neither inherently innocent children nor responsible,
docile adult citizens. Reproductive futurism and infantile citizenship presume a polar
opposition between adults and children that completely dismisses the in-between-ness of
teens that I hold as central to projects of citizenship and tactics of power which often
assume and expect that teens are different from children.93 While the heteronormative
training that occurs for teenagers takes place in a variety of sites, including teen dramas
in literature, film, and television, I argue that in those cultural locations it occurs
Thus, for Edelman, heteronormativity should also necessarily be linked to ableism, in that the “cure” for Scrooge’s queerness lay in the cure of Tiny Tim’s frail body. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 92 Edelman’s work is extremely valuable in critiquing naturalized political investments in futurity and the exclusionary nature of the “our” in “our children” (and likewise the ableist view of the healthy “children” whose future heterornormative politics is so invested in protecting). However, his pessimism about the inevitable immutability of the future and the futility of queer politics’ transgressive potential to unsettle the future are aspects of his work that I find less useful in resisting discourses heteronormativity and ableism. 93 Todd Ramlow’s “Bad Boys,” which speaks about the distinct positionality of teenagers in discourses of queerness and disability, is an important exception to the collapsing of difference between 53 through simultaneously presenting teen heterosexuality and the teenaged healthy body as natural and unnatural, normal and dangerous, able and disabled. My work illustrates the value in considering notions of age and “normal” development alongside and within queer studies’ critical work on national discourses of citizenship, politics, sexuality, and health.
Chapter Previews
Nothing played a greater role in representing teenagers to teenagers than the made-for-TV movie, which emerged in the 1970s. Thus, in Chapter One, I examine the cultural importance of “the bubble boy” by surveying representations of the “real”
bubble boys, David Vetter III and Ted DeVita, alongside the made-for-television movie,
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), an early example of “disease-of-the-week” television
programming. Specifically, I analyze the role of “disabled martyrdom” in ensuring
American narratives of technological progress and masculine, heterosexual coming-of-
age. Meanwhile, I also question the fragile alliance of sexual liberation and narratives of
overcoming as they were presented in 1970s programming. Through cultural
representations that focused on technological trappings of life in the bubble, the bubble boy, as a cultural figure forged by the fusion of fiction and non-fiction coverage, became invested with ambivalence about technology, masculinity, and sexuality in a new
children and teenagers that occurs in historical and theoretical scholarly work on youth in queer studies and in other disciplines. 54 sexually-liberated world by linking sexual and space exploration and manly self-sacrifice
with self-discovery.
In my second chapter, I examine representations of disability in ABC’s famous
After School Specials, material currently completely unexamined in scholarly
publications. Contextualizing the Specials within the history of television regulation,
educational broadcasting, and concerns about teenagers’ relationship to a new, post- sexual-revolution sexual culture of the 1970s, I argue that the series presented a disciplined vision of sexual liberation for teens, combining educational value with sexual titillation. The series offered moral lessons about sexual responsibility without imagining
teens as always inherently threatened by their own sexuality. By linking
heteronormativity and ability, the Specials presented coming-of-age stories of healthy overcoming of disability and linked this process to proper heterosexual development. I argue that the series’ ableist logics, while oppressive, ushered in a new openness about teen sexuality even as they reconsolidated heterosexist and ableist norms.
In my third chapter, I examine a subgenre of the YA problem novel that I call
“teen sick lit.” These books—published largely in the 1980s and aimed at teen girl readers—featured love stories about teen girls and boys with life-threatening illnesses.
Surveying the work of YA authors Lurlene McDaniel and Jean Ferris, I analyze the affective labor of sadness and its imagined crucial role in instantiating emotional growth and coming-of-age in readers by exposing them to the “grimness” of life. Additionally, I
55 connect teen sick lit and its cultivation of sadness to myriad national and governmental
initiatives aimed at conquering “aliteracy,” a crisis of unwillingness to read that was
narrated as a hidden affliction of American citizens in the 1980s. While the problem
novel was born as the quintessential young adult genre, the “problem” of teen aliteracy
was configured as a threat to the health of a nation defined by literacy. Thus, the birth of teen sick lit as a form of affective labor coincided with attempts to overcome the apathy of aliteracy with the excess of emotion elicited by sad books.94
Just as I critique the role of science and technology in constructing images of
overcoming adolescence in narratives of the bubble boy, my fourth and final chapter
discusses the rise of neuroscientific explanations for the “condition” of adolescence
during the 1990s, known as the “Decade of the Brain.” Chronicling the process by which
the teen “mind” became reimagined and reengineered as the “teen brain,” this chapter
analyzes the rise of what I call “neuroparenting,” a neuroscientifically-influenced model
of parenting teens that incorporated neuroscience discoveries to explain how “teen
behaviors,” such as laziness, impulsiveness, and explosive emotional outbursts, were
neurologically-rooted rather than culturally constructed or willingly affected by teens
94This chapter builds on literary studies of illness and disability narratives, which have largely focused on classic literature, by examining the proliferation of popular young adult novels about disease and disability, which are not traditionally analyzed as part of this genre. See Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Cheryl Mattingly and Linda Garro, eds. Narrative and Cultural Constructions of Illness and Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis:; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies; and Lois Keith, Take Up. 56 themselves. News media and parenting book representations of neuroscience discoveries
helped construct adolescent neuroscience as proof that teens were brain-damaged or
always-already-mentally ill rather than willfully (and often woefully) misbehaved. This
notion gained additional traction amid an American school shooting epidemic and
“masculinity crisis” of the 1990s. As neuroscientifically-enlightened parenting promised a
more compassionate approach to the “difference” of teens from adults and children,
messages of tolerance and celebrating difference also formed the rallying cry of
multiculturalism, feminism, and disability rights. Within the same cultural moment, neuroscience and genetics attempted to prove that valences of identity like race, class,
and gender, and behaviors such as violence, were biologically-rooted rather than (or at
least, as well as) socially-constructed. This chapter analyzes the tension between these impulses, spotlighting the crucial and particular ways in which these cultural debates became mapped onto the figure of the teen, his/her brain, and the rehabilitative logics I have traced in previous chapters.
In the end, this project is about how coming-of-age narratives have shaped our understanding of American citizenship and likewise how a rehabilitative model of overcoming disability has been central to discourses of national health and of
Americanness more broadly. Moreover, it suggests that the affective labor of the nation and of the cultural representations that trace its contours are implicated within and by the legacies of rehabilitation—or the pursuit of heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and
57 self-disciplining citizenship as ideals, hard-won through emotional struggle and consolidated in maturity. Finally, at the center of these labors to build and discipline a healthy body politic and nation, stands the teen as a voluminous metaphor and medicalized embodiment of rebellion and overcoming—a figure that illuminates the symbiosis of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness within American national citizenship.
58
Chapter 1: “Medicine is Magical, and Magical is Art:” Exploring Space and Sex from a Plastic Bubble
“[Y]ou’d see that I’m not a cripple. And that there’s nothing wrong with me except that I can’t get out of here until they tell me it’s okay…I’m so sick of it. I’m so sick of feeling like a hospital case. Like some weirdo kid who can’t even breathe normal air because he might get sick and die. I just wanna be like a man. Someone that you could care about, and not feel sorry for.” --John Travolta as “Tod Lubitch” in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976)
Alliteratively referencing “the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon
heart,” Paul Simon sardonically proclaimed the era “the days of miracle and wonder” in
his song “The Boy in the Bubble,” from which this chapter’s title derives.1 The story of
“the bubble boy,” an iconic story of the 1970s, continues to be a source of cultural
fascination and cultural production. Combining a triumphal narrative about
technological innovation and medical mavericks in the era of space exploration, the
story retains cultural resonance outside of its 1970s context.2 The most familiar incarnation of this story was the 1976 made-for-TV-movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,
which starred John Travolta as a love-struck teenage boy in an isolator. In this moment,
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and cultural representations of the “bubble boy,” more
1 Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble.”Graceland.1986. This album was released two years after the death of David Vetter, the infamous “bubble boy.” 2 Two other familiar incarnations of the boy in the bubble include an episode of Seinfeld and a Disney film. See “The Bubble Boy,” Seinfeld. NBC. 7 October 1992. See also Bubble Boy, DVD, directed by Blair Hayes (Beverly Hills, CA: 2001). This film starred Jake Gyllanhall as Jimmy Livingston, a “bubble boy.” 59 broadly, revealed connections among heterosexuality and its management, disability, and self-sacrifice, rendering youth, sex, and physical limitation crucial elements in imagining an adolescent’s place in a national future.
David Vetter and Ted DeVita, two boys with immune disorders, lived in plastic enclosures for a significant portion of their lives. David received overwhelmingly more media coverage than Ted for a variety of reasons, but the movie hybridizes the two boys’ stories. Although the news media narrated the story of a real-life bubble “boy,” who could not be hugged or kissed by his mother, fictional accounts meditated more on the question of a bubble “man:” whether or not a bubble boy could ever truly come of age when limited to a protected environment. Tracing the media representations of the bubble boy, this chapter examines the made-for-TV movie alongside and within newspaper coverage of and memoirs about David and Ted. This chapter shows how the bubble boy narrative functioned as part of an historically-specific trajectory in television programming in the late 1960s and 1970s that produced sexually-themed and “disease-of- the-week” programming, which highlighted multiply-intersecting modes of embodiment. I argue that the fictional re-imaging of the bubble boy as a teenager approaching manhood revealed many important cultural ideas about teen sexuality, disability, and national belonging that were hotly debated in the 1970s and that would also appear in ABC’s famous After School Specials, discussed in the following chapter.
This successful programming featured and addressed a preponderance of disabled teen
60 subjects encountering their own sexualities and suggests that issues of disability and
sexuality were predominant modes of representation in imagining teenagers’ coming of
age within fledgling “teen television” of the seventies. In addition to interrogating
connections among disability, (hetero)sexuality, masculinity, and youth, the coming-of- age narrative presented by representations of the bubble boy showcased NASA iconography in both its fictional and non-fictional forms, which implicated this coming-
of-age narrative in questions of national identity and its celebratory reliance on
technological progress.
Most importantly, within this narrative preoccupation with the requirements for
coming-of-age into manhood, I argue that the issue of disabled martyrdom and
masculinity problematizes the liberationist ethos that has come to characterize histories
of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beyond the complex bioethical questions provoked by
the medical treatment of Vetter and DeVita, the cultural representations of the bubble
boy raised important questions about the relationship between “liberation” and
“overcoming.” Specifically, a history of disabled overcoming became articulated to
emergent understandings (and disciplinings) of “liberation” in the 1970s, and cultural
notions of “liberation,” in various forms, became increasingly essential to and formative
of regimes of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Finally,
stories of national and technological progress, such as those constructing images of
bubble boys, relied on images of disabled martyrs to imagine and simultaneously
61 discipline individual choice and citizenship. Of course, although the bubble boy was one visible example of disabled martyrdom, he exists alongside other young disabled martyrs for national progress: Vietnam veterans. The fictional and nonfictional accounts of the bubble boys imagine that in submitting to medical technology, boys could be brave, and could become disabled martyrs for national progress—a progress heavily invested in a philosophy of technology’s triumph over the frailty of the body in this historical moment. However, akin to the Vietnam soldier’s noble self-sacrifice, only in coming out of the bubble and choosing normality over protection—even if it meant death—could bubble boys become men.
Technological Triumphalism and the Bubble
The first news story about the bubble boy began in Houston, Texas in 1971 with
the birth of David Vetter III, a boy born with a rare immunodeficiency called Severe-
Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome (SCID).3 His parents, David Joseph Vetter and
Carol Ann Vetter, had already lost an older son, also named David, to the disease in the
year prior to David’s birth.4 The Vetters, who already had a daughter, were told that any
of their sons would have a 50% chance of being born with SCID, but the doctors at the
3 SCID is a disease which leaves those born with it without any immunities to fight off even the most basic infections. There are several varieties of SCID, the most common of which is linked to the X chromosome. This form only affects males, which most likely accounts for the Vetters’ tentativeness in conceiving another son. See SCID.net,
son with the disease, they could facilitate a completely sterile birth and would place the
child into an isolator to protect him until a cure was found. Led to believe that a cure
was imminent and eager to try for another baby, the Vetters placed their trust in the doctors’ optimism and conceived David Vetter III. In describing their choice to have
David, news stories noted that the Vetters decided against an abortion when the sex of their baby was revealed not only because they were Roman-Catholic but also because they desperately wanted a boy.5 Doctors delivered David by caesarian section and placed him into an “isolator,” the “bubble” in which he would live out his next 12 years, 4 months, and 17 days. David’s bubble was filled with sterilized toys, and a teacher came in to educate him throughout his time in the bubble. Throughout his life, he made various forays into the “outside world” that were enabled by cutting-edge technology.
He traveled back and forth from his parents’ home a few times via a spacesuit, donated to David by NASA. In 1983, still without a definite cure for SCID, Dr.’s Ralph Feigin and William Shearer suggested performing a bone marrow transplant on David, using marrow donated by his sister, Katherine, to jumpstart his immune system. A few months after the transplant, David became ill with diarrhea, fever, and severe vomiting; he was removed from the bubble, unprotected, for the first time in his life and died
5 “Germ-Free ‘Home’ Shields Baby Boy.” The New York Times. September 23, 1972. See also Stuart Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life in Plastic Bubble.” The Washington Post. October 3, 1974, A1. 63 fifteen days later on February 22, 1984.6 American media outlets followed David’s story with fervor and generated numerous articles about the boy’s life, his death, and his contributions to the advancement of medical science. During this era of medical experimentation with immune deficiency diseases, ethical questions about life in the bubble were rarely discussed in the media.7
While David became the most well-known “bubble boy,” another boy in isolation from both germs and the public eye would provide more of the inspiration for fictional representations of life in a germ-free bubble. Born in 1962—nearly 10 years before David—Ted DeVita, nicknamed “Teddy” in the press accounts of his life, was diagnosed with aplastic anemia when he was ten years old by his father, Dr. Vincent
DeVita, a renowned oncologist at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in
Washington, DC. Upon diagnosis, Ted was relocated from his home to what he and his family called “The Room,” a completely sterile laminar airflow room in “13-East” in the
NIH’s Clinical Center. 8 Ted’s story entered the media after accusations of an “abuse of
6 Unbeknownst to the doctors, the bone marrow contained traces of a dormant strain of the Epstein-Barr virus, which produced Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare type of cancer. The disease produced countless cancerous tumors throughout his body and was the cause of his death. 7 Uncharacteristic of public accounts of David written during his lifetime, the ethical dilemmas about David’s isolation and his lack of autonomy are more characteristic of contemporary accounts of the story. For a discussion of the ethical dilemma presented by David Vetter’s confinement to the bubble, see American Experience: The Boy in the Bubble, DVD. Directed by Barak Goodman and John DiMaggio. WGBH Educational Foundation and Ark Media LLC, 2006. See also the website supporting the documentary, especially the section called “Bioethics Opinions.”
doctors expected him to “either remit…or die within a few months,” Ted lived in The
Room until May 27, 1980, when he died at age 17 of an iron overload from too many
blood transfusions. 10
Unlike the Vetters, who generally cooperated with media outlets seeking to write
about their son, the DeVita family and the NIH kept news of Ted’s treatment from the
airflow room” refers to the “‘curtain of air,” a steady outflow of positive air pressure to expel potential pathogens, that protected the openings of the room from allowing the entrance of pathogens. See National Institutes of Health (NIH). “Clinical News.”
nature of the Vetter’s story may have influenced the DeVita’s to try to retain their
privacy. In her book The Empty Room: Surviving the Loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age,
Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, Ted’s younger sister, described the family’s sense of the
uninvited sensationalism that surrounded her brother, writing that the media
environment occurred in “pre-AIDS days…before health and talk shows regularly
trotted out people with rare medical afflictions.”12 DeVita recalled being barraged by phone calls and lamented that The National Enquirer sent a photographer to Ted’s funeral, in spite of the DeVitas’ best efforts to retain their privacy.13 According to
DeVita-Raeburn, this absence of “rare medical afflictions” in the news media made her
11 David’s parents did ask that their last name be omitted from press accounts. See Stuart Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life in Plastic Bubble.” The Washington Post, October 3, 1974, A1. Eventually after getting a divorce, Carol Ann Vetter eventually married a journalist from People magazine, Kent Demaret, who had written multiple stories about Vetter’s son, David. 12 DeVita-Raeburn, Elizabeth. The Empty Room: Surviving the Loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age (New York: Scribner, 2004), 4. Interestingly, DeVita-Raeburn fails to note the long history of telethons and advertisements for the March of Dimes and other charities that featured poster children. While certainly “people with rare medical afflictions” may not have been popular talk show fare at the time of Ted’s death, the image of the poster child “trotted out” both for entertainment and to elicit donations had been standard fare since before World War II in advertisements about polio. 13 In excavating the trauma of her brother’s death for her, as his younger sibling, DeVita-Raeburn is trying to assert her ability to make his story part of her story rather than her parents’ or media representations of Ted having ownership of his story. However, although she is trying to figure out “what really happened” to Ted and how it affected her life, I am interested in the memoir not as a litmus test for inaccuracies in media or filmic representations of the discourse of the bubble boy, rather I am interested in its participation in the discursive construction of the bubble boy in its cooperation with or resistance to other sites of knowledge-production. 66 brother’s and David’s stories “big news,” which invited the boys’ persistence as “strange, abstract figures in American pop culture.”14
While mysterious maladies may not have been part of the traditional fare of
television talk shows of the period, disabilities and diseases were far from absent in news media and television, especially given the graphic prime time coverage of the ravages of the Vietnam War and the increasing cultural visibility of disabled veterans. According to
Bruce Jennings, a bioethicist, “medicine was on a roll” by the 1970s, as was technology more generally.15 Medical innovation had triumphed over many diseases in the past decades, most notably polio, through the combination of the Iron Lung technology with the Salk vaccine in the mid-1950s. The late 1950s also witnessed the first successful open heart surgery and the first kidney transplant, while medical achievements of the mid-
1960s included the patenting of the first artificial heart; the development of the heart- lung machine; hundreds of heart transplants, with varying degrees of success; the widespread use of “the pill;” and the advent of the first commercially-available, non- invasive fetal monitors, manufactured by Hewlett-Packard and aptly named “The
Babysitters.”16 Indeed, a LIFE magazine special issue in September of 1962 trumpeted the
arrival of “The Take-Over Generation,” referring to multiple breakthroughs by “young
men and women” in “government, science, space, business, education, religion and the
14 DeVita-Raeburn, Empty Room, 3. 15 Boy in the Bubble. 16 See also Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 67 arts” and featuring a photograph of a doctor peering into a microscope alongside a man observing a rocket.17 Additionally, the sophistication of battlefield medicine reduced war
casualties while increasing the number of disabled veterans returning home from
Vietnam. Of course amid all of this new technological control over the body, the mid-
1970s also witnessed a victory over immune-deficiency, embodied in the adorable baby
boy in a bubble.18
Although the postwar period witnessed many exciting technological innovations,
this celebratory attitude was far from absolute. By mid-1960s, a growing belief, among
activists, scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens, that new technologies needed
assessment mechanisms to judge their costs to humanity resulted in the rise of
Technological Assessment (TA) by the 1970s. Its terminology first introduced in 1965
during deliberations of the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of
Representatives, TA was an attempt to imagine the critical societal role of evolving
technology and its potential for damaging, unintended consequences.19 In theory, TA
would also provide indispensable “translation” of technological data to policymakers,
17 Life, September 14, 1962. Between the years of 1960 and 1980, LIFE magazine featured over 20 cover stories on medical triumphs and insights into the human body, including a multi-issue series on the brain and the first-ever portraits of a fetus in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were also at least four issues devoted to open-heart transplants in this period. 18 The culture of optimism about medical technology was repeatedly asserted in the PBS documentary about David by his doctors. 19 National Library of Medicine, “HTA 101: Introduction to Health Technology Assessment,” < http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/hta101/ta101_c1.html> Accessed 12 October 2006. The impetus to create TA began as an outgrowth of environmental activism. Sometimes space exploration is also credited with fueling the vibrant 1970s environmental movement’s creation of “Earth Day” in 1970, in part due to the first ever available photographs of the planet, taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968. 68 untrained in the sciences, and thus, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was
founded in 1972. Private-sector critics of TA argued that the lengthy process of TA
would stymie technological innovation and that anticipating all of the consequences of technology was absurdly impossible. Concurrent with the development of general TA, a more specific substratum of TA also developed in 1975: Health Technology Assessment
(HTA). The National Research Council conducted TAs on in-vitro fertilization, predetermination of the sex of children, and behavioral modification by neurosurgical, electrical, or pharmaceutical means.20 Since its inception, HTA has been enervated by
the emergence and proliferation of health technologies that have incited social, ethical,
legal, and political concerns, including contraceptives, organ transplantation, artificial organs, life-sustaining technologies for critically or terminally ill patients, and in more recent history, genetic testing and therapy and stem cell research.21 With respect to
David’s case, Texas Children’s Hospital only formally discussed the ethics of David’s remaining indefinitely isolated once and nearly three and a half years after his birth;
although TA was born on the federal level, hospital-based ethics committees in the 1970s remained rare.22 Thus, while the late 1960s and early 1970s were characterized by a
20 Ibid. The National Research Council was the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public and the scientific and engineering communities. 21 Ibid. 22 Steve McVicker, “Bursting the Bubble.” Houston Press Online, April 10, 2007
same period indicated some of the anxiety over new technologies and their impact,
revealing a tension over the cultural meaning of scientific advancement and its
relationship to national identity and American life.
Another emblem of technological progress, the poster child, was already a
familiar player in packaging technological innovation as medical miracle. David was
more iconic than Ted DeVita not only because Ted’s family suppressed his story until
his death, but also because David’s childhood status made him more suitable to the
representational conventions of the poster child. Noted as a twentieth-century
outgrowth of the nineteenth century freak show, the poster child was the result of the
merging of the medical model of disability, the visual spectacle of the freakshow, and the
charity model of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century.23 As Eli Clare and
Rosemarie Garland Thomson have argued, a relationship of pity between the observer
and the spectacularized body on display was not a component of the freakshow, which
never emphasized the wretchedness of the displayed “freak.” By contrast, the poster child’s raison d’etre was to evoke charitable pity from the nondisabled.24 The poster
was “disappointed” with the results. He has spoken publicly against David’s doctors, arguing that they coaxed David’s parents into conceiving him so they would have a ready test subject for research in immunology; the doctors deny this charge. 23 See Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 24 According to David Oshinsky, the March of Dimes campaign, through its use of celebrity images, poster children, and other advertising media, revolutionized fundraising activities undertaken by charities, in that prior to the depression, fund raising typically consisted of large donations from a few very 70 child was put on display to invite pathos and benevolent donation, while enabling
pitying nondisabled donators to “demonstrate to themselves that they still belong to a
moral community.”25 Historically, poster children emerged in service of the March of
Dimes fundraising campaign to cure polio, undertaken by the National Foundation for
Infantile Paralysis, Inc. The first poster child was Donald Anderson, who came to the
March of Dimes in the 1940s. In the aftermath of a serious outbreak of polio in Hickory,
N.C., the Foundation produced posters featuring child-survivors of the epidemic. Often,
the posters would feature a sad and disabled “before” image juxtaposed with an after
image of the same child, smiling and walking proudly, as a living testament to the
curative power of generous donations.26 Meanwhile, disability studies scholars have
argued that “the poster child” as a cultural figure was premised on objectification of the
disabled body—the denial of autonomy or individuality and the production of a
hierarchical viewing relationship between the presumed-superior onlooker and the
object’s disabled body, which was made reducible to the sum-total of his disease or
disability rather than his individual personality.
affluent donors rather than small donations from the masses. See David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 25 Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 134-158. 26 According to David Oshinsky, the March of Dimes campaign, through its use of celebrity images, poster children, and other advertising media, revolutionized fundraising activities undertaken by charities, in that prior to the depression, fund raising typically consisted of large donations from a few very affluent donors rather than small donations from the masses. See Oshinsky, David. Polio: An American Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 71 As a child standing in narrative and visual testimony to the triumph of medical
science and characterized nearly exclusively by the pathos of his isolation from the
“normal” outside world, David Vetter, as he was constructed by the media, conveniently
fit into an established poster child role for a disabled child’s body on display. His
environment described as “womb-like,” David’s image was one of “infantile citizenship,”
a docile citizen-subject who never resisted the medical management of his body, its news
media representation, or its mobilization in discourses of patriotism. David’s media
image boasted and bolstered a narrative of American technological progress, as it
embodied the inherent “good” of “reproductive futurity.”27 Always depicted as docile
and accepting, David stood in stark contrast to Ted DeVita and the fictional Tod
Lubitch, as often-recalcitrant teenagers in protected environments who questioned
rather than docilely submitted to medical authority, national belonging, and the
inevitability of technological progress.28
Press reports about David Vetter assiduously crafted an image of normality and
contentment tinged with pathos in their portraits of life in the bubble. He was described
as “like any normal, healthy, 3-year-old boy” in that he “jumps up and down, sometimes
27 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 28 Ted’s sister, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn wrote a memoir about Ted after looking through his medical files. She realized that his emotional adjustment to his isolation was difficult, and the staff described him as “alternatively hostile, angry, and cheery.” At one point, doctors discovered a cavity in the wall that Ted created to hide thousands of pills he had secreted away. See DeVita-Raeburn, Empty Room. 72 plays rough and giggles when he is tickled.”29 In the press’s estimation, David was
“precocious,”30 “handsome…extremely good-humored”—for all intents and purposes “a
model 3-year-old,”31 albeit one who occasionally “can get cranky” in spite of his being
“slightly ahead of other 3-year-olds in verbal skills.”32 In spite of his normal upbringing,
stories about David melodramatically emphasized the pathos of his predicament. In nearly every article written about him, reporters lamented that he was never kissed by
his mother.33 “Expert” testimony from David’s psychiatrists bolstered such depictions, as
they assured onlookers that not only did David exhibit “no emotional problems” but
also might “force psychologists to question long accepted theories” about necessary
elements for personality development because “isolation may have ‘removed certain
subtle impediments to development.’”34 Whether or not doctors’ vague delineations of
“subtle impediments” involved interactions with peers or overprotective parents, nearly every story about David Vetter cites an expert psychological opinion to assert that not only was David psychologically normal in all respects, but also in some cases, isolation
29 Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life.” 30 “Germ-Free ‘Home.’” 31 Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life.” 32 Ibid. 33Selected examples include: Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life;” Stuart Auerbach, “A Three-Year- Old Boy’s Life in a Sterile Bubble,” The Washington Post, October 6, 1974, A3; “Boy, 12, Out of ‘Bubble’ for Treatment,” The New York Times, February 9, 1984, A20; “Boy Leaves His ‘Bubble.’” The Washington Post. February 9, 1984; Wayne King, “Signs Hopeful for Boy Out of Bubble and One Who Fell in Lake.” The New York Times, February 11, 1984; Paul Taylor, “Emergence: Signs of Immune System are Found in Boy Who Lived in Plastic Bubble,” The Washington Post, February 11, 1984, A1; “Headliners.” The New York Times, February 12, 1984, E7; Wayne King, “Houston ‘Bubble Boy’ Dead; Could Not Fight Any Disease,” The New York Times, February 13, 1984, A1. 73 from the outside world might have even provided superior conditions for David’s
development. Although fears about the emotional effects of medical technology on
David were unspoken in the press, the inclusion of expert opinions expressed unvoiced
fears that the bubble might stunt his emotional and psychological growth while ensuring
his physical safety.
While the media constructed David Vetter as “normal” but “above-average,”
media accounts also describe Ted DeVita as “in many respects, a typical 17-year old
youth” who was likewise noted to be of above-average intelligence in scoring in the 99th percentile on his college board exams.35 His room contained a stereo set, television,
books, records, two Les Paul electric guitars, a telephone, a commode and shower, and
even a small recording studio.36 While in The Room, Ted had school lessons and also
undertook hobbies, including playing guitar, performing magic tricks, and operating a
ham radio.37 Just as David allegedly never resented his confinement according to the
press, Ted “never thought of himself as a prisoner;” a friend quoted in an article written
about him after his death said, “He controlled his environment…He didn’t want pity. I
never heard him complain once.”38 Ted was older than David when he entered the
34 “Boy With Immune Deficiency Challenges Theories in 3 Years of His Life in Plastic Bubble.”The New York Times, October 7, 1974. 35 Stephanie Mansfield, “8 Years in Germ-Free Chamber: Youth in the Glass Cubicle Dies,” The Washington Post, May 29, 1980, A1. 36 Ibid. 37 Cohn, “Boy With Fatal Disease.” 38 Mansfield, “8 Years.” 74 bubble, and his teenager status was also played up in articles, signified by his
rebelliousness. He “…liked Shakespeare and ‘Star Trek,’ played electric guitar, grew a
beard, drank too much champagne last New Year’s Eve, and bickered with his kid
sister.” The same article notes that “only one thing”—his disease and confinement—
“separate[d] him from his peers” to minimize his difference from his able-bodied friends.
In contrast to the emphasis placed on David’s isolation from his mother’s touch,
articles about Ted did not have the same mother-son pathos. Instead, they read “for the
next eight years could not touch or be touched by anyone” and emphasized his family in
terms of traditional teen older brother teasing rather than maternal affection. His
grandfather, Jim Lipscomb, described his family as “well-adjusted” in that they “talked
on and adult level” with Ted. However, instead of his relationship with his parents
taking center stage in media depictions of him, Ted’s quasi-adulthood and his teenaged
rebelliousness was highlighted, in that he drank too much champagne on New Year’s
Eve, played rock music, and grew a beard. Friends supplanted family, as articles instead
referenced his friendships, for with the assistance of “a specially designed helmet that
allowed the dark-haired teen-ager to make short trips outside his tiny cubicle,” most
often “rock concerts at the Capital Centre…where he sat in a special VIP ‘Sky Suite.’”39
As remembered by his sister and mentioned in the press, Ted also attended a Star Trek
39 Ibid. 75 convention—a trip outside that marked “the only time Ted wasn’t stared at.”40 Instead, a
boy his age who liked his “costume” flashed Ted the “Spock hand sign for ‘peace,’” and
this anecdote served the media in depicting Ted as a “sci-fi kid” much like David.
In contrast to placid depictions of contentment, images of tantrums, and whether
or not the boys in the bubble were having them, cropped up in each of the stories as a
marker of their transition from childhood to adulthood and as a measure of their
normality. David’s psychiatrists remarked that he had “never banged on the bubble in
rage or screamed to be let out,” instead he was noted as being extremely respectful and
gracious to the staff that cared for him.41 David’s docility evidenced his normality and
maturity. In contrast to rebellious Ted, David was nearly always depicted as the docile
and well-behaved son of loving parents until details of his depression and defiance
emerged well-after his death. In 1995, David’s psychologist, Dr. Mary Murphy, had
planned to publish a “realistic account of his life” to fulfill David’s wish to “set the
record straight”; the publisher decided not to publish the manuscript, Was It Worth It?:
The True Story of David the Bubble Boy, after receiving threats of a lawsuit from David’s parents and officials from Baylor.42 Murphy’s account of David portrays a despondent
and fearful boy, one who had recurring nightmares about a “King of Germs” who
40 DeVita-Raeburn, Empty Room, 205-206. 41 Auerbach, “Boy Spending Life.” 42 McVicker, “Bursting the Bubble.” 76 besieged the bubble with thousands of his “wives.”43 Murphy noted that David once
smeared his own feces all over the inside of his bubble upon hearing that his doctor had
a heart attack and was in intensive care. Other inappropriate behavior described by
Murphy included frequent “explosive rages” followed by a fear of abandonment as
punishment for his behavior; a “preoccupation with death and fascination with fire,”
exhibited in drawings featuring “giant flames to burn down the hospital or his home”
that he would “pretend to extinguish” by urinating on the paper; nervous tics; and “open
masturbation” as he entered puberty, which embarrassed teachers and nurses. Murphy
argued that David felt depressed and hopeless for the majority of his confinement. Apart
from Murphy’s unpublished account, the PBS documentary, The Boy in the Bubble (2003)
about Vetter also questioned the innocence of his doctors and their decisions in David’s
treatment.
Ted’s teenaged status stood in stark contrast to depictions of David’s obedience
and innocence in press accounts of his life. Quoting Dr. Pizzo, a pediatric oncologist
who served as Ted’s physician, noted in one article that when Ted “‘was a youngster, he
“‘resented the confinement’” and “‘threw “temper tantrums”’”, but then as he grew older, he “thought less and less about getting out, and more about living in his sterile sanctuary…[and that although] initially he had hoped for getting out…he set his sights
43 Ibid. 77 on living day to day. In order to deal with it, he stopped thinking about it.”44 Here,
Ted’s fantasy of emerging from his cubicle along with his temper tantrums characterized his days as a “youngster,” but as a mature “young man,” he outgrew this type of resistant behavior. Moreover, most likely due to his father’s very public position at NIH and relationship to the scandal of Ted’s confinement, his parents were rarely quoted in the press, and the press did not revolve around Ted’s relationship to his parents in the same manner in which the press obsessed over David and his mother. Tantrums, in these narratives, both confirmed and contradicted the assiduously cultivated image of the boy’s normal development. On the one hand, the news media used mild “crankiness” as a marker of normality—every boy gets moody or acts out from time to time. On the other hand, such recalcitrance and noncompliance also represented a dangerous resistance to or ungratefulness for medical authority in the context of a medically- managed existence like that of the bubble. Therefore, the progressive narrative of the boy’s development into autonomous manhood was often at odds with the progressive discourse of medical and technological triumphalism it was narratively meant to emblematize. 45
44 Mansfield, Stephanie. “8 Years,” A1. 45 Ted DeVita’s penchant for resisting medical authority is well-documented in Ted’s sister’s accounts of his confinement in “The Room.” In his sister’s memoirs, which are partially gleaned from her experiences with Ted and her readings of the medical documentation left from his stay at the NIH, Ted is described as “a bit of a disciplinary problem” medical authority in Ted’s medical records, which DeVita- Raeburn surveys to tell her brother’s story. The papers describe nurses who had punished Ted by removing all of the toys from The Room, because he hadn’t gone to bed on time or complied with medical procedures—a massive undertaking because all of his toys would have undergo a lengthy process of sterilization before they could be reintroduced into his environment. At age ten, Ted describes The Room in his diaries, calling it a “prison” and himself as “the lost prisoner of Alcatraz,” and after relating a 78 The Bubble on the Tube
Although David was the most visible boy in the bubble in the news media, the story of Tod Lubitch—the teenaged protagonist played by John Travolta in the ABC made-for-TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble—has become one of the most enduring representations of life in the bubble. The fictional story of Travolta’s character, “Tod”
Lubitch, was based predominantly on the mostly private life of “Ted” DeVita, but incorporated some aspects of David’s life as well.46 The film first aired on November 12,
1976 at 9PM on ABC and also starred Diana Hyland and Robert Reed. Directed by
Randal Kleiser and co-written by Joe Morgenstern and Douglas Day Stewart, the film
boasted a star-studded cast. By the time the movie aired, John Travolta had become a
household name as the wisecracking Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back, Kotter and had
already filmed Saturday Night Fever, the movie which would catapult him into
superstardom upon its release in 1977. Although Tom Shales’ review of the movie
entitled “Life and Love in a Bubble” mocked the “tearjerker,” he conceded that it
represented a “step up in quality for the season’s ABC’s Friday Night Movies” which
also “momentarily liberate[d] able actor John Travolta from the weekly caricature of
situation in which he had apparently offended a doctor, he writes angrily that he is “an American” who has “the right to say anything [he] feel[s] without being punished.” In contrast to the happy images conjured by the media of David’s life in the bubble, Ted is described as “periodically depressed and withdrawn,” “alternatively hostile angry and cheery,” and he resisted medical procedures in various ways, by throwing everything out of his room in a fit of fury or most famously, by hiding his pills in a hole in the wall that went undiscovered for weeks until thousands of them cascaded out of the wall during a repairman’s visit to The Room. DeVita Raeburn, Empty Room, 84-92 and 188-189. 46 By the time of the television movie’s premier, only two stories emerged to make Ted’s life public—a far cry from the proliferation of news attention to David’s story. 79 ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’”47 The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is often noted as the first film to
demonstrate Travolta’s dramatic range as an actor. The film also featured the talents of
Robert Reed, the famed All-American-Dad from The Brady Bunch, and Diana Hyland,
who had become a star on Peyton Place, one of the first network television primetime
soap operas.48 Hyland garnered an Emmy for Outstanding Performance by a Supporting
Actress in a Comedy or Drama Special for her performance in the film.
ABC’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was born within the rise of the made-for-TV movie that had infiltrated primetime schedules in the late 1960s and whose heyday was in the 1970s. While NBC is credited as the first network to air made-for-TV movies with its Project 120 series (1964), ABC’s primetime Movie of the Week (1969) is perhaps the most famous of this genre.49 This innovation was appealing, given the high licensing
costs for broadcasting theatrical releases along with the racier material of feature films, as
a way of drawing audiences. Although ABC followed NBC’s lead in establishing this
genre, ABC differentiated itself from NBC by cutting back on production costs by
scheduling 90- as opposed to 120-minute movies. At times, as with The Boy in the Plastic
47 Tom Shales, “Life and Love in a Bubble.” The Washington Post, November 12, 1976, B12. 48 Since the show was one of the first network primetime shows to talk openly about sex and infidelity, ABC would only allow the show to be aired at 9:30 EST, to avoid its being seen by children and teenagers. However, after a 1968 ratings slump, the show was moved to 8:30EST to court viewership from a younger audience. Therefore, Hyland was probably a familiar face to teens in this era as well. 49 For more information about the rise of the made-for-TV movie, see Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) and Douglas Gomery, "Television, Hollywood, and the Development of Movies Made-for-Television," in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 120-129 (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1983). For a comprehensive listing of all made-for-TV movies, see the multi-volume set Alvin H. Marill, Movies Made for Television 1964-2004 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005). 80 Bubble, made-for-TV movies were dramatizations “based on” major news events.50
NBC’s TV movies predominantly offered action-adventure and suspense stories, ABC offered comedic and social issue pieces as well. Many comedic and social issue pieces featured sexual subjects, “that acknowledged a society affected by such phenomena as women’s liberation, sexual promiscuity, and divorce.”51
While The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and some of ABC’s After School Specials
certainly fall within this ascension of made-for-TV movies and the sexually-themed
programming they promulgated, both are also part of a subgenre of such movies, called
“disease-of-the-week” narratives.52 Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote sardonically,
“Television dramatists, having finally run out of terminal diseases to inflict on innocent characters, are turning to more sophisticated gimmicks” with The Boy in the Plastic
Bubble.53 A term coined by the television industry itself, “disease-of-the-week” shows
were dramatic made-for-TV movies or single, self-enclosed episodes of dramatic series
that focused on a disease or disability and its social effects on characters. In episodic
television, rather than having a series’ regular character develop a disease or disability
and extend the plotline over multiple episodes, a character with a given disease or
disability would guest star on a particular episode. Thus rather than a staple feature of a
50 Perhaps the most well-known heir to this tradition is the contemporary Lifetime Movie series. 51 Levine, Wallowing, 25. 52 On “disease-of-the-week” television narratives, see Longmore in Mitchell and Snyder, 134-158. On disease-of-the-week shows that focus only on sexually-transmitted diseases, see Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice; and Treichler, How to Have Theory. 53 Shales, “Life and Love.” 81 series, the disease-of-the-week plotline is the exclusive focus of a single episode and is
resolved within the confines of a single episode.
While such dramas are often critically judged for their “realism,” medical
accuracy, and educational value, generally such shows did not highlight social and
political difficulties faced by people with diseases or disabilities. Paula Treichler argues
this strategy spotlighted “the human face” of diseases as a “more tolerable” alternative for
television audiences than the “political face” of disease and disability.54 Dealing in
“drama, death, pathos, and social conflict” enabled the television industry to claim that commercial entertainment programming has a “serious social edge” without offering any destabilizing social critique that might threaten ratings. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble combined sexually-themed programming with a disease-of-the-week storyline in its portrayal of Tod Lubitch, engaging the problem of heterosexual sex for its disabled protagonist.
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble received mixed reviews from critics, who generally applauded actors’ individual performances rather than the film itself, and critics read
Tod’s disease as symbolizing teen angst, alienation, and generational conflict. New York
Times critic John J. O’Connor lambasted the movie for its “startling…attitude toward
age and ageing.”55 While other critics focused on Tod’s “innocence” as a character
“inflicted” with a terminal disease, O’Connor’s review censured Tod’s “mocking”
54 Treichler, How to Have Theory, 182. 82 behavior toward adults as epitomizing “the righteous scorn of youth.”56 Shales described
the film as “an adolescent masochist fantasy along the lines of ‘Tommy,’” and said that
“[a]ny teen-ager who feels isolated, picked on, or odd should be able to identify with
Travolta.”57 The presumed natural condition of teenaged alienation and awkwardness
was obviously emblematized by Tod’s disability, and his adolescence also manifested
itself in his “righteous scorn.” Clearly, Tod’s status as a petulant teenager did not elicit the same type of pity-filled charity as representations of David Vetter did, and the critics constructed the story as less about his pitiable condition and more about the inherent
narcissism or masochism of “adolescence.” Tod’s disability became naturalized as a
symbol of teenaged isolation, while his resistance to his caretakers was resignified as
generational conflict or worse.
Classified as a “weepie” by some and a cult classic by many, The Boy in the Plastic
Bubble chronicles the life of Tod Lubitch from birth to his seventeenth year. The movie
begins in 1959 at the home of John and Mickey Lubitch, with Dr. Ernest Gunther
arriving to confirm that the couple is pregnant. Although John is thrilled by the news,
Mickey walks away nervously. After the doctor leaves, John puts his arm around
Mickey and assures her that although their first son was born without an immune
55 John J. O’Connor, “TV Weekend.” The New York Times, November 12, 1976, 71. 56 Ibid. O’Connor criticizes the film’s treatment of the history teacher, Mr. Brewster, who is “mocked” despite “seem[ing] kind and helpful to Tod. O’Connor also notes that “[e]ven Tod’s self- sacrificing parents must face the righteous scorn of youth: ‘You guys could use some sunshine yourselves,’ he tells them cutely, ‘you’re getting to look real old.’” 57 Shales, “Life and Love.” 83 system and died shortly after birth, they aren’t going to lose the baby this time because
“[t]hey know how to save these children now.” Mickey is nervous about making such
decisions for “another human being,” but John assures her that “God knows” that
“[t]here were never two people in this world more meant to be parents than you and me.” Unlike news media accounts of David and his parents, the very beginning of the story emphasizes the moral dilemma presented by their choice to give birth to another son in spite of the risks, and it immediately establishes their faith in the national technological progress narrative of this cultural moment. In spite of their optimism, Tod was born like their previous son, without an immune system, and Dr. Gunther tells them that he might have to remain in a sterilized environment for years until a cure is
found or until his immunities develop. While the movie begins with baby Tod being
housed in the hospital, he is eventually transported to his home in a Life Island.58 As the family pulls into the driveway, they are greeted by a mob of reporters, who try to question them as they struggle to reach their front door. After unsuccessful attempts to dissuade the reporters from taking pictures of his son, John screams desperately, “My son is not a freak!” While David and Ted were consistently hailed as “medical miracles” and their normality anxiously asserted within news accounts of their lives, Tod Lubitch is automatically constructed not as miracle but as freak. This tension, between Tod’s normality and his “freakdom” would be a staple of the story of his teenaged
58 The Life Island was the technological precursor to the laminar airflow room. 84 development, especially later in the story, when he attends school in a bright orange spacesuit.
The majority of the story, and that which will be the primary interest of this chapter, occurs twelve years after Tod’s initial voyage home. Two competing relationships, parental and romantic, are established early in the story to compete for his
loyalty and work in contrast to one another to establish his coming of age.59 As a
teenager, Tod eventually attends school, first via satellite connection, and next using a
bright orange spacesuit to protect him from the germs of fellow students. When Tod
falls in love with Gina Biggs (Glynnis O’Connor), the girl next door, he must decide
whether or not to remain in his bubble or to leave to pursue her in spite of the near
certainty of his death without a fully-developed immune system. Ultimately, Tod
decides to leave the bubble, kisses Gina, and rides off on a white horse with her.
Imbued with a visual rhetoric of liberation from the bubble, a linkage of
masculinity, exploration, and technological triumphalism was most often forged
through pervasive iconography of exploration—spacesuits and extraterrestrials—in
stories of the bubble. References to NASA and extraterrestrials are ubiquitous in The Boy
in the Plastic Bubble. Throughout the film, Tod is characterized as alien and alienated, through the film’s visual comparison of Tod and his entrapped germ-free pet mouse,
59 Prior to her role in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Glynnis O’Connor had a starring role in a film about syphilis called Someone I Touched (1975), in which she contracts the disease from a much older married man. The film was advertised with the following slogan: “The powerful story of four people whose care-free love led to a terrifying epidemic!” See Levine, Wallowing, 91-93. 85 Cagney, and its consistent use of space imagery in his characterization. The Habitrail
System of multicolored plastic tubes through which Cagney scurries and plays is visually
likened to Tod’s bubble—a veritable Human Habitrail! For example, in a scene that opens with quick paced jazz piano music, the camera focuses first on Cagney, running tirelessly in his little wheel. The camera then zooms out to reveal Tod, dancing alongside
the running mouse, with colored lights in the background that blink to the beat of the
music. While initially the scene seems to be celebrating Tod’s youth, like other later
famous sequences in Risky Business and Footloose that would feature rebellious, dancing teen boys, Tod’s dance is contained by its relationship to the mouse, spinning in its wheel. Just as the mouse continues moving forward without moving an inch, the visual
narrative of the film consistently reaffirms Tod’s entrapment and his narrative configuration as a “lab rat.”
Additionally, Tod’s mouse crawls through his Habitrail tube as Tod ducks through a tube-like passage to another section of his room to prepare a snack. A NASA
Skylab news report sounds in the background: “Earlier today, after the astronauts docked their command module with Skylab, they settled in and started their housekeeping chores; after a rest period of two hours, they had their first meal in
Skylab.” The scene ends focused on Tod as he eats, as the journalistic voice seems to narrate the likenesses of Tod’s routine to those of the astronauts in space. While the space imagery in the above examples serves to render strange Tod’s body and the
86 environment in which he lives, the repeated use of outer space imagery throughout the
movie also simultaneously positions the technology of the bubble within a narrative of
celebratory technological progress and promise and imperial conquest, as embodied in
the moon landings of the late sixties.
Representations of the bubble boy actively blur the rhetorical and visual
boundaries between science and science fiction. Throughout his life, David remained in
his plastic chamber; his only forays into the “outside world” began in 1977, through the
usage of a $50,000 child-sized spacesuit, donated by NASA less than ten years after the
first moon landing. Although the suit was publicized as a success, David made only a few
trips out of his bubble in the spacesuit, including trips to the zoo and to his suburban home. However, he never really liked the suit, and when he outgrew it, the suit was replaced but never again worn.60 In 1978, The New York Times featured photograph of
David in his spacesuit and helmet, which bear the NASA insignia. Attached by a thin
tube to a machine on wheels, David was depicted watering the lawn with a garden hose, conjuring an image of untroubled suburban bliss.61 Meanwhile, the picture’s caption
“Quest for a Normal Life” stood in stark contradistinction to the otherworldly
60 Whether or not the suit was a success is debatable—a debate elided by the press, who celebrated the suit’s use. David’s psychiatrist, Mary Murphy, describes David’s terror and refusal to enter the suit; she alleges that he screamed, “That’s the kind of place where germs live!” She alleges that while David wasn’t coerced to use the suit, he was pressured in spite of his obvious fear. However, David’s mother says that although he was “nervous” the first time he entered the suit, “for every entry into that suit, David thoroughly enjoyed it and was thrilled to be in the suit.” See McVicker, “Bursting the Bubble” and American Experience: The Boy in the Bubble. 61 United Press International, "Quest for Normal Life." Photograph. The New York Times. 31 March 1978, p. A14. 87 spaceboy. The caption, alongside the characterization of his bubble as “womblike” not only served to configure this image as one of rebirth but it visually united David, the miraculous “science fiction child come to life” with space exploration and adventurism— a hero’s “quest” for normalcy. NASA imagery, references to Star Trek, and actual astronauts make repeated appearances in the narratives about the bubble. Reporters often referenced Ted’s Star Trek fandom in pieces written about him, and his sister notes that astronauts came to visit him during his stay at NIH, a visit that was also dramatized in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
However, within a Cold War context of mistrust, this celebration of technology was far from absolute, a tension emblematized by the birth of Technology Assessment
(TA) in the late-1960s and 1970s and in cultural contestation about the role of militarized national projects as they coexisted with and fueled the Vietnam War. While the growth of technological assessment certainly revealed a cultural and political ambivalence about the proliferation of new technologies in the period, a celebration of technological innovation, mobilized as evidence of national progress and pride, also characterized the era of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. While this discourse about space exploration became triumphant with the moon landing in 1969, it began in dread of losing the Cold War to Russia. Following the 1957 launch of Sputnik,
Americans believed they risked technological and geopolitical inferiority to the Russians if the government did not do something to alter the course and speed of scientific
88 exploration and education in the United States. In a bid for competition with the
Russians, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which officially established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). Three years later in his 1961 State of the Union Address, President John F.
Kennedy made his famous directive to land man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. From its inception, NASA was thoroughly associated with national identity and pride, and its evidencing of technological progress was equated with national progress and national ideals.
The “one giant leap for mankind” was both part of and formative of a celebratory discourse of technological innovation and national pride, emblematized
most dominantly in space travel, which also proliferated in popular culture of the 1960s
and 1970s. This occurred most often in a genre of television that Lynn Spigel has dubbed
the “fantastic family sitcom,” a “hybrid genre” that was an admixture of the common
suburban sitcom and “New Frontier,” space-aged imagery, such as Lost in Space, My
Favorite Martian, and The Jetsons, that used their fantastic imagery to “question the
‘naturalness’ of [the] middle-class” American family.62 In doing so, the fantastic family
sitcom capitalized on already-existent tropes of domestic representation within the press
about the astronauts of the era, such as Life magazine’s biographical stories depicting their homes, wives, and life histories. A half-hour family sitcom originally broadcast on
89 ABC on Sunday nights, The Jetsons (1962-1988), featured a family living in a utopian
American future society, filled with robotic elaborate computerized devices, such a
robot-maid, Rosie, that celebrated the rise in consumer conveniences that characterized
many post-war suburban homes.63 “Populuxe” buildings, a term that described the space- age architecture, characterized both the shows and the cultural landscape of through the mid-1960s. In presenting families in futuristic landscapes, fantastic family sitcoms participated in constructing a discourse of celebratory American technological innovation positioned squarely within a national frame.
Amidst a spate of cultural productions that connected American success with scientific progress, this spirit of technological innovation and benevolent imperialism
was epitomized most memorably in the cult hit Star Trek (1966-1969). Star Trek was
situated amid an eruption of fantastic family sitcoms and other space-themed television,
including Lost in Space (1965-1968), My Favorite Martian (1963-1966), The Jetsons (1962-
1968), and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). In her book NASA/Trek, an analysis and celebration of American’s enthrallment with space and its exploration, film historian
Constance Penley argues that NASA remains “a repository for utopian [cultural] meanings” in America in part due to a “symbolic merging of the organization with the
62 Lynn Spigel, “From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com,” in Close Encounter: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, eds. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, 205-236 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 214. 63 The show had a long run and immense popularity, as George Jetson was later ranked #4 in the August 2004 issue of TV Guide’s “25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends.” 90 fictional Star Trek.”64 Penley notes that NASA began a self-conscious “Star Trek
makeover in the mid-seventies” when the agency yielded to then-President Gerald Ford’s
demand that the name of its first shuttle, Constitution, be changed to Enterprise, a change
prompted by a massive Star Trek fan letter-writing campaign.65 Forged by intersections between sex and science as they are contested and constructed in a pop cultural frame,
Penley argues that “NASA/Trek,” a discursive formation that blurs the boundaries between NASA and Star Trek, is constructed by “popular science” discourse. As the
“collectively elaborated story that weaves together science and science fiction,” popular science merges the efforts of scientists and science fiction fans to “attract interest and support for advancing science and technology” through the mutual construction of a
“personalized, utopian reflection on men and women in space.”66
The partnership between Star Trek and the nation’s space program underscored
NASA’s participation in constructing a triumphant national discourse of exploration
64 The space program was very active in the 1970s, although the moon landing is one of its major peaks in popularity and public attention. During the Nixon Adminstration, Apollo 11, the first manned- mission to the moon, launched on July 16, 1969, carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. The late 1970s witnessed the highly-publicized Voyager launches of unmanned scientific probes, Voyager I and Voyager II, which generated striking, never-before-seen close up color photography of the major planets and enjoyed significant public limelight. The Voyager program also equipped the spaceships with a famed “Voyager Gold Record,” which contained pictures and other data about life on Earth and an assortment of music from different cultures, to communicate with any extraterrestrials that might discover the probes. 65 Moreover, many of the show’s cast members witnessed the unveiling of an experimental model of Enterprise, used only practice takeoff and landing, as it was displayed at Edwards Air Force Base to the rousing Star Trek theme song. Penley also notes that NASA also attempted to attract women and minorities into the astronaut corps by hiring actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the series, to assist in recruitment efforts, while Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, began each of her radio communications with Lt. Uhura's signature line "Hailing frequencies open.” See Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997), 19-20. 66 Penley, NASA/Trek, 9-10. 91 and technological progress, a narrative that was continually evident in the visual and
rhetorical representational logic of the bubble boy. Moreover, within The Boy in the
Plastic Bubble, when the spacesuit and NASA iconography became part of a teen coming- of-age narrative, imagery of space exploration was actively linked to sexual exploration and national independence. However, for Penley, popular science is not only useful in producing utopian imaginings of the future through a celebration of technology, but also in critiquing the ethos of unequivocal celebration of a scientific mantra “to boldly go where no man has gone before” by encouraging science to assess its impact on the
“inner space” of the nation and its people. Just as Penley sees this partnership occurring in Star Trek “slash fiction,” an evaluation of “inner space” was forged through the discursive linkage of space exploration and sexual exploration in The Boy in the Plastic
Bubble.
Thus, there were two progressive discourses at work within the emerging commercial programming for and about teenagers within the larger cultural context in this moment. The first is a discourse of technological progress that imagined national identity and national pride being emblematized within evolving technologies. While the mobilization of NASA and other patriotic emblems within the content of television for and about teenagers was part of this discourse, it was also part of a discourse of healthy television viewership that disciplines teen TV viewing relationships. The second was a coming-of-age discourse of progress toward “healthy” adulthood, a health emblematized
92 by able-bodiedness and heterosexuality. This discourse was mobilized in television for
teenagers and cast development into adulthood as disciplining sexuality and “overcoming disability.” This narrative of overcoming repression, likened to disability, was indispensable to imagining sexual liberation for adolescents in this period. These two progressive discourses came together, united as a form of popular science, to imagine teenagers developing into a liberated national citizenship that retained normative able- bodiedness, heterosexuality, and national pride while disciplining queer/crip alternative
formulations of sex and embodiment.
The preservation of the celebratory discourse of medical and technological
progress cannot always successfully align itself with the discourse of progress to
manhood. Both the press and the film complicate this alignment when they present
autonomy, the ability to exert control over one’s life and environment, as the
measurement for adulthood. While the press and the film created images of normality
and contentment for the lives of the “boys” in bubbles, stories unite around the medical
ethics question posed by one Baylor University medical professor to a New York Times reporter in one of the earliest articles written about David Vetter: “‘When do you decide you’re not going to grow up in a plastic package?’”67 This is not only a question of
medical ethics, but a question of development into adulthood. In other words, when
does a bubble boy become a man? This question reveals the inextricable linkages
67 “Germ-Free ‘Home’.” 93 between fully-realized manhood and the able-bodied, heterosexual requirements of
“liberation.” The complicated bioethical answers to this question were generally systematically elided in the press and the film. However, the film and the press all participate in constructing a discourse of autonomy, bravery, and manhood for the patients by transitioning them from the passive identity of “experiment” to the active identity of “explorer,” an identity that is positioned explicitly within a national frame through the constant visibility of NASA iconography.
Although The Boy in the Plastic Bubble hybridized details from the public (and not-so-public) lives of David and Ted, their stories also differed markedly from the movie version in their standards for what constituted manhood. In the press accounts of
David and Ted, their sacrifice for scientific knowledge, their role as valuable experiments, and their masculine stoicism in the face of death were valorized. Thus, their submission to medical authority and their bravery in the face of death evidenced their maturity. However while submission to medical knowledge-gathering was evidence of the emotional maturity of approaching manhood for David Vetter and Ted DeVita,
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble instead configured the resistance to medical authority and parental protectionism as emblematizing maturity for Tod Lubitch. Finally, the film’s most notable difference was that Tod Lubitch’s resistance to medical authority, which culminated in his escape from the bubble, also concluded in a heterosexual partnership with Gina. Thus, in its participation in the discourse of coming-of-age, The Boy in the
94 Plastic Bubble asserted the partnership of heterosexuality and physical ability as the
markers of masculinity and citizenship. Thus, liberation—in the form of fully-realized heterosexuality—becomes the mark of adulthood, especially because it might culminate
in death.
Journalists and David’s and Ted’s doctors commended both boys for their
valuable contributions to science and national progress, and David’s death especially was
constructed as an act of heroic bravery, liberation, and self-actualization. From the
beginning of David’s life, news articles noted his value to medicine amid the pathos of
his tragic isolation. Reporters asserted with disturbing matter-of-factness that “…the 3-
year old [was] a valuable research tool.”68 The NIH officials celebrated Ted’s “ma[king] medical history” as the longest-surviving patient with aplastic anemia and mistakenly
reported that he spent the most time in a germ-free environment.69 Here, Ted DeVita’s
value lay in making medical history and furthermore, in inspiring his doctors. His
doctor commented on Ted’s “‘remarkable’” ability to “‘adapt so well to that
environment,’” and concluded, “‘To me, he’s an inspiration.’”70 Rather than focusing on
his resistiveness—a quality noted repeatedly in his sister’s memoirs—news media
highlighted Ted’s docile adaptation to the medical management of his environment in
spite of his recalcitrant moments. Additionally, as the boys become heroes in their
68 Auerbach, “Three-Year-Old Boy’s Life.” 69 David Vetter spent nearly 12 years in his bubble, while Ted only spent 8 ½. See Mansfield, “8 Years.” 70 Ibid. 95 martyrdom, the doctors, rather than constructed as ethically ambiguous, were also
figured heroically in their efforts preserve life. When they questioned whether or not
such effort was “worthwhile,” journalists inevitably concluded that the hope for a cure
always “had a tangible basis,” and consistently unable to resist the lure of a terrible pun,
they concluded “[t]he bubble of hope burst, but was worth its making.”71
David’s and Ted’s bravery in the face of death was noted in the articles, and
especially in the case of David, the press constructed his “choice” to leave the bubble as a
“noble” entrance into manhood. Dr. Pizzo described Ted’s death as “sudden” and said
Ted “continued to fight till the end” even though he “knew he was dying.”72 Likewise, as
his condition worsened and culminated in his eventual death, doctors applauded David for his stoicism throughout his final days. “In a voice choked with emotion,” Shearer remarked fondly that David “winked” at him before he slipped into a coma.73 In contrast
to Murphy’s account of visible depression and aggressive outbursts, Shearer said that
David “‘…tended to hide his feelings’” and that “‘[w]hatever his situation was in the last
few days, he made it easy for the doctors.’”74 The boys’ stoicism and acceptance of death
became configured as their entre into manhood as a form of manly heroism embodied in
martyrdom for national scientific progress and stoicism in the face of death.
71 “The Boy in the Bubble.” The New York Times. February 26, 1984, E16. 72 Mansfield, “8 Years.” 73 Paul Taylor, “David’s Death Unusual As His Life.” The Washington Post. February 24, 1984. 74 Wayne King, “Signs Hopeful,” 12. 96 One article about David Vetter, written upon his death, reflected explicitly on
the issue of burgeoning manhood. In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, author
William McPherson wrote of David that “[o]n the scale of great events” David’s “isolated
death…was not momentous” but he asked why his death, an isolated event and a small
one in the annals of history, “should touch us so?”75 After positioning David’s death on a global scale, McPherson answered his initial rhetorical question: “Less for the pity,
perhaps, than for its solitary grandeur.” This was a disparate image of David Vetter than
that which was constructed by the press throughout his life. Rather than constructing
the familiar mother-son pathos to invoke pity, McPherson mythologized David, saying
that “[Franz] Kafka might have done…justice” to David’s story of isolation, perhaps
referring to his famous Metamorphosis, in which a man transforms into a cockroach
while his family banishes him to his room. He characterizes David’s “isolation” as
“pitiable” but argues that “it goes beyond pity,” rather “it was in fact awesome and
terrible—terrible in the classic Aristotelian sense—as was his choice, and it is his choice
[to leave the bubble and undergo a bone marrow transplant] that arouses our pity, our
terror and the leaves us cleansed and somehow a little more noble than we were.” Again,
just as Ted’s value was in his inspiration to able-bodied doctors, David’s importance lay
in his cathartic value to “us,” the healthy onlookers. McPherson noted that although
“we” usually associate “[n]either greatness nor nobility” with a 12-year old boy, David’s
75 William McPherson, “David’s Choice.” The Washington Post, February 28, 1984. 97 “choice” to “…craw[l] out of his cell into a world fraught with tremendous dangers and
almost certain quick death, David chose the world—the world with its filth and glory—
over a long, slow death alone in his antiseptic solitary cell.” In venturing out of his
bubble and “choosing the world,” McPherson wrote triumphantly and bittersweetly
that David “chose to be a man” and in so doing “the boy who could not himself be
touched, profoundly touched us all.” McPherson transformed David Vetter’s treatment
into a quest for manhood, emblematized by his “choosing” the “almost certain death” of
a world filled with “filth and glory” over solitude and sterility.
The discourses of disability present in 1970s culture for teens revealed that
“popular science” was never truly a fully democratic civic engagement with science,
popular culture, or the nation, just as “exploration” and “experimentation” were never
neutral or without cost. Although NASA was certainly motivated by Cold War
concerns about military supremacy over Russia, space exploration was never viewed as a
participant in war or social violence, although its ascension coexisted with the military
project of Vietnam. Likewise, disabled bubble boys also traveled within the same
cultural context as returning, disabled Vietnam veterans. The boys’ choice of noble self-
sacrifice in service of the nation—a sacrifice which became coded as their growth into adult men—resonated with imagery of “sacrifices” to the nation made by young, dead or disabled veterans. As cultural theorist Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain, war ultimately exists to injure the bodies and minds of the enemy, and thus, to create
98 victims.76 The image of young men—or boys—sacrificing their bodies in service to the nation was a pervasive one in American culture during and after Vietnam, and perhaps the narrative recoding of David and Ted as manly explorers, rather than soldiers, displaced or transmuted the violence of experimentation on their bodies into an image of
manly self-sacrifice, akin to that of the disabled or dead veteran—rather than victims of
military or scientific violation, the “boys” became men, self-actualized as national
citizens through their martyrdom.
The film’s ruminates on self-actualization and manhood by depicting Tod’s
“choice” to “grow up” or remain a boy based on his relationship with the outside world,
a question that is posed early The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, when Tod is confronted by
his doctor after Tod spies on his love interest with binoculars. First, the movie
establishes Tod’s detachment from the world through his voyeurism, which is highlighted throughout the movie. Firmly established in the first shot, the teenaged Tod is introduced in the movie as he is looking down at his teen neighbors from his window.
Two boys and a girl are sneaking a cigarette, stealing paranoid backward glances to ensure they are beyond parental supervision. As they smoke, they talk about Tod and how “weird” it must be for Gina to live next door to him. She says it isn’t weird and that she really only saw him once a year for birthdays, but she reflects on his lack of friends his own age, because the “just old people,” like his doctor, the occasional
76 David A. Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3-4. See also Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: 99 minister, and friends of his parents, visit Tod. Gina says that Tod is weird, partially
because every time she looks up at his window, he’s already looking down at her; she
concludes, “Like I’m surprised he’s not looking at us right now.” Gina’s hunch is proven
correct as the camera reveals the onlooking Tod, donning a checkered cap topped with a
pom-pom and peering through a pair of binoculars at the trio on the docks outside his
bedroom window. Not only does establish his isolation from the rest the world, but also
it aligns Tod with the supervising eyes of “old people.” Throughout the movie, he is
often seen peering through windows, or when he attends classes at the high school via
closed-circuit television, he scans the camera around the room, pausing to zoom in on
Gina. Tod’s voyeuristic viewing relationship with his peers accentuates his detachment
from the real, outside world.
After this visual introduction to the teenaged Tod, the challenge to “grow up”
and be a man is presented first by Ernie Gunther, Tod’s doctor. Through its proximity
to the visual linkage of a traditional image, a veritable “peeping Tod,” the invitation to
“grow up” is inevitably linked to his pursuit of Gina. Tod becomes agitated by news of
yet another treatment that “might” enable him to leave his bubble. He cloaks his
agitation in indifference, because he is afraid to indulge in the hope of leaving the bubble, lest these dreams end up dashed by the treatment’s failure. Perturbed by Tod’s indifference to his own treatment, Ernie retorts that Tod has “really got it
Oxford University Press, 1987). 100 made…because [he] got the best excuse ever devised by anybody to avoid growing up.”
Tod argues that he is growing up, to which Ernie replies, “Yes. Sometimes you’re like an
old man. And other times you’re like a newborn baby” and chastises Tod for speaking
through the loud intercom when he doesn’t need to, to give himself “a feeling of power”
and “getting back at” those on the outside. In saying that Tod is both an “old man” and a
“newborn baby,” Ernie alleges that Tod is simultaneously jaded and naive, a boy
without experience and a man who already knows it all. However this categorization,
either a newborn baby or an old man, also highlights Tod’s asexuality, in comparison
with his voyeuristic relationship with Gina established in the previous scene. Although
Ernie says that Tod should fight to live because there “could be a cure anytime,” it
becomes clear that Tod becomes a man by defying Ernie’s and his parents wishes for his
safety, through his pursuing a romantic and physically intimate relationship with Gina
and by leaving his bubble-haven.
The preservation of the celebratory discourse of medical and technological
progress attempted to align itself with the discourse of progress to manhood but was not
always successful. However, both the press and the film complicate this alignment when
they present autonomy, the ability to exert control over one’s life and environment, as
the measurement for adulthood, a discourse that reveals the interconnectedness of adulthood, citizenship, ability, and heteronormativity. While the press and the film created images of normality and contentment for the lives of the “boys” in bubbles,
101 stories united around the question (or the impossibility) of “growing up” in a “plastic
package.” This was not only a question of medical ethics, but a question of development
into adulthood. In other words, when did a bubble boy become a man? Although competing stories about David and Ted’s happiness and the ethical dilemmas presented
by their medical treatment emerged after their deaths, these questions were generally elided by The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.77 All of the narratives emphasized manliness
through masculine displays of stoicism in the face of death and in feats of physical
strength. The film and the press all participated in constructing images of autonomy,
bravery, and manhood for “patients” by transitioning them from the passive identity of
“experiment” to the active identity of “explorer.” However, in the film version, this
“exploration” became not only invested in both showcasing and undermining national
technologies of progress but also made manifest in a heteronormative, ableist coming-of-
age into adulthood, achieved when Tod leaves the bubble to kiss his girlfriend. After all,
Tod’s plans for his spacesuit are a far cry from watering the lawn.
Thus, two potential ways of achieving manhood are established within the
narrative of the bubble boy. While reproductive futurity is a cornerstone of (the
heteronormativity of) politics itself as queer theorist Lee Edelman argues, it is also invested in able-bodiedness, embodied in the image of a healthy child as the promise and
77 I have already mentioned the memoir written by Ted DeVita’s sister that detailed Ted’s depression in The Room. David’s depression is also documented in the PBS documentary about his life. Accounts of David Vetter’s depression have also emerged from nurses and teachers that worked with David. These accounts are debated by his mother, Carol Ann Demaret. See McVicker, “Bursting the Bubble.” 102 reward of heterosexual partnerships.78 Thus, one way of a bubble boy’s achieving
manhood lay in bravely martyring himself to medical technology to shore up a national
investment in technological triumphalism and to ensure reproductive futurity.79 This is
the narrative presented by newspaper accounts of David’s and Ted’s death. The movie
attempted to resolve the bioethical dilemma of the bubble “man,” or in effect, to present
a Jamesonian “symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation” by imagining
another more individualistic and liberatory way of achieving manhood and self-
reliance.80 This alternative was sexual liberation—or manly exploration at any cost.
Although Ted was seventeen upon his death and had a girlfriend, the issue of
sexuality was conspicuously absent in news accounts of David Vetter and Ted DeVita.
However, the issue of sexuality was the central focus of the movie, and individual sexual
and national space exploration became linked in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, so that the
world’s “filth and glory” became embodied in sex.81 In contrast to the newspaper
accounts of the martyrdom-for-science of David Vetter and Ted DeVita, which is
configured as their entre into manhood, the movie imagines Tod Lubitch’s sexuality
within the bubble, in that he has a first kiss and a make-out session within his Life Island
78 Although it does not address the category of disability, see Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (Durham: Duke UP, 2004). 79 See also Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks, Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 80 Frederic Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 104. 81 According to Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, Ted’s girlfriend was the niece of a patient undergoing treatment for cancer in 13-East, the same ward as Ted. 103 and his spacesuit. Yet the movie ultimately disciplines this possibility of crip sexuality, in
that it is only in leaving the bubble, in spite of his probable death, that he can fully claim
adulthood, figured as the partnership of heterosexuality and ability. In doing so, I argue
the movie makes visible a crisis in sexual liberation which is also endemic to the regime
of compulsory heterosexuality. Just as disability studies scholar Patrick White suggests
that heterosexuality’s contingency rather than its essentialism is revealed by sex
education campaigns for the blind’s reliance on the visible, I argue that The Boy in the
Plastic Bubble reveals an anxiety about Tod’s sexuality because his inability to touch or
to be touched presents a crisis to heteronormativity. In the film, Tod “liberates” himself
into manhood by embracing a heterosexual sexuality that is misrecognized as “natural”
but that is actually the result of struggle and sacrifice.82 This tension between a sexuality
that is “natural” and one that is compulsorily and artificially produced is productive in
critiquing liberation’s investment in overcoming. The news media and the movie
recoded the boys’ submission to experimentation into a national masculine heroism and
exploration. And in this context, bubble boys became men through the struggle of
exploring the “filth and glory” of the world and overcoming their own frailty, rather than by passively embodying a masculinity that was natural and prediscursive. However, until he leaves the bubble, Tod is, in a sense, queer, because he is unable to engage in the regime of touch on which compulsory heterosexuality, and by proxy, sexual liberation
82 On the relationship of masculinity to struggle, see also Michael Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (New York: Beacon Press, 1995). 104 relies. Tod’s “liberation” occurs when he meets the challenge of “growing up,” in this
case, when he ceases being “insufficiently heterosexual” by leaving the bubble to touch
Gina.
The romantic and sexual conflict of the film is initially established in Tod’s first
trip outside his bubble to attend a Fourth of July party on the beach, to which Tod has
been invited by Gina herself. His mother and father wheel him out on the beach in his
square, portable bubble, as Tod tries to act naturally and conceal his embarrassment. As
night falls on the beach, two of Gina’s friends, Tom and Bruce, dare her to hold Tod’s
hand through the fireworks and promise her two dollars as a reward. Taking her gloved-
hand in his, Tod smiles and giggles through the fireworks display. As soon as the
fireworks are over, Gina runs away from the bubble to collect her winnings from Tom
and Bruce. Not in on the joke, Tod playfully yells after Gina, “Gina, what did you run away for? Come back! Talk to me!” Amid Tom’s and Bruce’s boisterous laughter, Gina also laughs that Tod didn’t know it was a dare and asks, “You didn’t think I was serious, did you?” Tod’s devastation and embarrassment becomes clear as he stares helplessly out of the bubble. A dramatic piano music score swells to accentuate his betrayal, as Tod angrily beats his bubble’s walls, screams ““I hate it! I hate it!” and barks at his parents to
“just take [him] to the hospital.” That Tod transitions so abruptly from attending a party on the beach to desiring to go back to hospital indicates a partnership between his romantic and sexual failure with Gina and his disability, emblematized by his stay in the
105 hospital. Ostensibly, nothing is “wrong” with Tod that would necessitate a visit to the hospital, but it provides a convenient place to hide after his spurned advances. Moreover, while a failed date is generally disappointing, the bubble’s interference with his courtship of Gina combined with how violently he reacts to her rebuttal makes it traumatic, in that this failure to achieve heterosexuality might be a permanent condition. Although we are meant to feel sympathy for Tod in this scene, having been so cruelly used by
Gina, this tantrum, like those referenced in articles about David and Ted, is meant also to signify his immaturity. Finally, the fact that Tod’s failure with Gina occurs on the
Fourth of July underscores the movie’s perception of his entrapment in his bubble, in that his dependence on his parents is highlighted on “Independence” Day rather than any fireworks between him and Gina. The scene evokes pity for Tod, as he is emasculated through his individual dependence during a celebration of national independence. Thus, the movie actively links Tod’s heterosexuality with the national independence afforded by citizenship. Furthermore, it establishes a link between ablebodiedness, which means autonomy and choice, with sexual liberation and citizenship, in that Tod’s disability necessitates the parental protectiveness that will always interfere with his progress toward manhood.
Through his proximity to and isolation from participating in national iconography, his ability to achieve full citizenship without heterosexual fulfillment is called into question, and the rest of the movie focuses on Tod’s realization of manhood
106 as an able, heterosexually-viable man. Tod’s naïveté on the beach is infantile citizenship incarnate; positioned safely within his Life Island, Tod is practically in an incubator as he witnesses the Fourth of July. However, during the time spent in his laminar airflow room at the hospital after Tod’s fateful, hand-holding encounter, he comes to sexual awareness and simutaneously positioned within a heroic narrative of space exploration, through two scenes: the first, a discussion of sex with a fellow patient, Roy; and the second, a visit from astronaut and man-on-the-moon, Edward Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin.
Upon his entrance into the “new Laminar Airflow Center,” Ernie notifies Tod that he will have a roommate, Roy, whose immune system has been compromised by chemotherapy. After an initially tense meeting in which Tod attempts to ignore Roy, the two strike up a friendship in a scene that depicts them pedaling on exercise bikes and discussing all of the sexual exploits they are missing in the bubble. Roy asks the question that Gina often asks throughout the film: “When are you getting out?” Tod replies that he “may never get out of this damn thing,” although “they” tell him that his
“immunities are building up.” Roy replies with dismay that he does not “know if [he]’d keep going on” if he never had any definitive exit date from the bubble. Then, the conversation turns toward sex, as Roy relates his frustration that when they discovered his tumor he was “too young for girls” and now that he’s “old enough” he “can’t do anything about it” and that now, banging his hands on the bike’s handles in frustration, he just gets “so” frustrated, unable to “stand” the thoughts of “all of [his] friends out
107 there, going to drive-ins and making out, and gettin’ all that action.” As a cure to this
lack of “action,” Roy vows resolutely, “You know, the first thing I’m gonna do when I
get out of here is get me…get myself a hooker!” A surprised Tod asks whether or not he
would fear the germs, which prompts Roy to laughingly reply, “Germs? I want the
germs! I want to be dirty! Really dirty, you know?! I wanna grow my hair real long, and
have a beard and a mustache, and I wanna make it with everything that walks.” This
exchange definitely reveals the movie as a pre-AIDS teen coming-of-age story, in that this
type of “filth and glory” would be configured as dangerous in a later period in television
history. However, in the meantime, the boys talk about masturbation, prompted by
Tod’s tentative question, “Do you ever? Um…do you ever?…you know…” to which a
knowing Roy replies, “All the time.” As two corners of what Eve Sedgwick calls a
“homosocial triangle,” Tod and Roy revel in their heterosexuality, emblematized by
their bawdy discussion of masturbation and Roy’s plans to get a hooker and “get some
germs.” Here, the “germs” of sex become a rite of passage into adulthood for both boys,
rather than a source of danger, and now the bubble that seemed to be benevolently protecting Tod from outside germs is now shielding him from sex, and thus, as the movie will establish, from truly “growing up.”
The next scene, a visit from special guest star and famous astronaut Edwin
“Buzz” Aldrin, links space exploration, sexual exploration, heroic masculinity and national citizenship. Aldrin’s televised visit with Tod in his hospital room is narratively
108 linked to Gina, who is shown making out with her boyfriend during the broadcast.
Buzz Aldrin compares his own experiences in quarantine after his moon landings to
Tod’s life in the bubble, a stay which he codes as heroic, since it holds “the record for the longest time in a command module.” Aldrin presents him with an autographed picture of his famed lunar landing with the dedication: “To Tod, Champion Spaceman on Earth.” Upon the program’s conclusion, Tom attempts to resume making out with
Gina, but when she does not respond to his advances, he says jealously that he thinks she’s “turning on” to Tod, “the freak.” The rest of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is devoted to Tod’s attempts to alter their relationship from one of pity and asexual friendship to one of romantic and sexual love forged through sexual and spatial exploration, an exploration that is couched within the national triumphalism connoted by space iconography.
When Tod experiences his first kiss with Gina, she invites him to kiss her through the thin layer of plastic of his Life Island wall, but this kiss prompts him to draft plans for a spacesuit to enable him to go to school and pursue her. Attending classes in his spacesuit, Tod embarks on his first-ever bout of teenaged delinquency when he ditches class to accompany Gina and her friends to the middle of the football field to smoke marijuana. Tod, of course, cannot smoke in the suit, but his Gina and her friends begin laughing at his suit. To redirect their laughter, he jokes that he is an alien from
Themopolis, and Themopolians are “ten times stronger than earthlings.” Vying for
109 Gina’s affections, Tod challenges Tom to a clap pushup contest, betting him ten dollars
that he is the strongest. Tom accepts, and Tod emerges victorious, hands raised above his
head. However, the jubilation soon turns to distress, as Tod begins running back toward
his classroom bubble with the help of his friends, having run out of oxygen in his
spacesuit. By competing for Gina’s affections, Tod demonstrates his heterosexual
viability by establishing his masculine potency via his super-able-bodiedness and his
normality by rebelling against school authority.
The rest of the film shows Tod’s attempt to negotiate his status as simultaneously
a “cripple” and a heterosexual man and to try to imagine the possibility of inhabiting both identities at the same time. When Gina comes over to reprimand Tod for “nearly
killing [him]self trying to show off for [her] on the football field,” Tod expresses his
wish that she not be mad at him, because he was just showing off so that she would see
that he was “not a cripple” but “a man,” linking disability with childhood and ability
with manhood:
Tod: Gina, I was just doing [pushups] so you’d see. Gina: See what? That you’re just as dumb as all the rest of them? Flexing your muscles? Tod: No. That you’d see that I’m not a cripple. And that there’s nothing wrong with me except that I can’t get out of here until they tell me it’s okay. Oh, Gina, I’m so sick of it. I’m so sick of feeling like a hospital case. Like some weirdo kid who can’t even breathe normal air because he might get sick and die. I just wanna be like a man. Someone that you could care about, and not feel sorry for. Gina: Tod. Tod, I don’t know what you’re doing to me. And I don’t know if I
110 like it at all. I don’t know anything anymore. Look, we were just supposed to be friends. I mean, that’s all that was supposed to happen, right? I mean, can’t we just leave it like that?
Tod’s assertion of manhood continues throughout the film, associating his virile
heterosexuality with his overcoming of his disability. For a moment, the film imagines
that one can be a “cripple” and a “man.” His spacesuit and Life Island function as a
veritable full-body condom as he begins to have a sexual relationship with Gina. He goes
on his first date, holding hands, running with Gina, and flying a kite on the beach.
Although this is configured as a liberating experience for Tod, accentuated by the
exultant, horn-driven Mark Snow score, the scene of unfettered new love is punctuated
(or punctured?) by Tod’s father’s yelling to Tod that his has “five minutes!” left on his air tank, revealing that Tod’s date is not unsupervised. However, at the end of the date on the ride back in the van, Tod and Gina make out on the floor of the van, with Gina sensuously kissing Tod’s plastic space mask as he rubs her back ravenously with his
orange-gloved hands. As opposed to the perpetually unfulfilled “quest for normal”
embodied by David’s watering the lawn, this steamy spacesuit scene encourages Tod’s
crip-queer sexuality, in that Gina’s sexual and romantic attraction to Tod, as a disabled
man, is already evident in this scene. However, his queer-crip sexuality is also managed through the film’s doctrine that “protected sex” will always be insufficient—a remarkable take on the issue of teenaged sexuality, given the contestation over sex education and sex on television that was contemporaneous with the movie’s airing.
111 Eventually Tod confronts his doctor about what would happen if he left the bubble, a moment that shapes his final decision to leave the bubble and pursue Gina. At this moment, the technology that has been keeping Tod alive and protected throughout the film and enabling his exploration of the outside world, fails. Ernie never offers conclusive evidence that he will survive an exit from the bubble. In spite of the doctor’s advice, Tod chooses to leave the bubble early in the morning. After pausing in the doorway of his sleeping parents, Tod continues outside, searching for Gina, further solidifying that his relationship with his parents is now secondary to his adult relationship with Gina.
In contrast to the sterile and mechanized imagery that characterizes the bubble, when Tod exits his house for the first time, he, and heterosexuality more generally, are linked visually with nature, as he touches the trees, feels the breeze on his face, and inhales a breath of fresh air. Donning a stark white shirt, symbolizing his rebirth, he is surrounded by greenery, with Gina and her white horse at the center of the sylvan suburban scene. At first she is startled, but after touching her face and telling her sensually that her skin is “so much softer than he ever imagined,” he kisses her on the lips for the first time. Linking his demonstration of heterosexuality and ablebodiedness to nature in a celebration of normality and manhood achieved, Tod and Gina ride off together on a white horse, a symbol traditionally associated with female rescue.
However, the final line forecloses the possibility of reading Tod as a feminized figure,
112 because when Gina asks where they should go, Tod replies exuberantly, “To
Themopolis!” his fictional home planet in which he would be stronger and more healthy than any human man.
The ending is ambiguous at best. The movie does not foreclose either reading— that Tod had developed sufficient immunities and would live long and prosper in his love with Gina, or that he chose a brief voyage to the outside, even if he would pay for it with his life. While the ending is uncertain, the choice of song “What Would They Say?” to play over Tod’s rescue, reconfigures it as an escape from parental and societal clutches in its moaning refrain, “What would they say if we up and ran away?...Would they carry on and on when they realized we were gone…Leave us alone, we’d make it just fine.”
Tod’s growth into manhood is emblematized by his running away from the safety of his bubble and his parents, and the song answers its own self-doubt about defying parental and societal expectations with the imperative: “Leave us alone. We’d make it just fine.”
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble reimagines and reinvents the story of a boy with immune-deficiency from being the story of a boy and his parents to a coming-of-age story of emerging and achieved teen heterosexuality. As Tod passes his sleeping parents, the inability to receive a “mother’s kiss” that characterized David Vetter’s representation becomes secondary. Instead, the central concern of the story is Tod’s sexual desire, physical intimacy with a girlfriend he cannot get from within the walls of his bubble.
The film does allow him to share some physical intimacy with Gina, but ultimately
113 considers “protected” sex to be insufficient in achieving a normative heterosexual
manhood predicated on touch. Ultimately, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble simultaneously
advocates against keeping teen boys locked up from the “germs” of sex—because then
they might not develop into proper heterosexual “men”—but also disciplines the
possibility of crip sexuality in that the likelihood that Tod will survive his journey seems
uncertain.
In an era that witnessed rampant debates over the sexuality of children and teens,
sexual liberation in the 1970s existed in a paradoxical space. On the one hand, the sexual
awareness that was the culmination of “liberation” was perceived as natural and
prediscursive—or as Adrienne Rich argued, “compulsory.”83 On the other hand,
heterosexuality, as implicated in a coming-of-age narrative, was the hard-won achievement of a long struggle to overcome sexual repression. To expand on Michel
Foucault’s famous “repression hypothesis,” the cultural idea of repression played an
important role in imagining teen sexual education and sexual awareness as a liberatory
remedy to an imagined repressive past. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble offered a momentary vision of the limits of sexual liberation while questioning the “naturalness” and autonomy offered by citizenship in the nation. Through the linkage of space exploration and sexual discovery, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble positions these debates about teenaged sexual exploration within a triumphal narrative of technological progress. Rather than
83 See Adrienne Rich. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994). 114 being martyred to science like David Vetter and Ted DeVita, Tod’s resistance to medical authority in pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfillment with Gina is configured as the problematically heroic choice that makes him not a “cripple” but a man and constructs the two as mutually-exclusive categories. However, in order to truly come of age, the narrative forces Tod to choose heterosexual fulfillment even though it might mean death. The film could not imagine a fully-heterosexual teen boy without liberating him into the world of able-bodied touch, and thus examining the linkage of liberation to a legacy of disabled overcoming incites a critical contemplation of liberation’s essentialized place in compulsory heterosexuality.
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble existed at the convergence of a 1970s rise in sex- themed programming and disease-of-the-week narratives. While scholars have remarked upon the emergence of each type, they have not acknowledged their historic and thematic convergences outside of sexually-transmitted disease stories, especially AIDS, many of which occurred much later in the history of made-for-TV movies than The Boy in the Plastic Bubble or ABC’s After School Specials. Issue-based television specifically for teens was emerging for the first time in this period, borrowing certain tropes from mental hygiene films of the 1950s and converting them into entertainment that regulated and constructed images of normalcy and deviance but situated it within an entertaining, sexually-titillating dramatic frame. In an era when teenaged television viewers were being imagined as distinct from child viewers, the “bubble” participated in a legacy of
115 protective television and protected sex, in addition to its thematic emphasis of
disability.84 Moreover, although not acknowledged to be so, made-for-TV movies like
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and ABC’s After School Specials form part of what Todd
Gitlin calls TV’s “turn toward relevance” epitomized by Norman Lear comedies.
However, rather than social consciousness being achieved by pointed satire within thematic content, as in Lear’s programs, teen shows of the era connected national citizenship with heterosexuality and disability in its dramatic narrative structure—a structure that would become regularized and forever impact teen programming when it was routinized by the After School Specials. Thus, the turn toward relevance’s brand of edutainment rose alongside and within the ascension of teen dramatic television, and both primetime and daytime movies would continue to imagine overcoming disability as being part and parcel of the normative development of heterosexuality for teenagers in the era.
84 David Vetter’s mother spearheaded protests along with other parents of children with SCID upon Disney’s release of Bubble Boy (2001). The movie spoofs The Boy in the Plastic Bubble by following a similar narrative trajectory, but it’s a comedy in which the teen protagonist falls in love with a girl, finds out she’s going to marry an unfaithful man, and ends up running across the country in a bubble suit that he constructs himself. At the end of the movie, he removes the suit to kiss the girl, and we find out that his immune system has been fully-functional the whole time. His extremely religious mother kept him in the bubble to keep him away from “sluts” like the girl with whom he falls in love. The movie enraged parents of children with SCID because of its lampooning of the disease; by contrast, there was no visible public outcry over the Travolta film, perhaps because it was a drama. See David Cho, “Parents Pan ‘Bubble Boy’ Film; Disney Movie Makes Light of Illness, Say Advocates for Afflicted Children,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2001. 116
Chapter 2: After School Special Education: The Emergence of Rehabilitative Teen TV
“I got to thinkin’ about what you were sayin’ about handicaps. Well, I was thinkin’ I don’t have to be a good talker to be able to skate.” --Tucker ‘Tuck’ Faraday (Stewart Peterson) ABC’s After School Specials (1975)
The portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt looms large over educational settings featured in ABC’s After School Specials (1972-1996). An early episode of the After School
Specials called “The Skating Rink” follows its stuttering protagonist, Tucker “Tuck”
Faraday through an embarrassing day at school.1 Tuck’s elderly teacher waxes poetic
Roosevelt’s virtue and triumph over his disability, and calls on Tuck to provide more
historical insight into this national hero. As a girl in class eyes him amorously, the
previously-attentive Tuck stands and stutters nervously that he did not complete his
homework assignment, so that he can avoid talking more than absolutely necessary. The class laughs viciously at Tuck’s inability to speak, in spite of the teacher’s feeble
protestations.
Tuck is called on by his teacher, apparently uniquely positioned to answer
questions about Roosevelt that the rest of the class cannot. This After School Special
establishes itself as a narrative about disability, sexuality, and masculinity, and
Roosevelt’s image augments these concerns, signifying “overcoming” adversity in the
1 “The Skating Rink.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. February 5, 1975. 117 form of disability and providing a version of masculinity and able-bodiedness “in spite
of” disability. However, Roosevelt’s image also implicates this disabled teen character into a national frame, in which an ableist narrative of “overcoming” is linked with the
development of patriotic American citizenship. As a “coming-of-age” story for the
teenaged protagonist, this narrative figures disability as essential “adversity” that subjects
must overcome to establish appropriate heterosexuality and national citizenship.
ABC’s After School Specials featured a preponderance of episodes dealing with
physical or mental disabilities. In fact, the storylines of ABC’s After School Specials
epitomized a new form of television for teens: medicalized edutainment. The Specials
presented disability as a natural, albeit transitional, component of normal teenaged life.
In shows ranging from It’s a Mile From Here to Glory, about a temporarily-disabled teen
track star, to The Kid Who Wouldn’t Quit: The Brad Silverman Story, a semi-biographical
story about a mainstreamed student with Down syndrome, the Specials transformed
stories of disability into stories of growing up, overcoming disability, and getting the girl
(or boy).
ABC’s After School Specials both produced and were produced by a discursive
linkage of disability, youth, sexuality, and citizenship. This linkage, established within
news outlets, cultural productions, and government intervention, cast teenagers as proto- or “infantile” citizens, who were temporarily disabled, sexually at-risk, and in need of rehabilitation. The Specials produced what I have called a “rehabilitative” approach to
118 teen bodies and teen sexuality. Rehabilitative citizenship constructed appropriately self-
regulating teenaged American citizen-subjects who “came of age” by aspiring to embody
heteronormativity, ability, and proper heteronormative masculinity or femininity. This
new rehabilitative approach to teen sexuality and to television programming for teens,
emblematized by the After School Specials, fused the impulses of social consciousness,
educational, and sexually-themed programming of the era to create a new hybridized
approach to television content and narrative structure that would address teenagers
proactively rather than protectively.
In spite of the series’ wide viewership and cult classic status, there has heretofore
been no scholarly attention to the Specials.2 Many remember watching them in health or
driver’s education classes, as the shows were often used to bring television into the classroom as an educational tool. The Specials emerged at a time when television’s role in youth education was being contested and while children’s programming was growing exponentially to accommodate new market segments. However, as television addressed teen viewers in the 1970s as a brand new segment of the viewing population, the After
2 This dearth of research is theoretically attributable to a variety of factors. First, the shows were low-budget and aesthetically simple. The show’s approach to teen problems now seems obviously didactic, and the plotlines seem contrived around a given “problem” rather than designed to facilitate character or plot development. This inattention to the Specials stems from a larger critical neglect of the adolescent “problem novel;” I discuss the critical denigration of the problem novel at length in Chapter Three. Second, there is no single archive that contains all, or even most, of the series. ABC has no network archive, and individual shows were produced by many small production companies, making them extremely hard to locate and centralize. Moreover, since many of the earliest Specials aired before VCR’s were commonplace in the home, very few, if any, private home collections exist. The release of DVD collections and boxed sets of ABC’s After School Specials may help make the series more accessible, though the DVD release is generally only composed of episodes which featured recognizable stars, such as Rob Lowe, Lance Kerwin, and Malcolm Jamal-Warner. The largest, single archive of After School Specials is 119 School Specials emerged as one of the first shows to target an exclusively teenaged
audience rather than subsuming them within a family or children’s audience.3 In
contrast to an earlier 1950s-era discourse of television as a “threat” to children, the 1970s witnessed a new way of “domesticating” the television to make it suitable for a young viewing audience.4 Rather than censuring television as damaging to young people,
medicalized edutainment like ABC’s After School Specials and made-for-TV movies like
the previous chapter’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, participated in debates over the
educational value of television by configuring commercial shows as having
“edutainment” value.5
While I argue the content and narrative structure of the shows contained a
“rehabilitative” logic, debates about programming itself were also active participants in
cultivating this rehabilitative logic, which enabled television to rehabilitate its own
reputation as a corrupter of youth by acting as a valuable rehabilitative tool for its teen
viewers. Contestation over television’s educational value dominated much of the 1970s
located at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in New York, NY. The Paley Center has over 30 unreleased After School Specials in an un-catalogued collection. 3 The overwhelming majority of After School Specials featured and addressed teens, though the series featured stories that also addressed younger children. 4 See Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 5 The After School Specials instantiated what I am calling a “rehabilitative” approach to teen citizenship that was presented via medicalized edutainment. Other teen edutainment series that fall into this category are the many clones of the Specials: CBS Schoolbreak Special (1984-1995); CBS’s Afternoon Playhouse (1981-1983); CBS’s The Winners [The first episode of the monthly Winners was a story about a girl who had one leg that was drastically shorter than the other; the story follows her “overcoming” her disability to become a horseback-riding champion](1973); NBC’s Special Treat (1975-1986) and USA’s Lifestories: Families in Crisis (1992-1996). Also included are series such as James at 15 (1977-1978), Degrassi 120 productions and formed part its rehabilitative approach. This concern over youth TV viewing practices surfaced in familiar debates about the dangers of TV violence—for example, a 1972 Science Digest article asked, “Does video violence make Johnny hit
back?”6 Meanwhile Time reported the “national nightmare” of an increase in violent
juvenile crimes and the link between “TV violence” and “teen-age violence.”7 This link
sparked a national panic and a “plethora of studies,” which included a $1.8 million dollar
five-volume report from the Surgeon General entitled Television and Growing Up: The
Impact of Televised Violence (1972), a study that emphasized a causal relationship between
increased televisual and teenaged criminal violence and contained concerns about the
sexual content of shows, commercials, and even scantily-clad talk show guests.8
Although television content had been assailed since the 1950s for its violent content, by the 1970s, this contempt extended to its growing sexual explicitness. Indeed, the After
School Specials and made-for-TV movies were part of a new sexual culture on television and regularly addressed issues of teenage sexuality—a hotbutton issue not only in television debates but also contemporaneously in fiery contestations over sex education
Junior High (1987-1991), Life Goes On (1989-1993), Doogie Howser, M.D (1989-1993), My So-Called Life (1994), and 7th Heaven (1996-2007), to name a few. 6 See “Does video violence make Johnny hit back?” Science Digest, January 1972, 57. 7 See “Ending Mayhem.” Time. June 7, 1976. See also Office of the Surgeon General. Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence. Report to the Surgeon General, United States Public Health Service (Washington: National Institute of Mental Health, 1972); Frederic Wertham. “How movie and TV violence affects children,” Ladies Home Journal., February 1960, 58-59; E. Merriam, “We’re teaching our children that violence is fun,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1964, 44; V.B. Cline, “TV Violence: how it damages your children,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1975, 75; E. Kiester, “TV Violence: What can parents do?” Better Homes and Gardens, September 1975, 4. 121 in schools—within concerns about an increasing lack of parental supervision over children and the television they were ingesting.
While a concern over television links to violence were familiar fare in debates over new media by the 1970s, a new contestation about sexualized television gained momentum amid a larger debate about one of the aftershocks of the (hetero)sexual revolution: sex education. Beginning in the mid-1960s, myriad articles about sex education surfaced in publications as varied as Christianity Today, Ebony, and The New
York Times Magazine.9 Articles posed provocative questions, such as “Sex in the Schools:
8 Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 82. 9 For secondary literature on the history of sex education controversy, see Kristin Luker. When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Janice M. Irvine, Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002). Many publications debated whether or not sex education should occur in schools or in the home: See K. D. Fishman, “Sex becomes a brand-new problem.” The New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1966, 69; R. Brecher et. al., “Every sixth teen-age girl in Connecticut-- [will become pregnant out of wedlock before her 20th birthday].” The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 1966, 6-7; W. B. Furlong, “It’s a long way from the birds and the bees [sex education program].” The New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1967, 24-25; M. F. Iseman, “Sex education: What do children actually learn?” McCall's, January 1968, 36-7; J. Kobler, “Sex invades the schoolhouse [with editorial comment],” The Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1968, 23-27; “Should sex education be offered in grade school? GH Poll.” Good Housekeeping, July 1969, 12; “Sex in the Classroom.” Time. July 25, 1969, 50; W. Goodman, “Controversy over sex education: what our children stand to lose.” Redbook, September 1969, 78-9; “Sex Education in School [debate splits town in Wisconsin].” Life, September 19, 1969, 34-41; “Sex-education controversy.” Christianity Today, October 10, 1969, 34; C. T. Rowan et. al., “Sex education: powder keg in our schools,” Reader's Digest, October 1969, 73-8; J. N. Bell, “Why the revolt against sex education?” Good Housekeeping, November 1969, 92-3; B. Bettelheim, “Right and wrong way to teach sex.” Ladies' Home Journal, January 1970, 26-7; O. Rabinovitz, “How to talk to your parents about sex.” [ed. by M. Brenton]. Seventeen, March 1971, 152-153; “Sex at Sunday School.” Newsweek, December 27, 1971, 50- 51; “Let’s learn to make love [class discussion threatens national teachers strike].” Newsweek, January 8, 1973, 30; S. S. List, “When our daughters discover love and sex.” McCall's, September 1973, 65; D. R. Reuben, “Everything you always wanted to tell your teenager about sex but were afraid to bring up.” Ladies' Home Journal, November 1975, 88; J.D. Butts, “Sex education: who needs it?” Ebony, April 1977, 96-8; J. S. Faier, “Sex-education controversy.” Harper's Bazaar, July 1977, 91; S. Gordon, “Let’s put sex education back where it belongs—in the home.” Good Housekeeping, October 1977, 66; J. Viorst, “What I tell my sons about your daughters.” Redbook, March 1978, 33; J. Keefauver, “Dick and Jane and a dread disease.” National Review, June 9, 1978, 721; C. Safran, “How Children Feel About Their Bodies.” Redbook, June 1979, 21; E. Tenver, “Talk to your teen-agers about sex.” Reader's Digest, December 1979, 128-31. 122 Education or Titillation?;" some presented sex education as a “powder keg” or an
“invad[er] of the schoolhouse,” while others pleaded desperately to “[b]ring back the
stork!”10
Within a context of new family dynamics of the post-sexual-liberation 1970s that
included increased divorces, working mothers and fathers, and latchkey kids, teens were
considered at risk in historically-specific ways. Most families on the After School Specials
were not nuclear and featured divorced, absentee, or otherwise incapacitated parental
figures, as if to highlight the reduced supervision of youth television intake occurring
outside the screen. In earlier periods of television regulation, it was expected that parents would regulate television intake for children of all ages. However, the era’s new approach to teen television presumed that teens’ parents would not be around to oversee their viewing practices, and thus, the After School Specials assumed a role as educator that was formerly imagined to be the province of parents.
Although it is tempting to read cultural impulses toward sex education and sexual television programming as liberalizing, I argue these cultural impulses toward sexual education, both in the classroom and on television, formed a novel
rehabilitative—that is to say, a productive and disciplinary—approach to teen sexuality
and teen bodies. Rather than inciting parental or regulatory censure, the new
rehabilitative teen TV combined social consciousness, educational, and sexually-themed
10 See B. Goodheart, “Sex in the Schools: Education or Titillation?” Today’s Health, February 1970, 28-30; Rowan, “Sex education: powder keg in our schools”; “Sex invades the schoolhouse;” and W. 123 programming of the era to redefine teen engagement with popular culture (and sexual
liberation) as potentially productive rather than damaging.
This chapter examines the production of this rehabilitative logic through the
intersection of several sites. First, I narrate the development of After School Specials, introduce their intended audience, and analyze the series’ obsession with disability
narratives. The Specials emerged during key moments in the disability rights movement and participated in a larger increase in cultural visibility of people with disabilities.
Second, I establish emerging ideas about “educational television” in which the Specials participated, illustrating the way in which commercial television presented itself as liberal and socially-responsible even while it consolidated images of ideal citizens as white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and heteronormatively gendered. Third, I contextualize the Specials within changing notions of sexuality and cultural responses to increased sexually-themed programming on television. Finally, the chapter examines in detail two episodes of the After School Specials, “The Skating Rink” (1975) and “The
Heartbreak Winner”(1980), to show the complex and surprisingly intricate ways the logics of protection and rehabilitation played out in shows that were, at the same time, groundbreaking in their attention to teen sexuality.11
Stanton, “Bring back the stork!” Good Housekeeping, August 1973, 59-60 124 Disability Dramas and the After School Audience
Airing from 1972-1996 on ABC, the Specials won numerous awards and prizes including 18 Emmys, three Blue Ribbons from the American Film Festival, and the prestigious Peabody Award, among others. The Specials premiered in 1972 amid bitter controversy over a perceived lack of quality in children’s programming and a simultaneous war over a perceived heightened visibility of sexuality on television and in culture more generally, the Specials themselves participated in this history by offering moral lessons amid the titillating lure of sexually-themed programming. The shows were also used as a learning tool, shown in health and driver’s education classes in American junior high and high schools.
Viewers nostalgically remember the shows as much for their hokey didacticism as for their unique, racy storylines. According to Maureen Ryan, a Chicago Tribune media writer, ABC’s After School Specials addressed teenagers “not as children or adults, but as something in between” in its serious treatment of relevant teen issues. Ryan asserts that the issue-driven series was unprecedented on network television of the era, in that the most popular series for teens in the 1970s was Happy Days; Ryan sniggers that, unlike the bulk of the era’s network programming, the Specials “acknowledged that there was more to adolescence than sock hops.”12 ABC’s Specials dealt with grittier realities of teenaged life, addressing issues like alcoholism, drug abuse, sexually
11 “The Heartbreak Winner.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. February 13, 1980. 125 transmitted diseases, racism, and teen suicide. In a radio piece for “On the Media” about
the DVD release of ABC’s After School Specials, one man remembers that he was
“forced” to watch the Specials in health class and recalls “Scott Baio freaking out on drugs
and getting hit over the head in the water…” while another man laughingly reminisces
about a Special involving an illiterate basketball player and an unlikely chain of events
that constituted the story’s dramatic climax: “somehow I think it was his little brother
burnt his eyes with some bleach and this basketball player couldn’t read [laughter] the
back of the bottle to get him some help…and I think Kareem Abdul Jabar was somehow
a guest star on it.”
Famous for their overtly moralistic tone and their sometimes hyperbolic
approach to teen problems, the shows were usually dramas but occasionally, featured
straight comedies or “dramedies.” Whether remembered as “melodramatic, hysterical,
and hokey” or “campy tragedy and good moral lessons” in its coverage of “real teen
issues,” the Specials were among the first television shows in television history explicitly
directed at a teenaged audience rather than solely a family viewing audience.13 According
to one of the Specials’ first producers, Martin Tahse, the series was initially pitched as a way “to cover the distance between the Saturday morning ghetto for kids and prime time” because “teenagers were not being addressed” in either venue.14 The shows were
12 After School Specials. On the Media. Sarah Lemanczyk. NPR Radio. 14 January 2005. 13 Ibid. 14 Tahse, Martin. Interview. Talk of the City. KPCC Radio. After School Specials DVDs. 126 intended to be viewed when teens returned home from school, usually around 4PM.
Although the Specials are often considered to be old-fashioned, preachy, and moralistic,
Tahse says that “wagging fingers” was never the intent, rather the Specials “were doing
topics that normally were not being done at all [a]nd… were being entertaining.”15
Based on young adult (YA) novels of the era, the Specials generally devoted each episode to a single dilemma facing teenagers in the 1970s. Tahse kept tabs on emerging
YA literature by subscribing to Publishers Weekly, seeking advice from the American
Library Association (ALA), courting new young adult authors, and negotiating with publishers to buy the rights of novels he felt would make good Specials. He continually reiterated his profound respect for first-time YA novelists of the era, because they
“present[ed] different problems with a reality to it,” in part by using “realistic dialogue.”
However, he also noted the pragmatism of basing Specials on novels: “Walking in [to
ABC] with a book lent credence to the story you wanted to tell.”16 The series tackled
many “serious issues,” including, to name a few, teen and adult alcoholism, teen
pregnancy, racism, violence, AIDS, and child molestation.17 Noting the scarcity of shows
15 Martin Tahse, Telephone interview with the author. Washington, DC. February 22, 2007. 16 Ibid. 17 The series dealt with homosexuality implicitly, in episodes about AIDS and in one episode about ballet dancing (“A Special Gift.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 24 October 1979.). On racism, see “Color of Friendship” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 11 November 1981; “Class Act: A Teacher’s Story” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 18 March 1987; “Taking a Stand.” ABC’s After School Specials. 19 January 1989; “Girlfriend.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 15 April 1993; and “Shades of a Single Protein.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 28 January 1993. On teen pregnancy, see “Schoolboy Father.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 15 October 1980; “Jacqui’s Dilemma.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 2 June 1994; and “Too Soon for Jeff.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 12 September 1996. On child 127 addressing these issues, Tahse declares that “the soaps” were one of the few venues that dealt with “drunk driving, homosexuality, [and] pregnancy,” and Tahse contends they were “getting away with murder” in that even adult-oriented prime time of the era was not nearly as racy as daytime soaps.18
When asked whether or not the Specials had a “formula” for its shows, Tahse responded that he was “very interested in kids getting out of ghettos.”19 Tahse clarified that he did not necessarily mean “a black ghetto,” rather such a ghetto might be “living in a farm” and imagining “how…you get from the farm to college and see another kind of a life than what your father has been doing…[to show] kids who were trying to
molestation, see “Don’t Touch.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 6 November 1985. On AIDS, see “Just a Regular Kid: An AIDS Story.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 9 September 1987; “In the Shadow of Love: A Teen AIDS Story.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 18 September 1991; and “Positive: A Journey Into AIDS.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 7 December 1995. “In the Shadow of Love” featured the following disclaimer, which was uncharacteristic of After School Specials: “Today’s Afterschool Special deals with the subject of AIDS infection and contains frank discussions of teenage sexuality. Parents are encouraged to watch and discuss with their children.” “Don’t Touch” also featured a warning about the disturbing content of the episode. On child abuse, see “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 19 September 1983 and “Terrible Things My Mother Told Me.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 20 January 1988. On physically abusive teen relationships, see “Love Hurts.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 16 September 1993. On divorce, see “What are Friends For?” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 19 March 1980 and “Divorced Kids’ Blues.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 4 March 1987. On sexual harassment, see Boys Will Be Boys.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 15 September 1994. On rape, see “Did You Hear What Happened to Andrea?” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 27 December 1983 and “Date Rape.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 15 September 1988. On teen suicide, see “Amy and the Angel” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 22 September 1982 and “Face at the Edge of the World (a.k.a. “A Desperate Exit”) ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 19 September 1986. On illegal drugs, see “Stoned.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 12 November 1980; “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 26 October 1988; and “Desperate Lives.” ABC’s After School Specials. 3 March 1982. “Stoned” starred Scott Baio, while “Desperate Lives” featured a young Helen Hunt as a drug using teen who, in a scene that has achieved cult classic fame, vaults from a window while high on PCP. 18 Tahse, Telephone Interview. 19 Tahse, Martin. Interview. Talk of the City. 128 become something that they weren’t.”20 Dolores Morris, ABC’s East Coast director of children’s programming in the early 1980s also asserted another important guideline:
“The protagonists are always young people, and in almost every instance, the problems in question are solved by the young people themselves.”21 Tahse recalls “very few rules and regulations” governing the shows apart from the directive that “adult[s] can’t solve the problem” facing the teen protagonists.22 For example, “A Very Delicate Matter”
(1982), an episode that dealt with gonorrhea, features two teens in a relationship, Kristin and Greg, going to get testing and treatment without involving adults.23 Additionally, many episodes focus on parental alcoholism and show a transition from a teen’s enabling and covering for an alcoholic parent to his seizing control of his life by attending
Alateen, or in one hyperbolic example, a girl’s staging a fire drill out a rope ladder from the window in case her drunken mother fell asleep while smoking in bed.24 All of the teens with alcoholic parents in the previous examples were girls, and in all of the examples, the girl began taking charge of her life after meeting a boy, who shares the
20 Tahse, Telephone Interview. 21 Leslie Garisto, “Why ‘Afterschool Specials’ are Special; ‘Afterschool’ Fare,” The New York Times, August 5, 1985, H21. 22 Tahse, Telephone Interview. 23 “A Very Delicate Matter” starred Zach Galligan, who would become famous two years later for his starring role in Chris Columbus’ Gremlins (1984). “A Very Delicate Matter.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 10 November 1982. 24 Ibid. Tahse notes that he focused a lot on parental alcoholism because his father was an alcoholic. “Francesca, Baby.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 6 October 1976; “She Drinks a Little (a.k.a “First Step”).” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 23 September 1981; “Can A Guy Say No?” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 12 February 1986; and “Just Tipsy, Honey.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 16 March 1989. On teen alcoholism, see “The Late Great Me! Story of a Teenaged Alcoholic.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 14 November 1979. “The Late Great Me,” “Francesca, Baby” and “She Drinks a 129 same problem and who shows the girl how to deal with it. While it is certainly true that problems are often solved by teens themselves in the Specials, it is notable that problems and solutions are often gendered, and the solutions to such problems often emerge through heterosexual partnering.
Characters with disabilities were a mainstay especially of the early After School
Specials, and disability was not always considered a problem in need of rehabilitation like
other “social problems” on the series. More often than not, the disabled characters on the series were white teenage boys rather than teenage girls.25 This emphasis on male
protagonists, at least in the earliest Specials, occurred partially by design, because “the idea was that the boys would watch a boy show but not a girl show, whereas a girl would like a boy show too.”26
Little” are available on DVD, while the rest of the episodes mentioned can be found at the Paley Center for Media in New York City. 25 In fact, none of the episodes about cognitive disability feature disabled girls, and very few episodes about physical disability feature a female protagonist. I have not been able to find a copy of “Blind Sunday” (1976) or “Run, Don’t Walk” (1981) though both feature a teen girl with a physical disability. A few episodes dealt with mental illness. Two were stories about mental illness in two homeless women, one African-American and one white: “Are You My Mother?” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 5 March 1986 and “Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 9 October 1985. Another episode that focused on mental illness featured a mother who kidnapped her children from their father and made them dress in disguise for years. See “I Want To Go Home.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 13 February 1985. Another episode that focused on schizophrenia was “My Dad Can’t Be Crazy…Can He?” “Are You My Mother?” “Cindy Eller” and “I Want to Go Home,” can be viewed at the Paley Center for Media. Another episode, which I have been unable to view, deals with a daughter’s right to sue her biological father for the right to live with her disabled stepfather after her biological mother dies in an accident (“Torn Between Two Fathers.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 20 April 1989.). 26 Tahse said that the series courted the “General Hospital women” as much as teen viewers, and he remarked that as the show progressed, more onscreen time was devoted to girls, because “the assumption was that if there was a girl or woman involved” that the older female demographic would stay glued to their televisions after the soaps had concluded. From Tahse, Telephone Interview. 130 Disability figured into After School Specials in a variety of ways.27 It was sometimes presented as a penalty for “bad behavior.” For example, in “A Mile from
Here to Glory” (1978), the protagonist, Early MacLaren (Steve Shaw), a track star, has an all-consuming desire to win at everything rather than being a team player. Sulking after he fails to break the school record for the mile, Early is hit by a car, which breaks his legs.28 Although Early’s injury was an accident, it was also a penalty for Early’s selfishness, because had he gotten on the bus with the rest of the team rather than
sulking after his loss, he would not have been hit by the car. Through his rehabilitation
efforts and his physical therapist, his body and spirit are literally broken down and
27 There quite a few episodes that focus on disability of which I have been unable to find viewing copies. See “Mom and Dad Can’t Hear Me.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 5 April 1978. (Another episode featuring a storyline about deafness is “Tough Girl” [ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 22 September 1982. 28 October 1981].) Produced by Henry Winkler, “Run, Don’t Walk” (1981) features Scott Baio, Winkler’s then co-star on Happy Days, as Johnny Jay, a wheelchair-user. According to the Washington Post article entitled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Wheels,” the story is about an 18- year-old girl, Samantha Anderson (Toni Kalem) who becomes paralyzed from the waist down after a horseback riding accident. The Post reports that during the episode, Johnny Jay, as an “activist,” “wheels around with a toilet seat around his neck to beat the band for wider access to the bathroom stalls.” This episode, dealing with disability activism, is particularly of interest given its context in a period of intense disability activism in America. The paper reports that Sam is “too graphically confronted” with the “scatological bent” of his activism and is scandalized; while Johnny lobbies for his right to wider stalls, Sam “is taking to tooling along in her chair with a jogging teacher and wants nothing more than to enter the marathon.” See Sandy Rovner. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Wheels,” March 4, 1981, B7. “Blind Sunday” (1976) is about a developing relationship between a blind teenaged girl and a sighted boy. The New York Times describes Eileen (Jewel Blanch) as “feisty and outspoken” compared with Jeff (Leigh McCloskey), who is “shy and socially inhibited.” See John J. O’Connor, “TV: ‘Blind Sunday’ Is a Fine Drama,” The New York Times. April 21, 1976, 48. Another episode, “Mom and Dad Can’t Hear Me” (1978) deals with an able-bodied teenaged girl with deaf parents; she attempts to conceal their deafness from her friends rather than risking their disapproval. Finally, “Dinky Hocker” (1978) considers “the millions of tons of blubber that American youngsters are carrying around with them” in a narrative that likens the “misery” of “juvenile narcotics addicts” with the misery of obesity in its story of Wendie Jo Sperber, who “has plenty of weight but lacks human dimensions.” See Tom Buckley, “TV: Afterschool Gluttony,” The New York Times. November 15, 1978, C30. 131 rebuilt, and while learning how to walk again, he learns the value of teamwork rather
than only personal glory.29 Furthermore, in a formulation typical of teen dramas, sexually transmitted diseases function as a penalty for “promiscuous” sex. The earliest
Specials about STD’s—almost all of which were focused on gonorrhea—often feature a teen cheating on his or her long-term boyfriend or girlfriend and then infecting an unsuspecting partner, who is configured as the innocent party in the infection.30
Finally, at least three episodes deal with cognitive disability: “Sara’s Summer of
Swans” (1974), “Hewitt’s Just Different” (1977), and the biographical “The Kid Who
Wouldn’t Quit: The Brad Silverman Story” (1987).31 “Sara’s Summer of Swans” was met with criticism, because although the Newberry-Award-winning Betsy Byars novel featured a “mentally-retarded” little boy named Charlie, the televised “Charlie” did not seem disabled enough, according to New York Times TV critic John J. O’Connor.
28 “A Mile From Here to Glory.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 5 May 1978. This episode is also available on DVD. 29 Other Specials about illiteracy follow this framework, in which disability is a penalty for the failure to “do the right thing.” For instance, “Daddy Can’t Read” and “The Hero Who Couldn’t Read” featured a child’s medical emergencies as penalty for and result of the protagonists’ illiteracy. See “Daddy Can’t Read.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 16 March 1988; and “The Hero Who Couldn’t Read.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC 18 April 1984. These episodes can be found in the Paley Center for Media (New York) collection. 30 See “A Very Delicate Matter” (1982) and “Private Affairs.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 26 October 1989. 31 Washington Post writer Tom Shales described “Hewitt” as “[not] only a morality play striking a blow against prejudice toward the retarded. Its particulars carry overtones of universality; what 12-year-old Willie Arthur learns from his retarded pal, Hewitt Calder, has to do with the whole subject of friendship, with resisting peer group pressures and with facing crises of conscience bravely.” See Tom Shales, “Hewitt’s Difference: Quality TV for Kids,” The Washington Post, October 12, 1977, B1. See “Sara’s Summer of Swans,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 2 October 1974; “Hewitt’s Just Different,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 12 October 1977; and “The Kid Who Wouldn’t Quit: The Brad Silverman Story,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 23 September 1987. “Sara’s Summer of Swans” is available on DVD, whereas “Hewitt” and “Silverman” are available for viewing at the Paley Center for Media in New York City. 132 Although Charlie was “the real reason for [Byars’s] book’s Newberry award,” the
Specials “made [him] little more than extremely shy.”32 In the other two aforementioned episodes, “Hewitt Calder” and “Brad Silverman” appear as teenagers with cognitive disabilities.33 All of the episodes that focus on cognitive disability feature able-bodied actors playing disabled characters, and mainly, they preach messages of tolerance, gently
castigating able-bodied youths who tease disabled protagonists. Notably, although sexuality is often a contested or absent issue within narratives of cognitive disability,
Hewitt’s and Brad’s teenaged heterosexual desires for able-bodied women are emphasized throughout the stories and are used to evidence their normality as teenage
boys.34
This new televisual visibility of disability is significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that disability was a prominant cultural concern and a cultural language
32 See John J. O’Connor, “Those Adaptations—Faithful or Fudged?” The New York Times, February 29, 1975, D29. 33 Notably, although Silverman, who has Down Syndrome, appeared at the end of “The Kid Who Wouldn’t Quit” to address the Special’s audience, an able-bodied actor, K.C. Martel, played the high-school and college-aged Silverman in the movie; an able-bodied actor also portrayed Hewitt. Silverman appears at the end to say “I just want you kids to know out there it’s a good thing to have a dream as long as you’re willing to work to make it come true. I’m in my second year at Pasadena City College.” The episode’s writer, Joanna Lee, won a Humanitas Prize in the Children’s Live-Action category, while young actor Carl Stevens, who played Silverman between the ages of 10 and 13, was nominated for a Young Artist Award for “Best Young Actor Starring in a Drama Special, Movie of the Week, or Variety Show.” Silverman eventually went on to star in films and television shows, including I Am Sam (2001) alongside Sean Penn. 34 In “Hewitt’s Just Different,” Hewitt’s younger friend, Willy, finds a sexy poster of a scantily- clad blonde woman and makes fun of Hewitt, saying, “Wow! Hewitt! Gonna hang it in a special place?...Got a crush on her?” Hewitt angrily yanks the poster away from Willy, who apologizes for taunting him. Meanwhile, Brad Silverman’s “coming-of-age” in “The Kid Who Wouldn’t Quit” is established through his bar mitzvah and through his shameless flirting with able-bodied high school girls. He flirts openly with a cheerleader and doesn’t realize that she’s making fun of him to a group of girls. He 133 not only for addressing and entertaining teen viewers but also as advice for channeling teens into good American adult citizenship—which is to say, properly gendered, heterosexual, and able-bodied, as well as properly aware of their patriotic American national identity. Thus, the era’s teen viewers were constructed and addressed as disabled subjects in need of rehabilitation and configured as always already under development.
In addition to imagining teens as constantly “in the process” of resolving the “problem” of the inherent disability of adolescence, the rehabilitative logic of ABC’s After School
Specials not only rooted teen problems in their very bodies but also placed the responsibility for “treatment” squarely within the hands of the teenagers themselves.
Secondly, it is important to note that the After School Specials premiered in a watershed year of the disability rights movement. Disability emerged as a politicized identity in an unprecedented way in the 1970s, and through the combination of deinstitutionalization efforts, the passage of significant legislation, highly visible political protests, disabled people were culturally visible in new ways, as political actors, as returning Vietnam veterans, and as young people demanding access to education. A campaign for autonomy and self-determination for disabled people, the Disability Rights movement was also part of this increased youth political activism of the period that
is rescued by an African-American basketball player, Kevin Washington (Eric D. Wallace) who encourages him to “be cool” rather than coming on so strong. 134 galvanized young activists while participating in a contestation and redefinition of the
category of “youth.”35
Spearheaded by a group of college-aged students, at least one portion of the
disability rights movement came from disabled youth lobbying for their rights to
privacy and independent living. Often called the father of the Disability Rights
Movement, Ed Roberts sued the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for
arguing that his disability would prevent him from attending college. As a result of
having polio as a child, Roberts was both a wheelchair- and iron lung-user. After Roberts
was admitted to Berkeley, instead of housing him in a dorm, the university housed him
in the student infirmary, because it was the only room on campus that could support the
weight of his iron lung. As other disabled students gained admission, they were also
housed in the infirmary. With five other disabled students, Roberts formed “The Rolling
Quads,” an activist group that fought to form the first university Physically Disabled
Students Program (PDSP) program and the nation’s first center for Independent Living,
the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (1972). While The Rolling Quads certainly
fought for access, they were also demanding an “adult” privilege of autonomy and
privacy.
35 The World Institute of Disability, “Highlights from Speeches by Ed Roberts,”
commercial television in the 1970s, as a preponderance of the Specials focus on disabled
main or supporting characters. In spite of incorporating disabled characters and plotlines
about disability, the series always presumed a middle-class, white, suburban audience of
“normal”—able-bodied and heterosexual—youth viewers, and some episodes about
disability attempted to teach lessons of tolerance toward disabled people. However,
disability also entered this form of teen commercial television to educate teens about
overcoming adversity, at times presuming that a state of disability—like Tuck’s
stuttering—was “natural” for developing teens to occupy. While young disability rights activists were problematizing paternalistic care that limited their autonomy, the Specials was part of a wider cultural redefinition of the boundaries between “child” and “adult.”
Third, in the context of this new visibility of disability, the teen educational shows operated under fundamentally ableist assumptions. The After School Specials consistently positioned their disabled teen protagonists within a trajectory of overcoming disability and configured it as an essential journey to “growing up.”
“Overcoming” narratives are ableist, in that they reinforce the superiority of the able body in contrast to the disabled body by “rely[ing] upon the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other and that any disabled person who overcomes this contradiction is heroic.”36 Within this form of coming-of-age narrative, teenagers are
36 Clare, Exile and Pride, 8. 136 addressed initially as “infantile citizens,” but the After School Specials produces a discourse
of “rehabilitative” citizenship, which promises and presents normalcy—the linkage of
heterosexuality and able-bodiedness—as equivalent to “growing up.”37 In its
“overcoming” narratives, the series produces a form of compulsory able-bodiedness in its discursive linkage of “overcoming,” able-bodiedness, and heteronormativity.
While some episodes focused on educating people about disability explicitly, other episodes used characters with disabilities to represent other teen struggles. In this case, disability functioned, in the words of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, as the
“materiality of metaphor.”38 Functioning as a form of citizenship-training for teenagers,
the After School Specials consistently featured narratives of teens overcoming disability,
and this narrative was often explicitly linked to national iconography of health and
freedom and with the development of proper heterosexuality. In the 1970s, the teen body became an embattled cultural figure within cultural texts, scientific discourses, and rehabilitative logics, while it also functioned centrally in the new cultural contest over sexuality and its increasing visibility.
In order to properly analyze the rehabilitative approach of the series, the After
School Specials must be understood in relationship to multiple issues of television
37Robert McRuer argues that compulsory able-bodiedness produces disability, and that compulsory ablebodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are contingent on one another. See McRuer, Crip Theory. Eli Clare also argues that the “construction of gender depends not only on the male body and the female body, but also upon the nondisabled body” (Clare, Exile and Pride, 112). 38 See Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis. 137 regulation, in general, and children’s broadcasting in specific. The shows were fundamentally shaped by contestation over what constituted “educational” television and television’s construction as a technology both in need of rehabilitation and with rehabilitative capabilities for young, impressionable viewers. Debates over the new sexual culture of the 1970s were often staged on and in relationship to television programming, and discourses about educational programming emerged alongside and within this context.
Grassroots efforts, such as petitions to the FCC, also threatened to bring more regulation into children’s broadcasting, voicing objections about sex-themed programming, overabundant advertising during children’s programs, and debates over television’s educational value. Meanwhile, networks took evasive action with new regulations to forestall any outside intervention from the FCC in their programming schedules. Networks also altered content, nurturing what television scholar Todd Gitlin named a “turn toward relevance,” composed of commercial television that was “socially- conscious,” including Norman Lear’s adult fare, All in the Family and its spinoff, The
Jeffersons, and Sanford & Son.
As Cold War educational bills increasingly linked television to national educational reform, the embattled medium was also configured as a crisis necessitating intervention, which was offered by the development of educational TV, most notably
138 via the establishment of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1969.39 Within the
thrust to repair America’s deficient educational system, Americans also began to debate
the place of sex within school curriculum and on television in the wake of the “free
love” ethos of the 1960s and concomitantly began imagining television’s role in
education and sexual instruction for young people in the nation. There were two
primary targets for such regulation: first, commercial programming that was “wallowing
in sex” or reveling in violence, and second, advertising during children’s programming.40
Both threats materialized as threats to young viewers, although in this period, teenagers were addressed as distinct from child or family viewers in ways that were unprecedented.
Television began to be imagined as part of the nation’s educational reform in the
Cold War.41 Specifically, Title VII of the 1958 National Defense Education Act funded
the promotion of the educational use of media, which made the use of audiovisual media
indispensable to (and synonymous with) educational reform.42 William Harley, then-
president of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), firmly
linked educational and media reform to America’s geopolitical position in the space race
39 For more information about educational programming, see Alison Perlman. Reforming the Wasteland: Television, Reform, and Social Movements, 1950-2004. Unpublished dissertation. American Studies Department, University of Texas at Austin, 2007. 40 An anonymous television network executive made this confession to characterize 1970s television. See “Closed Circuit,” Broadcasting, August 8, 1977, 5. See also Levine, Wallowing in Sex. 41 See Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981). 42 Thanks to Allison Perlman for pointing me to this resource. This was an unprecedented educational act that granted money to variegated educational areas, including college loans; encouragement of science, math, and foreign language instruction; and funding for college preparation courses and counseling. See Clowse, Brainpower, 162-167. 139 when he hoped that Russia did “not have to launch the equivalent of a sputnik in the use of television for educational purposes in order to bring the breakthrough which
American education so desperately needs if it is again to seize a position of world leadership in education […].”43
This heightened television’s stake in affecting the nation’s youth and effecting educational reform, and within this milieu, commercial television was attacked.44 A 1960 report, The Impact of Educational Television, described commercial television as
“encourage[ing] chiefly passivity and minimum effort rather than activity, a minimum of social interaction, a concern with fantasy rather than real life, and living in the present rather than concerning oneself either with self-improvement or the problems of
43 The National Association of Educational Broadcasters was formed in 1925 as Association of College University Broadcasting Stations (ACUBS). It changed its name to NAEB in 1934. In 1956, NAEB merged with the Association of Education by Radio-Television, a partnership which reorganized in 1963 with new divisions: Educational Television Stations and National Educational Radio. These divisions existed until 1973 when they were dissolved and their duties assumed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the National Public Radio (NPR). Until its total dissolution in 1981, NAEB was public broadcasting’s main voice, forum, and program distributor. Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, United States Senate, Eight-Sixth Congress, January 27-28, 1959, 67. For more information about the history of educational television, see Perlman, Reforming the Wasteland. 44 An anxiety over passive viewership and the abstraction of commodity culture within the “spectacle” of television and advertising is also manifested in the work of Guy Debord, a filmmaker and cultural critic, who penned his famous La société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) (1967), which first appeared in English in 1970. Meditating on the issue of increasing mass mediated images and the hyperstimulation of the visual environment from the rise of advertising agencies of the mid-twentieth century, Debord argues that people are increasingly becoming “spectators” rather than active participants in their own lives. Debord argues that Marxist formulations of the commodity, based on a replacement of “living” with “having,” are outdated; if the commodity was not enough of an abstraction of “real life,” Debord cites the replacement of the commodity with the spectacle, a replacement of “having” with a more abstracted “appearing,” as an even further abstraction of the real that better characterizes mass-mediated urban culture. See Guy Debord, trans. Ken Knabb, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1983) and Spigel, Make Room for TV, among others. 140 tomorrow.”45 As youth television consumption was positioned as an indispensable
portion of their developing, participatory national citizenship, television became implicated in national crises over youth development, in whose name regulatory efforts monitoring commercial content and increasing educational television were undertaken.
Within this onslaught on commercial television, media historian Allison Perlman argues that educational television positioned itself in stark contrast to commercial television in coaxing viewers to “be active, striving, achieving, trying to better
[themselves], participating in social interaction and public affairs.”46 As evidenced by
programs like ABC’s After School Specials, the esteem of educational television incited many networks to seek opportunities to market their own programming as having
educational value, evidenced in a statement by Kenneth Yourd, vice president of
National Educational Television and Radio Center (NETRC) during the 1961 hearings
that when “the commercial broadcasters saw that ‘education’ was acceptable television
fare, they then began to designate many of their so-called public service programs as
‘educational television’ programs.”47 Yourd’s suspicion was realized, in that ABC’s After
School Specials arrived on the television scene amid a flurry of commercial edutainment
as a healthier alternative to Saturday morning cartoons, such as Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
(1968), Sesame Street (1969), The Electric Company (1971), Mr. Wizard (1971), Schoolhouse
45 Wilbur Schramm, ed., The Impact of Educational Television (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 26. 46 Ibid., 26. 47 Ibid., 80. 141 Rock (1973), CBS Library (1979), 3-2-1 Contact (1980), Reading Rainbow (1983), and also
the rise of cable networks specifically targeting a youth audience, such as Viacom’s
Nickelodeon (1979) and MTV (1981).
A 1978 article entitled “Required TV For Students: A Proposal for Home
Educational Viewing,” featured a cartoon that depicts an anthropomorphized television,
extending a suit-jacketed arm from the screen with a spoon in its hand. The spoon
approached the mouth of a little boy, sitting in front of the TV and looking immensely
small in comparison to the huge television. The story’s author, Larry Cuban, asked
“Because the short- or long-term impact of TV upon children is self- evident, instead of
damning the tube or calling it a drug, why not mandate home viewing for children as a
teacher second to school and make it accountable?”48 Instead of “required reading,”
Cuban notes that many commercial and non-commercial television shows might already
fit into such a “required television” curriculum for youth.
However, such a request was problematic for many, given the contestation over
the perceived network penchant for “stuffing most of their rotten eggs into their
Saturday-morning baskets” of children’s programming.49 New York Times television
critic John J. O’Connor praised the Specials and ABC when he wrote that “[o]nly ABC
ha[d] made a serious and impressive effort to venture a bit further than typical series for
48 Cuban, “Required TV.” 49 John J. O’Connor. “Saturday Is No Picnic For the Kids.” The New York Times, September 30, 1973, 137. 142 young people” and lamented that the programs only appeared once or twice a month.
While newspapers and grassroots organizations repeatedly asserted that children’s
television was problematic, a new cultural construction of television as potential
“teacher” presaged the incorporation of television in school as an acceptable teaching
methodology.50 O’Connor noted that the Specials formed with “remarkable speed” to
address the many “loud” complaints leveraged by the grassroots Action for Children’s
Television (ACT) “about cartoon gluts and violence overdoses” in programming for
young people.51 While the resounding discourse of television reform, especially
children’s programming of the late 1960s and early 1970s, took issue with televised
violence and sexuality as they related to teen viewers, educational television’s importance—in both devoted educational television and commercial, medicalized edutainment programs that had “turned toward relevance”—was a method of disciplining the technology in order to make it safe for youth consumption.
Special-ized Sexual Liberation
The After School Specials must be understood in relation to changing sexual norms and concerns about teenagers’ relationship to the new, post-sexual liberation sexual
50 See John J. O’Connor, “TV: A.B.C. Presents Its New Fare for Children,” The New York Times, October 13, 1972, 78. 51 John J. O’Connor, “ABC’s ‘No Greater Gift’ About Organ Donorship,” The New York Times, September 10, 1985, C22. 143 culture of the 1970s.52 Tahse noted that, in spite of the Specials’ often racy subject matter,
he recalled very few skirmishes with the network about what was fit to air on ABC, but
he also argues that he was somewhat insulated by his own success while he recalled
“other producers [who] had a bad time with ABC.”53 “I enjoyed a position that other producers didn’t enjoy, because I was so successful with the shows,” remarked Tahse.
According to Tahse, he and Squire Rushnell, an ABC executive in Children’s
Programming, “mostly saw eye to eye; there was no animosity, because [even when we disagreed, Squire] knew I would come up with something else that would be just as good, that we would both like.” However, Tahse recalled one disagreement with
Rushnell about a Special he pitched based on a book by Mildred Lee about a young girl’s pregnancy.54 Before the meeting, ABC had just signed Tahse to a seven-picture deal for
the After School Specials. He recalls that the network “started making all these stupid
suggestions about changing the script;” some were so ridiculous, Tahse joked, that they
practically wanted the boy in the story to be the one who was pregnant.55 When ABC
demanded too many changes, Tahse refused to do the adaptation of Lee’s story,
52 See Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920-1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 53 Tahse notes that he couldn’t really say why other producers had bad experiences, since he didn’t interact with other producers who were doing After School Specials. He said, “I don’t know what they were sending in, but I got very very very few notes, because I worked very hard and very long with the [Young Adult authors] before we’d submit the script. And it was in pretty good shape by the time I submitted it, and I was starting off with good stories.” From Tahse, Telephone Interview. 54 This is most likely Mildred Lee’s Sycamore Year, published in 1974, which tells a tale of 14-year old Wren and fifteen-year old Anna’s attempt to handle the problem of Anna’s pregnancy without assistance from adults. 55 Tahse, Martin, Telephone Interview. 144 prompting Rushnell to joke that ABC—and not its producers—were supposed to be the
ones refusing to do stories.56 This skirmish epitomizes the fine line the Specials walked between edgy sexualized programming, the network’s disciplinary power, and yet, the
Specials’ relative freedom to explore controversial material.
Although television historians often lump children and teenagers together within moral panics over culture and media effects, this conflation is quite problematic for apprehending the specifics of late-1960s and 70s concerns over TV content. Children and
teens were clearly not the same audience within the regulatory discourse or in the
understanding of television content producers, both of which increasingly addressed
teens in this period as sexual subjects and proto-political Americans. Within the new social and sexual milieu of the 1970s, the “viewer” itself—that is, the viewer in need of television regulation—was redefined. While other scholars have argued that the ideal
television viewer in need of regulation was largely defined as an innocent child or as a
“youth,” a catch-all designation that largely elides age-specific issues in television
regulatory efforts, the Specials illustrate that a discourse of TV regulation and
programming of the 1970s produced a subtle bifurcation in its configuration of the
viewer in need of protection.57 While representations of violence and sexuality were
56 Tahse continually remarked on his good relationship with young adult authors, including Betsy Byars, with whom he remains friends today. He remarked that “Mildred was relieved” that he opted not to do the story rather than change its fundamental parts. He said that the authors with whom he worked were always happy with the way their stories had been adapted in the After School Specials, from Tahse, Martin, Telephone Interview. 57 Michel Foucault argues that one effect of modernity was the production of a discourse of children’s asexuality. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: 145 certainly imagined as threatening to children and teenagers alike, the teenaged viewing
subject was addressed differently than the child within cultural discourses about sexual
programming on television. That is, teenagers were explicitly addressed as sexual subjects
in the Specials and its clones. Meanwhile, an insistence on the impossibility of childhood
sexuality stood in stark contrast to a threatening inevitability of teen sexuality, and
commercial television content sought both to profit from a teen market and a new
openness about sex and sexuality, while still being perceived as responsive to public
concern (and thus, insulated from public scorn).
By the 1970s, the public discourse about media and sexuality was deeply fraught.
While some commentators proclaimed commercial television’s educational value, trying
to address ever-present allegations of its being a “wasteland,” others turned their
attention to media as a different kind of “educational” tool. A January 1964 Time cover
story proclaimed that the 1960s was witnessing a “second sexual revolution” and
lamented the increased public discussions and representations of sex in the media and in
society.58 The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the proliferation of contraceptive
pills, an increase in divorce rates, single-parent households, “latchkey kids,” and
premarital sex. Dr. David Reuben’s controversial Everything You Always Wanted to
Vintage Books Edition, 1990). Moreover, television’s role in the domestic sphere, in contrast to film of earlier periods that was always imagined as outside of the domestic realm, always envisioned regulatory efforts being directed at the family structure. Spigel argues, using examples like “Telebugeye” advertisements detailing tv-watching’s adverse effects on childhood development, that children were imagined as imperiled by television viewing and television content. See Spigel, Make Room. Also see William Body, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Illinois reprint edition, 1992). 146 Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask was published in 1970, followed quickly by the
famous The Joy of Sex (1972) and Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973). Contemporaneously, the
American Psychiatric Association permanently removed homosexuality from its list of
psychiatric disorders in 1973, a landmark step in rejecting homosexuality’s depiction as
both pathological and imminently “curable.” Moreover, teen magazines like 16 and Tiger
Beat emerged in the mid-sixties to enliven romantic fantasy and sexual titillation in
“teenybopper” girls, aged 10 to 19. Historian Ilana Nash argues that although the
“general tone” of the articles in these magazines “trained girls’ imaginations along
traditionally heterosexual, romantic lines,” the magazines gradually incorporated
feminist principles and encouraged sexual fantasy, often including “‘kissable color
pinups’” that showed teen idols shirtless or posing in bathing suits.59 Nash contends that
“16 and Tiger Beat served a similar function for [girls] that Playboy did for boys,
including the fact that the most privileged photographic space was the centerfold.”
Thus, the After School Specials were situated in and emerged out of a convergence
of multiple contestations over sexualized and sexual teen bodies and the educational and
commercial role of television and other media in mediating such debates in a
rehabilitative capacity for young viewers. The role of television in American society and
in relation to young people was negotiated within a new sexual culture defined by a
58 “The Second Sexual Revolution.” Time. January 24, 1964. This was a cover story. 59 Ilana Nash, “Hysterical Scream or Rebel Yell? The Politics of Teen-Idol Fandom,” in Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 133-150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 144. 147 conflict over sexual openness and sexual education, shifting gender norms, and changing
ideas about “young people” and their place as participatory national citizens.
Amid this flurry of sexual discourse in American popular culture, a growing
debate over sexual education in schools began to boil alongside and within concerns over
sex on TV. A 1969 edition of Good Housekeeping cautioned that there might be “a
knockdown, drag-out battle in your school district this fall over sex education.”60 In her
Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States, Janice M. Irvine
chronicles the rise of sex education debates in the late 1960s and 1970s, which challenged
a Romantic ideal of childhood as characterized by asexuality and a need for protection.61
During this period, professional organizations ranging from the American Medical
Association, to the National Education Association, and finally the American
Association of School Administrators, produced a series of resolutions in support of sex education, while federal funding issued from grants from the U.S. Office of Education to promote sex education in public schools.62 Disability historian Patrick White notes that
similar sex education initiatives also took place among disabled students in the 1970s,
when sex-education-for-the-blind campaigns proliferated to address “a persistent, implicit
anxiety among the educators of the blind that blind adolescents were insufficiently
60 Joseph N. Bell, “Why the Revolt against Sex Education?” Good Housekeeping, November 1969, 63. 61 Irvine borrows this concept of “Romantic childhood” from Anne Higonnet. See Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998). See especially the discussion of the denial of childhood sexuality as a governing feature of modernity in Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). 148 heterosexual and that their ‘restrictive’ environment was to blame.”63 Within sex
education discourse, youth sexuality was configured as simultaneously natural and
threatening to the youth themselves, while an undisciplined and uneducated teen
sexuality threatened the stability of the nation. Sex education (and television’s place
within it) was thus a symptom of cultural decay while it was also lauded as a crucial solution to disciplining the sexual crisis facing young people and the nation.
Commercial television mediated these conflicts over sexual visibility in culture
and this tension between commercial and educational programming in being
characterized by two, seemingly opposing impulses. On one hand, commercial
television engaged in virtuous “social consciousness” programming, which purported to
tackle controversial racial, sexual, and gender issues, and on the other hand, it spurred on
the proliferation of racy sex-themed television, perceived to be degenerative. Social
consciousness programming, or the so-called “turn toward relevance,” was heralded by
Norman Lear. Addressed predominantly to adult audiences, all of these shows featured
frank language and challenges to traditional family structures and sexual norms.64
Alongside television’s “turn toward relevance,” another impetus defining commercial programming of the era was a desire to participate in the levity and liberated sexuality ushered in by the sexual revolution. Fred Silverman, moving from CBS to the
62 Irvine, Talk about Sex, 37. 63 Patrick White, “How the Blind Became Heterosexual,” in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ) 9, no. 1-2 (2003), 136. 64 See Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 203-220. 149 then-struggling ABC, created a new form of television entertainment, dubbed “jiggle
television” by NBC executive Paul Klein to describe ABC’s sex-saturated
programming.65 Television historian Elana Levine argues that Klein held special disdain
for the “juvenile nature of ABC’s sexual content” which seemed to enliven “the sex-
crazed adolescent in all of us.”66 Epitomized by Charlie’s Angels (1976-1981), jiggle
television featured sexual humor, sexual gratification, and skimpy clothing.
Additionally, while soap operas have been part of traditional broadcasting
lineups since the days of radio, they not only skyrocketed in popularity in the mid-
1970s, resulting in Time magazine’s first-ever cover story on the soap opera—“Soap
Operas: Sex and Suffering in the Afternoon”—on January 12, 1976, but also became
increasingly sexually-explicit.67 This Time article also revealed that an estimated 35
million households tuned into at least one soap opera per afternoon, while the most
popular soap of the era, As the World Turns, seized a whopping twelve million viewers
or higher every day. Soap operas of the mid-1970s also continued to provide a forum for
controversial issues, as they grappled with issues such as rape, abortion, child abuse, and
later in the decade, interracial love stories and lesbian plots.
65 For more information on jiggle TV, see Whitney Womack, “Reevaluating ‘Jiggle TV’: Charlie’s Angels at Twenty-Five,” in Disco Divas, 151-171 and Douglas, Where the Girls Are. Silverman’s time at ABC coincided with a host of regulatory initiatives to protect young TV viewers from “objectionable material,” and Silverman undertook a strategy centered around family-friendly viewing, featuring veiled sexual jokes and innuendos that were safe for family consumption. See Levine, Wallowing, 33. 66 Ibid., 37. 67 Ibid., 28. In March of 1973, CBS launched The Young and the Restless, which would “emphasize more the man-woman relationship than the life and death crisis situations used as the prime emotional 150 In the early 1970s, PBS also premiered arguably the first reality television show in TV history. Featuring challenges to marriage and heteronormativity, the documentary-style An American Family addressed controversial issues such as divorce and homosexuality in showing Bill and Pat Loud’s divorce and featuring the first openly
gay character on television, 20-year-old Lance Loud.68 Ten million viewers tuned in to the Loud family, and the show continually courted substantial controversy in the media.69 Finally, on a notorious 1978 episode of NBC’s hit series James at 15, James, played by teen heartthrob Lance Kerwin, lost his virginity in a trip to a local brothel in as episode entitled “The Gift.” Hotly debated was the show’s use of the word
“responsible” as code for protected sex; a Washington Post article “The Initiation of
James: Network Brouhaha Over Teen-Age Virtue” reported sardonically that “James
[wa]s not going to lose his virginity without a fight.”70 In the following episode, James was punished for his transgression, as he feared having contracted a venereal disease from
force in many daytime dramas.” TV Guide later credited the series as establishing the “paradigm” of sexual boldness for other soaps of the era. 68 Lance occasionally sported lipstick and women’s clothing, and in the second episode of the series, he took his mother to a drag show. 69 The Loud Family appeared on the cover of the March 12, 1973 issue of Newsweek. 70 The show was critically acclaimed. Its creator, Dan Wakefield, had his name removed from the episode and threatened to quit the show because of the changes he was forced to make by NBC’s network executives. NBC executive Paul Klein suggested to Wakefield that James should lose his virginity by going to a local brothel, a gift from his uncle for his sixteenth birthday. Wakefield argued that the brothel idea was outdated and insisted that James lose his virginity to a foreign exchange student, with whom he had fallen in love, and that the teens “act responsibly” and discuss birth control. NBC network executives rejected Wakefield’s idea, insisting that the teens not use birth control and if they have sex at all, that it be a moment of “spontaneous passion” after which the girl would have a pregnancy scare so James and she would regret their actions. After this episode, the show’s title was changed to James at 16 and Wakefield resigned in protest. See Tom Shales, “The Initiation of James.” The Washington Post, January 10, 1978, B1. For more information about the controversy, see Levine, Wallowing, 42-43. 151 his “gift.” After this sex-induced entrance into manhood, the show’s title also came of
age to “James at 16” instead of 15. Thus, although the After School Specials featured
multiple storylines about teen sex, it was still a highly contentious moral and regulatory
issue.
Television scholar Elana Levine argues that a “discourse of youth sexual
endangerment” was constructed by and reflected within made-for-TV movies and
regulatory debates about television content, both sites working in tandem to produce a
moral panic about the dangers of sexual liberalization engendered by the sexual
revolution. This panic over sexual danger depicted in myriad made-for-TV movies not
only struck fear into viewers but also titillated them with salacious content; its role as
educator to sexually endangered youth tempered accusations of exploitativeness. Yet sex-
themed programming was essential to ABC’s “ascension” from a third-place network to
an industry leader, most notably, in its made-for-TV movies for Movie of the Week.71
However, sexy television also incited many regulations meant to curb youth intake of such shows, such as the 1975 implementation of “family viewing” time as the first hour of prime time, though Levine notes that such measures lacked teeth, offering
“no specific definition of ‘family viewing’ and leaving the onus for regulating children to the networks themselves rather than the FCC. 72 Just one short year later, the family
71 Levine, Wallowing, 19. 72 Ibid., 96-99. 152 hour policy was removed from the NAB TV Code, though networks assured onlookers
that they would continue to self-police and protect young viewers from obscene content.
The implicit regulatory promise went further: that TV would responsibly
manage and channel teen sexuality into proper heterosexuality—albeit heterosexual
exploration that neither culminated in reproduction nor sexually-transmitted diseases.
This “Romantic Ideal” of childhood had already been challenged during this period of
sexual upheaval, in that it also witnessed unprecedented youth political activism, an
activism seasoned with violent encounters with the state, most tragically in the Kent
State massacre of 1970. Concretized most powerfully by the ratification of the 26th
Amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the legal voting age to eighteen, teenagers’ capabilities as politically-engaged, sexually-active citizens had been asserted in unprecedented ways in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That young people participated in a redefinition of youth and its relationship to civic duty and American citizenship undoubtedly exacerbated cultural debates about sexual openness.
A combination of educational value and sexual titillation, the After School Specials combined the two dominant impulses of 1970s TV—“relevance” and sex-themed programming—by offering moral lessons about sexual responsibility alongside and within sexual titillation and the incitement of teen sexual desire, both in the characters onscreen and in the show’s teenaged viewing public. While the After School Specials certainly fit into this growth of sex-themed programming, they did not focus on teens as
153 always inherently threatened by their own sexuality. As a new rehabilitative approach to teen sexuality and to television programming for teenagers, the Specials presented a disciplined vision of sexual liberation, “protecting” teens from sex by configuring itself as prophylactic edutainment. Multiple episodes discussed the perils of sex such as sexually- transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, but rather than discouraging sexuality among young people, the Specials attempted to negotiate the complex terrain of young adult sexuality within sexually liberalized times to encourage sexual exploration while still channeling teen sexuality into heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and “maturity,” emblematized by safety and responsibility.
The Specials were not only situated in the middle of warring factions between the denigration of commercial television, the assertion of television’s educational value, and within increasingly sexualized television fare amid a boiling, nationwide sex education debate. The series also participated in a critical redefining of the boundaries between
“youth” and “adult,” providing provocative sexualized content for young adult viewers while simultaneously disciplining their sexual desire by situating the show’s commercialized “sex education” within educational and moral frameworks. Starring many of Tiger Beat’s alluring teen centerfolds, the show encouraged sexual identification with its protagonists but carefully managed that sexuality within the series’ characteristic moral didacticism and its staunch policing of nonnormative sexualities and behaviors.
154 Thus, the After School Specials were an effect of the biopolitical power of the era, but
they produced other versions of teen sexuality than sheer sexual endangerment.
Skating Toward Normal: “The Ice Skating Rink” and “The Heartbreak Winner”
The After School Specials both instantiated and employed a rehabilitative logic as
an historically-specific mode of addressing teenagers that combined new “flexible”
gender roles espoused by the feminist and feminist men’s movements with a frankness in
sexual education and visibility in the wake of sexual liberation. The Specials’
rehabilitative approach to adolescence and teen sexuality imagined that “if you devote[d]
sufficient resources, it [wa]s possible to…bring each person, however great the burden
she carrie[d], to reoccupy a normal place in the group of the able (the normal).”73
Through prosthetics and medical interventions that discipline the body to self-care and the cultivation of “the disabled individual’s desire for assimilation to the norm,” Henri
Jacques Stiker argues that the twentieth century “mark[ed] the appearance of a culture that attempt[ed] to complete the act of identification, of making identical” through integration rather than exclusion.74 Thus, rather than “excluding” people with disabilities or teen sexuality, the Specials worked by strategically integrating disability and sexuality
as two important aspects of teen coming of age—overcoming the co-constitutive
73 Stiker, History of Disability, 135 74 David T. Mitchell, introduction to A History of Disability, by Henri Jaques Stiker, History of Disability, xi; and Stiker, History of Disability, 128. 155 “disabilities” of adolescence and sexual repression in order to achieve healthy, able-
bodiedness epitomized by heterosexuality, or in other words, “identicalness” to the ideal
citizen(s) of the 1970s.
Such a rehabilitative approach also depended on another unique feature of the
new rehabilitative mode, an anxiety over a perceived “loss” and a belief that it could be
masked or repaired. In the case of 1970s teen culture, commercial television, according to
its harshest critics, had apparently corrupted or even “disabled” teenagers. While this
betrays nostalgia for a teen untouched by the dangers of television or of a new sexualized
culture, the new teen TV proposed rehabilitation as a solution to the teen’s disablement,
a disciplinary project that would only celebrate difference in order to make teens
identical with the desired citizen-image of the 1970s—one characterized by flexible,
heterosexual, able-bodied patriotism.
In the Specials, disability acted as what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
call “narrative prosthesis” or the process by which disability materializes as a “fleshy
example of the body's unruly resistance to the cultural desire to ‘enforce normalcy’” and
“a crutch upon which…narratives lean for their representational power.”75 Disability and
disease thus became the material basis upon which normal bodies were rendered visible.
However, this enforcement of normalcy also occurred through the policing of normative gender and sexuality in the cultural logic that queer-crip theorist Robert
75 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 48-49. 156 McRuer has named “compulsory able-bodiedness,” or the co-dependent projects of
compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. The Specials appeared in the era in which feminists like Adrienne Rich were theorizing compulsory heterosexuality for the first time, and the shows’ rehabilitative logic demonstrated not only that compulsory able-bodiedness was already working in the 1970s alongside and within compulsory heterosexuality but also that both cultural logics were emerging in ways specific to teen bodies, although already manifested in adults. After School Specials likewise were meant
to channel teens into heterosexuality—rehabilitating their always-already embattled
sexuality through narratives of disability.
Two stories about ice skating, “The Ice Skating Rink” (1973) and “The
Heartbreak Winner” (1980) illustrate the differences in the treatment of disability in
narratives with male and female protagonists, respectively.76 “The Ice Skating Rink”
deals with a boy’s stuttering problem, while “The Heartbreak Winner” explores juvenile
arthritis in a teen athlete. I do not mean to obliterate the obvious differences between
juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA) and a stutter, I analyze them as representations of
disability because they are constructed as “handicaps”; this designation, and the
76 That there were two figure skating stories just following or in the years of the Winter Olympic Games is not surprising. Maggie especially seems based physically on famed women’s figure skater Dorothy Hamill, as the famous bobbed haricut popularized by Hamill in the late 1970s when she garnered a gold medal win in the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. 157 rehabilitative logic of the series more generally, works to collapse differences among
disabilities.77
Described as “the story of a teenage boy who rises above the handicap of his stuttering,” “The Ice Skating Rink” (1975), one of ABC’s earliest After School Specials, meditates on issues of proper heterosexual development and disability.78 Set in a small
farming town in middle America, this “icy tale with a happy ending” follows the
teenaged, Tucker “Tuck” Faraday (Stewart Peterson) in a coming-of-age story about overcoming teen awkwardness and earning paternal respect.79 Producer Tahse said he
never noticed that so many of his shows focused on characters with disabilities but asserted that it fit into his desire to depict stories about kids “getting out of a ghetto” or
“kids who have a dream of wanting to do something and are held back by their parent’s prejudice or lack of understanding.”80 When I asked him about shows featuring
disability, he immediately referred to “The Skating Rink,” saying that Tuck’s stutter “is
not that dangerous—it’s not multiple sclerosis,” but he argues that his focus on disability
was “without question” a “teaching tool” so that “other kids watching with slight
disabilities could identify with it and see that somebody could overcome it.” Tahse
77 Henri Jacques Stiker argues that the obliteration of difference between disabilities—and “difference” in general—is the modis operandi of rehabilitation when he says that “Two discourses arise [in rehabilitation]. The one proposes to make careful distinctions among the kinds and classes of disability, the other to make the boundaries so fuzzy that there is scarcely more than a single class of the disabled.” See Stiker, History of Disability, 156. 78 “TV Highlights.” The Washington Post, February 5, 1975, B11. 79 Emily Fisher, “An Icy Tale with a Happy Ending.” The Washington Post, February 5, 1975, B9. 80 Tahse, Telephone Interview. 158 argues this is a “subtle recognition of the intelligence of your audience,” in that viewers
would identify with Tuck, even if they didn’t stutter: “‘I don’t stutter, but I have a limp’
or ‘I wear glasses’ but [Tuck] got over it and became something.”81 Thus, the After School
Specials used disability as narrative prosthesis, as a “teaching tool,” and while it never
imagined a “severely” disabled audience as potential viewers, the Specials generated an
image of adolescence as disabling.82
In this New York Times “Recommended Viewing” program, Tuck was “a cornflake-faced country kid, tousle-headed and snubnosed, with a Colgate smile.”83
Although the movie detailed his hardships with girls, one reviewer noted Tuck’s sex appeal: “[Tuck] looks like the kind of golden boy for whom life is a breeze” but though
“all the girls should like him,” Tuck was “an alltime (sic) loser.”84 Depending on which
summary of the story one reads, the narrative trajectory of the story is described not as
overcoming a “handicap” or disability, but rather as “overcoming shyness” or “a gawky lad learns to skate.”85 Although the narrative explicitly presents Tuck’s stutter as a
81 Ibid. 82 This educational framework was rewarded, as Martin Tahse Productions garnered The Institute for Education by Radio and Television’s Ohio State Award and a Christopher Award for this episode. First given in 1949, the Christopher Awards are presented directly to writers, producers, directors and illustrators in the publishing, film, broadcast TV and cable industries and recognize “profiles in courage, determination and vision, and chronicles of constructive action and empowerment” that “affirm the highest values in the human spirit.” 83 Fisher, “Icy Tale.” 84 Ibid. 85 See the descriptions of this episode The Internet Movie Database.
an unnatural condition, a traumatic disability. However, all of these versions of Tuck’s
disability also function as impediments to the development of his proper heterosexuality
and manhood, as his overcoming disability and achieving heterosexuality are positioned
within national iconography of disability and triumphant overcoming.
Throughout the story, Tuck slinks around and avoids talking almost entirely due
to his “shameful” speech problem. However, when the narrative shows Tuck’s having a
nightmare, the audience realizes that Tuck’s stutter developed from witnessing a
traumatic event: the drowning of his mother in a flood when he was a child. We learn
this from Tuck’s unsympathetic father, Myron (Rance Howard), as he talks about
Tuck’s speech disparagingly to his wife, Ida, at various points in the movie; his dialogue is interspersed with cross-cuts to Tuck to establish that Tuck can hear his father’s disappointment in his immaturity and weakness. Later in the narrative, Pete Degley
(Jerry Dexter), a former professional figure skater and owner of a new ice skating rink, gives Tuck skating lessons, which boosts his self-confidence and transforms him into an economically-productive man.
Early in the movie, Tuck’s struggles at school and at home are linked directly to his disability and positioned proximally to national iconography. In Tuck’s aforementioned embarrassing classroom encounter, Tuck and his stutter are symbolically linked with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the camera focuses on him while
160 his teacher gives a lesson on FDR’s overcoming his paralysis. The elderly female teacher,
Mrs. Bayliss (Molly Dodd) says that Roosevelt “guided our country through the worst
depression…and…saw our country through most of World War II,” but, she continues,
“the amazing thing about this man was that in spite of the fact that both his legs were paralyzed, he was able to rise above this affliction to become one of our greatest presidents.” The camera focuses on Mrs. Bayliss from a low angle, mimicking the perspective of the students sitting at their desks, so that the viewer is symbolically positioned in the classroom. Throughout her lesson, the camera continuously cross-cuts from her to Tuck’s look of intense concentration, in comparison to the other teenagers in the room, who seem distracted. Once, the camera cuts to a pretty blonde girl, Elva
(Cindy Eilbacher) who smiles at Tuck. Tuck notices her but does not smile back. In the foreground of the shot of Mrs. Bayliss, a book title clearly reads Voices of a Nation, a title which will become ironic as she calls on Tuck to answer a question and asks him to stand and face the class to answer. The prominent positioning of the book’s title implies that “voices of a nation” are meant to be the students. However, Tuck’s “voice” comes out haltingly, and amid the laughter of his classmates. Already established as a focused student, Tuck lies about not doing the required reading to avoid further talking.
Although the teacher scolds the class for laughing, the final image of the scene is of Elva,
specifically, laughing as a defeated Tuck takes his seat. Through its invocation of
Roosevelt, this scene serves to construct Tuck’s stutter as a disability, and it links it to
161 heterosexual failure, in that a smiling girl who may have initially been interested in him ends up laughing at his stutter. This linkage also positions Tuck’s disability and sexuality squarely within a framework of “overcoming disability.” Tuck will develop his “voice,” while the other voices of the nation, the student-subjects onscreen and in the audience will learn from his struggles.
Tuck’s disability is linked further to his heterosexual failure when Elva asks if she can walk him home from school, and Tuck falls victim to her duplicity. As Elva talks nonstop and attempts to ask Tuck questions, Tuck avoids talking entirely and walks almost too quickly for her to keep up. When Elva invites him to sit down with her, she looks longingly at him and asks suggestively if he has “a girl,” after begging him to talk and threatening to leave if he doesn’t. Tuck leans in to kiss Elva after she begins stroking his chest through his shirt. Abruptly, Elva slaps him, darts upright, and screams dramatically, “Dummy! I thought you would talk! I told my girlfriend I could make you talk! I had a bet with her…I can make boys do anything I want!...All you can do is be fresh, because you don’t have to talk to do that!” Elva establishes herself as a manipulative girl, and thus, while the audience is meant to feel pity for Tuck, we are also meant to feel that his failure with Elva is no big loss or that perhaps Elva must be tamed or rehabilitated as well.
Earlier in the story, we learn from Tuck’s little sister that he does not ride the bus home like all of the other kids, because kids on the bus “pick on him and call him
162 dummy.” Predictably, cantankerous Myron is unsympathetic to his son’s plight and growls, “Looks like you just can’t stand to act like everybody else! Gotta be different, like you’s tetched.” Myron argues that teasing is “no reason for not ridin’ the bus,” especially when walking home from school every day makes Myron have to buy new shoes for him all the time. Emasculated in front of his younger sister, Tuck’s stutter is not only linked to mental illness, in that he just might be “tetched,” but also serves as evidence of his inferior intellect.
While Tuck’s failure with girls is associated simultaneously with his disability and his natural teenage awkwardness, the story also circumscribes what constitutes
“good” heterosexuality by imagining “bad” heterosexual boys and girls. The manipulative Elva is the first example. However, Tuck’s two older brothers, Tom (Billy
Bowles) and Clete (Robert Clotworthy) also serve as “normal” but bad boys. Though constantly the object of undeserved paternal scorn, Tuck is quickly established as the most responsible boy in the household. The movie introduces Tom and Clete as they careen into the driveway in a pickup truck. Spilling out of the truck and playfully cuffing one another in spite of Myron’s repeated requests for help with the chores, the boys talk about getting girls and buying a “rock guitar.” While Myron screams “What’s the use of having sons?” at the two frivolous teens and complains about shouldering all of the farm’s responsibilities, Tom and Clete completely disregard his attempt to wield patriarchal power.
163 However, everything begins to change for Tuck when Pete encourages him to try figure skating. While Pete immediately takes an interest in Tuck, he initially seems to take advantage of a vulnerable young teen. Pete and Tuck are often completely unsupervised, as Pete gives him a tour of the rink and encourages him to try skating.
When Tuck says that he couldn’t skate, Pete quickly offers to give him his first skating lesson, if he comes back at night. Tuck shamefully tells him that he cannot afford to pay for lessons, and Pete replies, “Nobody said anything about paying…but listen, keep it under your hat, huh? I wouldn’t want anyone knowing I was giving lessons before the rink opened, especially not for free…right?” Night falls, and Tuck sneaks from his house to go to the rink. Pete skates over to Tuck, puts his hand on the back of his neck, and guides him back to get a pair of skates; Pete cautions Tuck that he’ll be cold in what he’s wearing and urges him to borrow Pete’s sweater to stay warm.
Pete’s special attention toward Tuck is proven to be innocuous but initially seems strange, since it is clandestine, homoerotic, and focused exclusively on Tuck.
Although Pete’s wife, Lilly, is spontaneously introduced much later in the narrative, at the outset Pete is single, new in town, and without friends his own age. Moreover, the ice rink’s positioning in the middle of a rural space already serves to isolate Pete, as figure skating is coded as a frivolous and feminine luxury activity for Tuck in contrast to his work on the farm. Tuck tells Pete that he parents would think he was “loony” if he
164 were found to be, in his little sister’s words, “skating like a girl.”86 Finally, while a 1970s audience might have presumed Pete’s heterosexuality, Tuck’s and Pete’s association with the feminized sport of figure skating necessitated an active narrative recoding, or
“rehabilitation,” of their perceived compromised masculinity, recasting them as heterosexual, able, masculine men.
While Tuck’s disability queers him because it causes his insufficient heterosexuality, Pete, who has knee problems from skating, and Tuck are coded queer and disabled within the story, but they are both rehabilitated into “better” heterosexuals than Tuck’s brothers, Tom and Clete, or father, Myron. Pete’s and Tuck’s figure skating is linked to their respective disabilities, as they bond over their mutual status as
“handicapped,” and skating is configured not only as mode of overcoming disability but also of achieving normative heterosexuality. During his first skating lesson, Pete demonstrates one of the moves that Tuck was unsuccessfully attempting but crashes to the ice. He tells Tuck that he has a knee problem and says matter-of-factly, “It’s a handicap—there’s no doubt about that. I guess everyone has some sort of handicap to wrestle with. I’m lucky it’s just my knee. Look at me; I got my own skating rink, right?”
Just as Roosevelt overcame polio to lead a nation and Pete overcame a knee injury to
86 While I chose not to include it in this article, this theme of a rural boy’s participation in a feminized sport is taken up again in “A Special Gift” (1979), which won a prestigious Peabody Award. In this episode, Peter Harris must choose between being a basketball player or a ballet dancer, in spite of the disapproval of his family and harassment from his friends for being a “sissy.” Like “The Skating Rink’s” Tucker Faraday, Peter Harris is a farmer, and his ballet dancing is often crosscut with “masculine” images like playing basketball or bailing hay in the barn with his father. 165 own a rink, Tuck eventually finds his true talent in figure skating after realizing he
“do[es]n’t have to be a good talker to skate.”
The narrative recodes both Pete and Tuck as masculine men by recasting their
participation in skating as economically productive and by spotlighting the heterosexual
pairings it provides. The climax of the Special occurs when Tuck performs publicly in
front of the entire town. Before this, the show introduces Pete’s wife, Lily, and she
quickly summarizes how she met Pete as his doubles partner and has been caring for his
parents while he has been constructing the rink. Her arrival is somewhat abrupt, as she
is not mentioned at all until her appearance onscreen. Pete passes Lily to Tuck,
informing him that Lily will be his partner for the opening night festivities at the rink.
At the Faraday dinner table just prior to Tuck’s opening night performance,
Tom and Clete rib Tuck about looking “kinda spiffy” and ask tauntingly if he has a date
to bring to the rink; they burst into laughter at the impossibility of Tuck’s having a date without waiting for Tuck’s reply. Later, the rink is established as a place of heterosexual courtship, as Tom and Clete playfully grope their respective girls on the ice, falling down gawkily and laughing. Their inability to function on the ice will stand in stark contrast to Tuck’s nimble athletic prowess.
During Tuck’s and Lily’s flawless performance, images of an incredulous and awestruck Myron are interspersed with the footage of Tuck’s routine; even Tom and
Clete smile in wonderment at Tuck’s hidden talent. Pete is ecstatic over their
166 performance and says excitedly to Tuck, “I thought I was going to have to carry some of
those screechin’ girls out tonight! Tucker Faraday, from now on, you’re going to have
to beat those girls off with a club!” Introducing Pete’s wife to the story resolves any vagueness about Pete’s sexuality and displays Tuck’s able-bodiedness and heterosexuality to the entire town. Although Tuck has been a successful singles skater throughout the narrative, he only needed a female “partner” to publicly demonstrate his able-bodiedness and heterosexuality; after all, now he’ll need to beat away gaggles of determined girls rather than avoiding their gazes.
Once the school “dummy” shunned by the girls, Tuck is now a viable heterosexual man. Wise to the ways of duplicitous girls like Elva, Tuck has also gained
his father’s respect as an economically-productive and responsible family man. In the
end, Pete offers to pay Tuck to give skating lessons at the rink and gives him one
hundred dollars for his performance. Tuck turns most of the money over to Myron and
tells him to buy his wife a coveted new stove, without telling her that the money came
from Tuck. Just as Pete’s handicap is overcome by his ownership of the rink, Tuck’s
skating is recast as economically productive rather than artistic or indulgent. Although
Myron says that “prancin’ around that skatin’ rink with a girl” can hardly be considered
“workin’,” the money is “honest” and “appreciated.” Tuck’s father concludes that
Tuck’s difference from his brothers is a good thing rather than something in need of cure. Therefore, Pete and Tuck are recoded as masculine—in spite of their “prancin’”
167 with (or without) girls—via their economic productivity. However, it is a kind of
flexible “new masculinity” that historian David Savran argues became “hegemonic” in
the 1970s; this softer masculinity involved “a reconsolidation of the characteristics and
fantasies associated with a residual, entrepreneurial masculinity combined with an
avowal of certain qualities traditionally associated with femininity.”87 Rather than trying
to assert that figure skating itself is masculine, owning the rink or giving lessons for
money legitimates skating as masculine productive work, while sensitive Tuck
represents a more “whole” man than his father or brothers.
Tuck will now have to “beat away” gaggles of “screeching girls” with a stick
while his opportunity to teach figure skating lessons to earn extra cash for the family
renders permissible his participation in skating without compromising his
heterosexuality or masculinity. In the end, Tuck’s health and able-bodiedness are
inextricably linked to his heterosexuality—he is construed as being at his “healthiest” and
most mature when his solo skating becomes co-ed pairs skating. As Tuck overcomes his
stutter, his triumph over it is linked to national iconography through the comparison
with Roosevelt and the continual reiteration of Tuck’s economic productivity.
Five years later, the After School Specials broadcast “Heartbreak Winner” (also known as “The Heartbreak Winner”), which followed Olympic-bound figure skater
Maggie McDonald (Melissa Sherman) from her unbeatable performances on the ice to
87 David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 125. 168 her diagnosis with and rehabilitation for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA). The
Washington Post asserts that “all is not Olympic gold that glitters” in that the
“‘Heartbreak’ tale” encourages Maggie to “learn that giving is more important than
victory or gold.”88 In addition to its critical acclaim, “Heartbreak Winner” garnered an
Emmy award for “Best Cinematography.”
While “The Skating Rink’s” task is to make Tuck an appropriately masculine
citizen by overcoming his disability and asserting his heterosexuality, “Heartbreak
Winner” works to recode Maggie as appropriately feminine, by encouraging her
heterosexual pairing and her “acceptance” of her disability rather than her overcoming of it. This acceptance involves her focusing less on her career and more on her social life, specifically directing her interest toward another male figure skater, Bobby (Chris
Hagan), and helping Joey Taylor (Mark James), a young, African-American boy with paraplegia, to walk again. While Tuck’s heteronormativity is linked to his able- bodiedness, only when Maggie accepts rehabilitation and her “limitations” does her heteronormative coupling occur. Moreover, in contrast to Tuck, Maggie can only be truly “healthy” when she is taking care of others, like Joey and her friend, Cindy, who also aspires to be an Olympic Gold-medalist in ice skating. In the end, the movie emphasizes Maggie’s acceptance of her body and her subjugation of individual desires in favor of collective goals.
88 “‘Heartbreak’ Tale: All is Not Olympic Gold that Glitters.” The Washington Post, February 10, 1980, TV43. 169 The movie simultaneously valorizes and labels excessive Maggie’s dedication to skating, because her rigorous practice schedule inhibits her ability to partake in traditional teenaged life—most importantly, the pursuit of boys. The narrative actively contrasts her with Cindy, a fellow figure skater who lacks Maggie’s diligence for practice and consistently chastises Maggie for being “a gold medal bore” because she never socializes with friends. While bad-girl Cindy dates boys and goes to parties, “Miss
Perfect” Maggie arrives early and leaves late from the rink.
Although Maggie generally skates flawlessly, in the opening of the episode, she crashes to the ice unexpectedly while doing jumps. Mortified, she skates off of the ice, clearly in pain. Later, we discover that this is the first evidence of the onset of her JRA.
When Bobby offers to help her, she yanks her arm away, violated by his assistance. In contrast to Cindy’s popularity with her peers and with boys, Maggie is seen as a judgmental loner. As opposed to Cindy, who dons fashionable clothing, long hair, and makeup, Maggie appears more masculine, with her short hair and tomboyish dress.
Moreover, her mother asserts that she “takes after” her father “with her drive and determination,” while her father jokingly tells Maggie that she should be sure not to
“marry an attorney” like him. In spite of Maggie’s obvious dedication to skating, her parents discipline her goal-oriented personality by talking about her eventual marriage, anxiously reasserting a traditional heteronormative version of her femininity. Thus, as
Maggie’s commitment to her sport is valorized by constant comparison to and desire to
170 improve Cindy’s work ethic, Maggie’s myopic pursuit of the gold medal at the expense
of a “normal” teen girl’s life is subtly critiqued as both “gender trouble” and as reaching
adulthood too quickly, even before her JRA is discovered.
Maggie does compete in sectionals, but as in practice, her knee gives out during a crucial jump, sending her crashing to the ice. Courageously finishing the routine, Maggie manages to win the competition in spite of her fall. Standing in the middle of the ice amid resounding applause, she collapses, exhausted, and is rushed to the hospital. Before and after her diagnosis, Maggie’s status as a “bad patient” is repeated throughout the episode, as she constantly undermines the doctor’s orders and resists rehabilitation. Her inability to “get well” and grow up, the story tells us, stems from her inability to identify as “sick” and submit to rehabilitation.
Maggie continually lies to doctors and her parents about her pain level, and after her diagnosis, she denies her disabled status, even trying to overcome her disability by convincing Bobby to help her sneak out to skate against the doctor’s orders for her to rest. The transgression of the doctor’s orders lands a feverish Maggie back in the hospital, and she growls at the nurses, “I hate hospitals; they’re for people with something wrong with them. Sick people. Not me.”
Maggie’s acceptance of JRA occurs through her relationship with other boys in the story: Bobby, who becomes a quasi-boyfriend and the young disabled Joey Taylor.
By becoming a girlfriend to Bobby and a mother figure to Joey, Maggie’s rehabilitation
171 is complete. In the end, the Maggie’s rehabilitation works, in the words of disability
studies scholar Martin Sullivan, to “restore docility and…productivity” to her disabled
body, while her competitiveness is productively channeled into coaching rather than
into resisting her doctors.89
As he wheels in to visit Maggie, Joey vibrantly introduces himself as a “pro- basketball player” who is on “sick leave” from the New York Knicks. Maggie eyes him skeptically, and picking his afro, Joey says confidently, “Actually, I’m Mohammed Ali.
One punch and you’re out to lunch.” Although he is the first person to make Maggie laugh since her diagnosis, their interaction quickly sours when he says, “So, you got
JRA, huh?” Maggie screams that he is mistaken and orders him from the room. Her dismissal of Joey reaches its height when she snarls that she and Joey are “losers” and
“failures” because they will never be able to play competitive sports. While shunning
Joey, she also withdraws from her friends; her parents repeatedly tell her that Bobby and her other skating friends want to come and visit her.
At first, Joey’s “can-do” attitude positions him, in contrast to the pessimistic, self- hating Maggie, as the ideal patient. However, as she rides in a wheelchair pushed by
Pearl, an African-American nurse, Maggie learns that Joey’s optimism is mere “slick street talk” to “cover” his fear that his upcoming operation will not fix his condition.
Nurse Pearl tells Maggie that he “do[es]n’t need the wheelchair” and that the doctors
89 Martin Sullivan, “Subjected Bodies: Paraplegia, Rehabilitation, and the Politics of Movement,” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 172 have high hopes that Joey will walk again. As she speaks, Maggie is visually linked to another woman who stands in the foreground with Pearl and is revealed to be deaf. She is never introduced to Maggie or the audience, but she has the same color hair and haircut and is wearing the same robe as Maggie, albeit in a different color. Pearl and the woman conduct a conversation in ASL, and the deaf woman not only enjoys a positive relationship with Pearl but also “cleans up” after Maggie by wheeling her empty wheelchair back into the hospital. Maggie’s linkage with a deaf woman, who seems compliant and conversational with the medical staff, foreshadows Maggie’s eventual compliance—and resultant happiness—with medical authority.
However, until they are successfully allied by the doctors’ machinations, Joey and Maggie are unified by their resistance to rehabilitation, exasperating the doctors because they have been “medically successful” with Joey’s and Maggie’s bodies but the patients have not been mentally responsive to rehab efforts. Joey “still won’t try to walk,” and even though Maggie is healing from her recent flare-up of JRA, she will not
“accept that she’ll never compete again.” The doctors develop an alternative strategy: enlisting Maggie’s help with Joey’s rehabilitation in the hopes that it will spur both of them to rehabilitate themselves.
Before Maggie can participate in this plan, she must first accept that she “ha[s]
JRA” and “learn how to live with it” with the assistance of Bobby, linking
Press, 2005), 27-45. 173 heteronormative romance not to able-bodiedness, but to a rehabilitating-subject. Armed
with a bouquet of flowers, Bobby sneaks up flirtatiously on a sulking Maggie and pleads
that JRA “doesn’t mean that…life is over or that you can’t teach somebody else to be the
best skater in the world. It just means it won’t be you, Maggie.” Maggie screams, “Why
don’t you go and kick some other cripple when they’re down!...I hate being a failure,
and I can’t stand being a cripple” to which Bobby replies, “Then stop being one!” In the
rehabilitative ethos of the story, just as teens can willingly inhabit a rehabilitating-
citizen-subject position, teens can also actively “cripple” themselves. Rather than
inhabiting the bitter and noncompliant identity of “cripple,” the rehabilitative logic of
the story works to make Maggie identical to “normal” able-bodied people.
Maggie should simply “stop being” a cripple, and only after crashing to the
ground and being picked up and kissed by Bobby does she accept her diagnosis. In doing
so, she also distances herself from other (un-rehabilitate-able?) cripples: “I’m not a
cripple, and I’m not a failure…I’ve got JRA, and I’ve gotta learn to live with it.”
Rehabilitation becomes both a bodily performance and a state of mind. Maggie’s
budding relationship with Bobby links heteronormativity with hospital rehabilitation
efforts, and although compulsory able-bodiedness dictated that Tuck overcome his
disability to assert his masculinity and heterosexuality, it plays out with Maggie to
construct her into a continually “rehabilitating subject” rather than a static, able-body.
While “overcoming” narratives like “The Skating Rink” proclaims individual triumph
174 over disability, “Heartbreak Winner” valorizes but also disciplines interdependence
through a reassertion of heteronormative femininity and a cultivation of a rehabilitating-
subject. Maggie’s “coming-of-age” occurs not only through her acceptance of her
disability and her bodily and emotional rehabilitation but also through her participation in the rehabilitation of others—namely, Joey and Cindy.
The scene in which Joey walks again for the first time is of a piece with
American Telethons, as crowds of people yell for Joey to “get up out of that chair” and try to walk. A scene of multicultural solidarity, Joey’s struggle to walk provides a liberalizing rallying point for racial harmony and heterogeneity, as Indian, white,
African-American and Asian hospital kids join in cheering on Joey. In spite of Nurse
Pearl’s coaxing that “[c]rutches are better than a wheelchair any day,” Joey crashes to the
ground in a discouraged heap. Everyone falls silent except for Maggie, who emerges
from her room to encourage Joey that “when you fall down, you have to get up again.”
Once resistant to medical authority, Joey and Maggie now represent the ultimate
rehabilitating-subject-citizens and the triumph of liberal antiracism by yielding to the
will of the doctors, partnering across the color line, and in Maggie’s case, transforming
her body and her JRA into an object of knowledge for Bobby to “figure out” as her
friend and potential love interest. Moreover, her friend, Cindy, who always struggled
with commitment to skating, is “inspired” by Maggie’s courage and work ethic, and she
175 too is rehabilitated by Maggie.90 In the end, Maggie walks onto the ice without skates
and agrees to coach Cindy, concluding triumphantly, “I told you. This is Maggie
McDonald’s year to go to the Olympics. It may not be my medal, but it’ll be a gold
medal!”
In their treatment of disability, sexuality, and coming-of-age, ABC’s After School
Specials were an entirely new television form for a brand new audience segment. Their
format was distinct from educational television’s objective to democratize access to high
art by offering televised theater and opera, in the hopes that adult viewers would be
uplifted. In contrast, the new teen TV meant to train teens into proactive, responsible
citizens via racy commercial fare, which was an invention of the market rather than
something desired by industry professionals or activists proclaiming the virtue of
educational television. Rather, this rehabilitative model was specifically geared toward
teens rather than adults and depended on configuring teens as “disabled” viewers and
onscreen characters to teach them how to “overcome” their problems to achieve
adulthood. Moreover, in an era in which “integration” manifested itself in civil rights
movements of all varieties, this rehabilitative mode represented a neoliberal
rehabilitative “wish…to make identical without making equal.”91
90 While I chose not to include it in this article, another episode that features a similar trajectory is “A Matter of Time.” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. 11 February 1981. 91 Stiker, History of Disability, 150. 176 “Rehabilitative” edutainment was never meant to be “curative” in its discursive construction of teenaged bodily normality and abnormality. Whereas a curative discourse imagines a culmination to medical or cultural management of a body-in-need- of-cure, a rehabilitative discourse is a disciplinary tactic of power that continually produces both normative and nonnormative bodies. In producing the teen body as always in need of cure or growth, the disciplinary logic of rehabilitation autopoetically ensures its own perpetual continuation. Thus, by configuring teenagers as already-always disabled and imbricating them in rehabilitative storylines—culturally and within television content—teens like Tuck and Maggie become “docile bodies,” biopolitically produced as malleable and productive in embracing citizenship’s rehabilitative management. Within the television content of the 1970s and its biopolitical engagement with the teen bodies both on- and off-screen, this was never a relationship of total submission. Rather, the rehabilitative and educational discourses of television invited and required the participation of self-surveilling teenagers in their own overcoming or acceptance. Thus, these narratives encouraged liberatory and active “exploration” and assimilation rather than passive submission.
The After School Specials’ demise was generally blamed on the rise in popularity of syndicated talk shows coupled with the proliferation of treatment of teen issues in
177 movies and 1990s primetime teen TV series, such as Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000).92
Although Disney discontinued the series upon its purchase of the ABC network, its didactic, issue-driven formula lives on in traces, for instance, in the “very special episode” format of contemporary teen dramas. In later years, the Specials often appeared as an object of satire and nostalgia, as on the popular Comedy Central show Strangers with
Candy (1999-2000). In spite of its status as a contemporary object of ridicule, the series’ place in television history in addressing teens as a serious audience distinct from children, its innovative educational format, and its lasting legacy on teen programming should not be understated.
“Heartbreak Winner” and “The Skating Rink” positioned teen coming of age within national iconography and presented overcoming or accepting “handicaps” as indispensable to teen coming-of-age as sexual citizens. They represented a consistent narrative and structural focus of ABC’s After School Specials. Emerging during an increasing industry thrust for educational television fare, the After School Specials’ rehabilitative mode often involved bittersweet and incomplete endings, indicating that a
92 The affiliates were actually part of the show’s success and its demise. Tahse noted that “once critics started reviewing the shows, the affiliates really joined in and made it all possible” because “once the affiliates jumped in, every city started showing them, and then the advertisers jumped in.” Tahse notes that the Specials were always economically precarious, because they were “really at the whim of affiliates” who had to voluntarily “give up” the hour timeslot for the Specials rather than filling it with more profitable commercial programming. However, he says the show’s cancellation “…is a mystery because it happened after Disney bought ABC, because you’d think that Disney would be interested in keeping these shows on the air. But they were stealing the time from the affiliates, it wasn’t network time that was being used. They were on every other Wednesday, so the affiliate had to take something they’d have programmed out, in which they got all the money, and put in the After School Special, in which they’d have to share with the network.” From Tahse, KPCC interview and Tahse, Telephone Interview. 178 teen’s ability to solve a given problem did not mean they were “cured.” Rather, the
Specials presented coming-of-age as a constant, self-surveilling construction process, while
teen sexual exploration was both encouraged and safely contained within romantic,
heteronormative love or within the danger of imminent sexually-transmitted disease.
Finally, as television itself continued to negotiate its place in the American family and
mediate the turmoil of the times, this rehabilitative logic toward teens not only imagined itself to help rehabilitate teens through their problems but also to rehabilitate commercial programming’s image from one of frivolity and scandal to one of social responsibility.
The After School Specials encouraged and contained difference in its protagonists and eschewed social critiques of the prejudices and problems it presented. McRuer refers to this as a primary effect of neoliberalism in its production of “flexible” able-bodied and
heterosexual individuals, who “are visible and spectacularly tolerant” of disabled and
queer others.93 In delivering its message of tolerance to a presumed middle-class white
audience, it often fails to implicate them in the problems of racism, ableism, sexism, or
homophobia. Therefore, in “Heartbreak Winner,” Joey and the rest of the non-white crowd appear as an emblem of racial harmony achieved; through Joey’s childhood illness and his admirable overcoming of disability, Maggie is construed as appropriately
93 McRuer, Crip Theory, 2. 179 feminine and maternal rather than tomboyish and recalcitrant through her racial tolerance.
Within an era witnessing a burgeoning disability rights movement, the Specials functioned, in some cases, as an early educational tool for teens about disability, although it always presumed a normal, able-bodied audience. The After School Specials dramatized teen coming-of-age within disability narratives and positioned them within national iconography, transmogrifying coming-of-age stories into rehabilitative citizenship stories. Meanwhile, ableist logics, while oppressive, were also used to create a discourse of sexual openness regarding teen sexuality and to construct a new active rather than passive youth television viewer.
180
Chapter 3: Feeling Real, Real Feeling: Six Months to Live in the Age of Aliteracy
“The one thing that Dawn Rochelle remembered most about her fourteenth birthday was that she was still alive. In her diary she wrote:… Today at school I heard that Jake Macka is moving. I wonder what it would be like to have him kiss me. I wonder if any “normal” boy will ever kiss me.” -- Lurlene McDaniel, I Want to Live
“Nothing feels as real as a Lurlene McDaniel book.” A Printable Bookmark from www.lurlenemcdaniel.net
In 1989, a “literary time capsule” was buried in the Library of Congress in
Washington, DC, a treasure to be unlocked in the year 2089. In partnership with Pizza
Hut’s “Reading is FUN-damental” program and the Barbara Bush Foundation for
Family Literacy, the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book invited schoolchildren to participate in an essay contest and nominate their favorite books and authors for inclusion in this literary time capsule.1 The best student letters from each state would be
included in the capsule, which was meant to be a repository of the nation’s youth
reading heritage.2 Among its other selections, the capsule housed the most-nominated book in the competition, Six Months to Live (1988), the first of the popular “Dawn
Rochelle Series” which describes 13-year-old Dawn Rochelle’s diagnosis and treatment
for leukemia. Penned by Young Adult (YA)/“inspirational” novelist Lurlene McDaniel,
1 Jamie Whitfield, “Missions of Mercy inspire Lurlene McDaniel’s angelic series.” First Person Bookpage
publication in 1988 through the late 1990s.3 To date, McDaniel has authored over fifty
YA novels. Six Months to Live’s placement within the Library of Congress’s time capsule, a national symbol of American reading history, makes evident that YA illness narratives have a significant place within the history of reading. In this chapter, the partnership of
able-bodiedness and heteronormativity becomes especially evident within the
conventions of the teen sick-lit genre: the stories perennially link their illness plotlines to
their romantic ones and also, through their pedagogical impulse, to the nationally “fit”
reading publics they are meant to produce.
As YA literature was emerging as a fully-fledged genre and market throughout
the 1980s, multiple federally- and privately-funded initiatives arose to combat “aliteracy,”
a term invented in the mid-1980s to describe people who were unwilling (but not
unable) to read. Aliteracy was a cultural concern spurred on by American corporations,
not-for-profit groups, educational and scientific experts, politicians, and the Library of
Congress. The prevention of aliteracy and the promotion of youth reading practices
worked in tandem as gauges of the nation’s health.
Contemporaneously, what I term “teen sick-lit” emerged as a pervasive and
popular YA subgenre. Often subsumed within designations applied to adult literature,
including “10-hankie-novels” or “tearjerkers,” teen sick-lit was, and is, usually written for
3 Bernard Drew, The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and 182 young female readers, although teen boys also read such novels.4 Popular teen sick-lit writers like Lurlene McDaniel, and her contemporaries Isabelle Holland, Jean Ferris,
Cynthia Voigt, Elizabeth Benning (the name under which many illness stories were ghostwritten), and Lois Lowry, fall within a timeworn tradition of illness narratives by and about women.5 In contrast, this chapter discusses the proliferation of popular illness narratives about teens dealing with disease and disability from the late 1970s through the
1990s, a proliferation that occurred within other media, like film and television, simultaneously.
Disability and disease themselves, in teen sick-lit, become the material basis upon
which normal bodies are rendered visible. This partnership of heteronormativity and
able-bodiedness facilitates a collapse of the distinction between disease and disability,
establishing and making visible able-bodiedness by serving as its composite opposite.
Bibliographies (Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1997), 274. 4 McDaniel remarked with surprise that boys read her novels, even though she had always envisioned a female audience. Asked in an interview by Bookpage if she wrote her books with a specific gender in mind, McDaniels answered that she has always “been amazed guys read these books and seem to enjoy them.” She also cites her experience raising boys as giving her special insight into boy’s minds: “I try and make the boys talk like guys, sound like guys and react like guys. [Characters] say, ‘Well, you know, she's got cystic fibrosis, and that grosses me out.’ You've got to be realistic.’” Rather than tackling ableism “realistically” to change perceptions among her teenaged protagonists, McDaniel imagines that offensive remarks such as this one cultivate “realistic” dialogue. The same interview notes, though without a citation, that a poll taken by Book Magazine listed her as fourth most favorite author among girl readers and fifth among boy readers. See Whitfield, “Missions of Mercy.” 5 On classic narratives about illness, see Herndl, Invalid Women and Keith, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk. For literary criticism on mental illness, femininity, and literature, see Showalter, The Female Malady, and Gilbert The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Second Edition. See also Klages, Woeful Afflictions, and Holmes Fictions of Affliction. On nonfictional illness narratives, see Brody, Stories of Sickness; Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography; and Kleinman The Illness Narratives. 183 Scholars within the fields of literature, history, and disability studies have long debated
the boundaries and differences between disease and disability.6 By including narratives about disease within a dissertation about disability, I do not mean to suggest that disability and disease are identical. However, often, as non-normative states of embodiment, people with diseases and people with disability are subject to similar rehabilitative logics, social marginalization, and stereotypical representations of their bodies and conditions. Disease and disability, as materialized metaphors, are used to conjure images of coming of age, as they trace and establish the contours of a gendered teen body, illuminating differences in gendered modes of “illness” and establishing gender complementarity, in the form of heterosexual romance, as a salve for ill teen protagonists. In this way, disease and disability function as what Snyder and Mitchell have called “narrative prosthesis,” the process by which disability acts as the “materiality of metaphor” within storytelling.7 The linkage of individual and national health within
YA literature occurs also as a result of the prosthetic function, not only of storytelling, as Mitchell and Snyder argue, but also of the practice of reading itself and its imagined a priori “good” in the normative development of healthy teen citizens. This dissertation as a whole focuses on the historical contingence and the larger implications of polyvalent meanings of disease and disability in conceptualizing national health and the health of
6 See Wendell, The Rejected Body; Couser, Recovering Bodies; Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Carol Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007); and Diane Price Herndl, “Disease v. Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, 120.2 (2005) 593-8. 184 the body politic. Through teen sick lit, I trace how concerns over national health writ large are illustrated and remedied metaphorically through cultural representations of individual illness.8
In order to make this argument about the pedagogical work of these books upon the teen body and the national body, this chapter surveys teen sick-lit by various authors but pays special attention to Lurlene McDaniel and Jean Ferris, examining how disease and disability function as “narrative prosthesis” and how they participate in the larger discourses established in previous chapters.9 I choose McDaniel because she has published most prolifically in this genre and achieved recognition in national reading
7 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 48-49. 8 My focus on the convergence of metaphoric, moral, and cultural meanings forged in narratives of disability and disease is similar to Susan Sontag’s trenchant Illness as Metaphor, which constructs an archaeology of mythical representations of tuberculosis and cancer as they change over time. 9 There is YA literature about HIV/AIDS from this period that would certainly fall into the category of teen sick-lit, though I chose not to include it in the current version of this chapter, both for reasons of length and representativeness of authors’ work. While Jean Ferris has never published a novel about AIDS, Lurlene McDaniel has published only two books out of 50 that focus on people with AIDS: Sixteen and Dying (1992) and Baby Alicia is Dying (1993). Sixteen’s protagonist, Anne Wingate, contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, and after an anonymous benefactor grants her “One Last Wish,” which enables her to travel to a ranch out west where she meets Morgan, her love interest. Sixteen is part of the “One Last Wish” series, which chronicles the stories of teens with chronic illnesses who are granted “one last wish” from an anonymous benefactor. Baby Alicia is the story of teenaged Desi, who volunteers at a home for HIV-positive babies, and her attachment to Alicia, whose mother abandoned her when she was born. In McDaniel’s work, HIV and AIDS are largely underrepresented in her oeuvre, when compared with other diseases. This significant omission is in keeping with significant omissions of the time regarding HIV, AIDS, and heterosexuals. As Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, famously predicted in 1984 that an AIDS vaccine would be developed in less than 2 years, AIDS was largely considered a disease that affected gay men and drug users and “innocent victims,” such as hemophiliacs or medical professionals who contracted the disease unknowingly. For an analysis of how AIDS was presented as a disease not affecting “normal” heterosexuals, see Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). While the problem novel was an outgrowth of 1970s liberalism, teen sick lit often reaffirmed conservative political and sexual values, and the way in which the novels deal with HIV/AIDS (and certainly, the way in which they dealt with this disease substantially less than other diseases) is certainly part of this reaffirmation, especially in that AIDS is often seen as part of (or a penalty for) the collective adolescence of the 1970s. Thus, this chapter’s “silence” with respect to AIDS should be seen as driven by the source materials rather than ignoring the legacy of YA novels about HIV/AIDS and their place within teen sick-lit. This dissertation will also take up HIV/AIDS narratives more thoroughly in its conclusion about Life Goes On. 185 programs of the era. I choose Jean Ferris’ Invincible Summer because it demonstrates
some important variations in the teen sick-lit genre, namely sexual contact between a
boy and girl with cancer and a radical reinterpretation of the hospital space as a place of
sexual adventure rather than a place only of misery and tragedy.10 Although McDaniel’s
texts often depicted conservative and tragic images of illness—whose rehabilitation was
dependent on traditional, heteronormative relationships—Jean Ferris offers resistive,
sexy images of hospital spaces and ill bodies.
After introducing teen sick-lit and Lurlene McDaniel’s work, I argue that,
although the problem novel (of which teen sick-lit is a variation) was an outgrowth of
1970s liberalism, teen sick-lit reaffirmed conservative political and sexual values and
espoused traditional heteronormative gender roles. This chapter maps out the
relationship between literature and national health in the late 1970s and early 1980s by
contextualizing teen sick-lit within national reading initiatives of the era, which
imagined reading as having medicinal value for combating indolence, promoting
national health, and curing the then-newly diagnosed problem of “aliteracy,” or the lack of the will to read.
Although the study of trauma has long been the province of productive literary analysis, what some scholars have called an “affective turn” in scholarship has
10 Ferris’s novel was also an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist Young Adult Editors’ Choice, and a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. 186 profoundly affected recent literary criticism and studies of citizenship.11 However, while
scholars have begun to analyze the operations of affective labor in relation to a
population of citizens and cultural consumers presumed “adult,” they have yet to apply
the theoretical insights of affect scholarship to YA literature and to the study of teen
culture more generally. Likewise, recent work in disability studies has critiqued the
limits of discursive analysis in attending to the bodily realities and experiences of pain
and suffering.12 This chapter builds on recent queer and literary analyses of affect to argue that an “intimate public” is formed within teen sick-lit by imagining reading and the intense feeling of sadness and suffering offered by teen sick-lit novels as modes of teen citizenship training. Constructing heteronormativity and able-bodiedness as mutually-constitutive ideal aspirations for teen citizens, this intimate public is produced through a process that unites emotional instruction and a notion of participatory democracy through reading. The linkage between the teens inside the book pages and the (non)reading American teens that reading initiatives and new YA novel offerings were trying to reach occurs through the “affective labor” performed by teen sick-lit as a
11 See the many texts on affect published within the last two years, including Patricia Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 12 See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Bill Hughes, “What Can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” and Barry Allen, “Foucault’s Nominalism” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 187 palliative for the apathy of aliteracy. I argue that, working within the heteronormatively
gendered logic of the stories, teen sick-lit performs a form of affective labor as theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and others, in which the manipulation of emotion—in the case of teen sick-lit, “sadness” and sometimes even fear—performs a cultural and biopolitical labor-function in defining normal, “healthy,” adolescent bodies and their investment in a national citizenry defined by reading. Through its gendered engagement with sick teen bodies and via the affective labor it performs by cultivating sadness, teen sick lit endorses very conservative norms for teenage boys and girls. In these stories, boys demonstrate their athleticism and virility “in spite of” their illness or within their remission, while girls with illness must continue to cultivate their normality by rehabilitating their physical beauty in mostly all-female communities. Thus, this chapter examines the role of affective labor power in imagining how teen sick-lit creates reading national public. As Lauren Berlant convincingly argues, this form of participation and belonging is not political but rather “juxtapolitical;” it imagines teen readers as outside of politics and “under construction” rather than as fully self-actualized,
stable “adult” citizens. In so doing, it simultaneously shores up a normative
developmental (read: teenaged) identity via “structures of feeling,” that link individual
emotional responses of teen readers to larger pedagogical and national projects, such as
reading’s place in gauging the health of nation and democracy, the place of “grimness” or
sadness in constructing developmental narratives about the “condition” of teenagerness
188 as one of angst, and the gendering of reading itself. Thus, the cultivation of an intimate
public of teen readers, which is characterized by over-emotionality and the experience of
suffering, is also necessarily implicated in constituting the very category of adolescence
itself, constructing it as a passing stage of emotional volatility that must be overcome to
achieve the inherent emotional stability and normalcy promised by adulthood.
Finally, I establish teen sick-lit as a subgenre of YA literature whose historical
significance and continued popularity have been heretofore underestimated. More than
simply a genre, teen sick-lit is both an historically-specific cultural concern and cultural
production, emerging within a larger national impetus to achieve national health by
encouraging youth reading. In this way, as teen sick-lit employs literature itself into a
coming-of-age narrative of development into adulthood—configuring reading
emotionally-difficult stories as an indispensable step in maturation--it also participates in
shoring up a fantastic investment in a coherent, healthy, reading-enthusiastic adult
citizen-subject who will inevitably emerge after a child successfully weathers the storms
(or illness) of adolescence.13 In an era in which young people’s individual reading
practices were being construed as a litmus test for the health of democracy, constructing
metaphors of health and illness within YA literature forms the linkage between healthy
citizenship and the overall well-being of the national body.
13 Jacqueline Rose addresses this issue in her The Case of Peter Pan. See especially in Ch. 1 “Peter Pan and Freud” (The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993], 12-42.) 189 Six Months to Live: Introducing Teen Sick-Lit
“Everyone loves a good cry, and no one delivers heartwrenching (sic) stories
better than Lurlene McDaniel” reads the opening line of McDaniel’s biography on her
author page on Random House Publishers website.14 The tagline for McDaniel’s fiction,
which focuses exclusively on chronic illness, recovery, and death, appears inside every
cover: “From every ending comes a new beginning…,” while fans often use the phrase
“cryin’ and dyin’” to describe her depressing books. Lurlene Gallagher McDaniel has published over 50 YA novels, spanning nearly two decades, about adolescents, life- threatening illnesses, and teen romance. Her novels have appeared on several bestseller lists, including Publishers Weekly, and she was the recipient of a Romance Writers of
America (RITA) Award in 1992, while three of her novels were selected by children as
International Reading Association (IRA) and Children’s Book (IRA/CBC) Children’s
Choices in 1989 and 1990.15 McDaniel’s target market is girls aged 12-15, but when an
interviewer mentioned that a poll taken by Book Magazine listed her as fourth and fifth
favorite author for girls and boys respectively, McDaniel said she has “always been
amazed” that “guys read these books and seem to enjoy them.”16
14 Random House's Lurlene McDaniel Webpage.
literature, it should begin with one. Teen sick-lit traffics in some of the most egregious
and patronizing of cultural stereotypes of disease and disability. Alana Kumbier, the
only scholar to publish on the genre I am calling teen sick-lit, argues that these books
avow the most “insidious dominant cultural ideas we have about sick people,”
portraying them as objects of “inspiration…and pity;” tragic and innocent; “narcissistic”
and duplicitous figures in need of medical and parental surveillance; and most important,
“vehicles for others’ emotional growth and sentimental education.”17 Likewise,
treatment for disease or disability is often left up to the girls’ themselves, as they are told
repeatedly that “the ‘will to live’ has a scientific basis” and that imaging techniques, in
which individuals envision themselves fighting their disease, combined with a positive
attitude “enhances [their] chance of recovery” and “improve[s their] life’s quality.”18 In
McDaniel’s novels, disease immediately and only dehumanizes, as Dawn in Six Months to
Live imagines herself upon diagnosis with leukemia as “a white rat trapped in a science
experiment…caught in a maze of mind-boggling proportions… with no exit…a rat with
no future.”19 Although the novels imagine themselves to be encouraging teens’
acceptance of illness in themselves or others, the texts often deny acceptance of illness
17 Kumbier, “Chronic Popularity.” Feminist philosopher Elizabeth V. Spelman names these figures “spiritual bellhops,” by which she means “carriers of experience from which others can benefit” (Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering. [New York: Beacon Press, 1997], 1.) 18 McDaniel, Six Months, 27. In some ways, this comes from a place of wanting to instill a sense of autonomy in a person with an illness, but in other ways, it functions to make remission the responsibility of a patient with a “will to live” or a positive attitude. 191 while they encourage acceptance of death, continually juxtaposing the grotesqueness of
treatments and the diseased body against virile healthy souls and bodies. Mostly told in third person narration, they also consistently deny ill or disabled protagonists their own voice or perspective.20 Teen sick-lit’s continued popularity and relevance to national
reading projects necessitates an examination of the way in which oppressive
heteronormative and ableist logics are imbricated the pedagogical project of teen
citizenship and in imagining “normal” teens coming of age.
Teen sick-lit blends the didacticism of the problem novel with the melodrama of
the modern romance novel. Its protagonist is usually female and on the precipice
between childhood and adolescence. There is usually a third-person, partially-omniscient
narrator (though Judy Blume’s first-person narrative style in Deenie is a notable
exception), and the “sick girl” rarely gets to speak for herself.21 If, as literary critic Sherri
Egoff argues, the problem novel is often about a “child defined by the terminology of
pain,” then teen sick-lit shares much with the problem novel in its obsession with
19 Ibid., 7. 20 Two notable exceptions to this suppression of the voice and perspective of characters with disease or disability are Cynthia Voight’s Izzy Willy Nilly (1986) and Judy Blume’s Deenie (1991). 21 One journalist has used the term “sick-lit” to describe a third-wave feminist and self-actualizing statement in adult literature about “invisible illness.” See Paula Kamen, “A ‘Sick-Lit’ Manifesto: I am woman, hear me kvetch.” Cupcakeseries.com. March 3, 2005
revolves around diagnosis and treatment, either listing symptoms so that readers could
participate in the diagnosis of the protagonist or, as with Six Months to Live, beginning
the story at the moment of diagnosis. If the books begin with the prelude to diagnosis,
they end with the remission or death of the main or supporting characters. The final
characteristic, and that which is of particular importance to this chapter, is the nearly-
always-obligatory love interest of the protagonist. It is in this final characteristic that
teen sick-lit shares more with popular romance novels of the 1980s than of the problem
novels of the seventies.
Before the 1970s YA literature boom, Time magazine had lamented the feeble
selection of literature for teens as compared to the “barrowfuls of fresh and forgettable picture epics” for “under-sixes.”23 “Teenagers,” Time reports using the metaphoric
language of disability, “unless they have been permanently crippled by early years with
Dick and Jane, can begin to forage for their literary fare cheek by jowl with their
parents. But how does one bridge the gap between, say, Pooh and Salinger?” The lack of
suitable reading fare for teens and “tweens” combined with federal initiatives which
imagined reading’s part in the Great Society, and later, in reviving an aliterate populace
22 Barbara Feinberg, Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 40. For a further discussion of YA illness narrative’s obsessive recounting of symptoms, see Kumbier, “Chronic Popularity,” 72-77. 23 “From Pooh to Salinger.” Time. Friday, December 13, 1963. 193 into participatory democratic citizens, created a market opportunity upon which
publishers seized voraciously.
By the early 1970s, conditions were ripe for the proliferation of young adult
literature, when government policy and the publishing industry seized upon a new
market segment of the reading public. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA) intended to enhance the nation’s schools and libraries.
Part of Johnson’s “war on poverty,” ESEA’s Title II poured dollars into the growth of
school libraries through the use of federal monies to purchase non-consumable
instructional materials. This investment in libraries encouraged publishers not only to
reissue children's literature classics but also to begin publishing new literary fare for
adolescents, to create a host of new novel forms for adolescents, which constituted an until-then untapped literature market.24 Moreover, paperback books had become firmly
entrenched as a more profitable publishing market in the sixties, making YA titles
cheaper to produce.25
In the midst of the YA literature explosion in the 1970s, a new literary genre
emerged for teens, the “problem novel,” and became YA literature’s most recognizable
24 Frances FitzGerald, “The Influence of Anxiety,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2004, Vol. 309, Issue 1852. 62-70
fiction.”27 Thus, most scholars situate the birth of the problem novel as a popular young adult genre as being causally related to the turbulence of the 1960s, which caused writers to “embrac[e] a new realism for a young adult audience” amid the period’s “new
construction of childhood,” which noted that children could not always be insulated from the dangers of “real life” but could and should be prepared to handle adult responsibilities.28 It also involved a fundamental redefinition of the difference between childhood and adolescence. As a cultural product, the problem novel separates, in both
26The structure of the problem novel, character and plot development are secondary to the chosen social problem under debate, so that “…the titles alone often tell all—My Father Lives in a Downtown Hotel; My Name is David, I am an Alcoholic;…—as if the writers had begun with the problem rather than with the plot or characters.” Although the problem novel continues to be a beloved format for YA literature, it is noted for its formulaic approach to storytelling, stock characters, and general lack of literary merit. Problem novels operate prescriptively, beginning as an adolescent protagonist confronts a problem; although it ends with the “solution” to the problem, it does not always end with happiness, safety, or security for the protagonist. The alleged point of origin for what is now regarded as the “young adult novel” is varied, but most trace its evolution within the lineage of the problem novel. Indeed, many cite Holden Caulfield’s adolescent angst in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as forming the earliest prototype for the problem novel, although Salinger’s text was not intended for an adolescent audience.For more information about problem novels see Sheila Egoff, “The Problem Novel” in Egoff, Sheila, G.T. Stubbs, and L.F. Ashley. Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, Second Edition. (Toronto and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 356-369. See also Sheila Egoff, Thursday’s Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children’s Literature. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1981); Gail Schmunk Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998),175-212; and MacLeod, Anne Scott. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 198-210. Also, although it is a polemic against “grim” subjects for children, see also Feinberg, Lizard Motel. 27 Robert Lipsyte, “For Teen-Agers, Mediocrity?” The New York Times, May 18, 1986, BR30. 28 Murray, Childhood, 185. The stories that comprise what I am calling teen sick-lit are generally situated disparagingly (and thus, oftimes dismissed) within the larger YA “problem novel” genre, which features teenaged protagonists coping with various societal or personal issues such as burgeoning sexuality, substance abuse, and other issues, including chronic illness. Many cite Holden Caulfield’s adolescent angst in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as forming the earliest prototype for the problem novel, although Salinger’s text was not intended for an adolescent audience. For more information about 195 form and content, the innocence of the “child” of children’s fiction from the fully-grown
adult of adult fiction. In spite of encouraging an “adult posture” toward the world,
problem novels also reflect a mistrust of parental authority that historians have come to
associate with 1960s radicalism, after which “came the deluge” of problem novels in
which adults no longer act as “keeper of the moral universe for children” and instead
expose children to “the untidy realities of the adult world with no moral judgment
attached.”29 Thus the “sick-lit” of this chapter’s focus was in plentiful company as the
expanding young adult publishing trend broadly emphasized problem novels that had
pedagogical approaches to their readers and took on issues of import for one-day adult citizens.
The pedagogical project of citizenship-training through reading is especially inherent in the problem novel of which teen sick-lit is one variety. Disciplinarity is inherent in the very form, function, and category of children and young adult fiction, for “building an image of the child inside of the book,” argues Jacqueline Rose, “secure[s] the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.”30 Simultaneously didactic, disciplinary, and entertaining and driven by conveying
young adult genres, see the library resource Diane Tixier Herald, Teen Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests Second Edition (Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1997). 29 Other touchstones in the history of problem novels include Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967). See MacLeod in Feinberg, Lizard Motel, 40. 30 Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 2. 196 a message or lesson to their readers, problem novels are proscriptive, or “…really about how their readers will think and act after finishing the books.”31
The designation “problem novel,” at a formal level, instantiates a difference between children’s literature and young adult literature by equating adolescence, and likewise, teen reading fare, with the “problems” that one needs to surpass to reach the
“healthy” solution of adulthood.32 Thus, as literary scholars often collapse the distinction between the “problem novel” genre and the general category, “YA literature,” this collapse is telling. In spite of other available literary selections for teens, often what makes literature “YA” as opposed to “Children’s” for literary critics are the problems themselves.
31 See Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, Third Edition (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002). Roberta Seelinger Trites agrees that the books are characterized by this type of didacticism, and argues that such “manipulation of the adolescent reader” overshadows the potential for the genre’s subversiveness. See Roberta Seelinger Trites, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), x. 32 There was also a resurgence of series fiction which competed with the problem novel formula, serving in many ways as its antithesis. A wildly popular format of YA literature for teen girl readers from the 1950s, famed girl sleuth Nancy Drew reinvented herself in the mid-80s with a spinoff, The Nancy Drew Files (1986-1991). However, new girls’ series, such as Ann M. Martin’s Babysitters Club series (1986-1991) and Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High (1983-1991), also burst on the YA lit scene.32 Both series featured affluent suburban girls partaking in normative teen girl staples, such as cheerleading, babysitting, and boyfriends. However, girls’ series fiction usually cultivated a world that, while brimming with adventure, was imminently “knowable.” No matter what sort of peril series fiction heroines faced, writes literary historian Sherrie Inness, unlike the protagonists of teen sick-lit, “…Nancy Drew is not going to get seriously injured in a car accident; Cherry Ames is not going to discover that she has cancer.” Series fiction will not be the subject of this chapter, although The Babysitters Club devoted a few books to discussing main character Anastasia “Stacey” McGill’s diabetes, including her coming to terms with the disease, periodic hospitalizations, and maintenance treatments, such as her taking insulin. For more information on series fiction (though not about Sweet Valley High or The Babysitters Club), see Sherrie Inness, Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 197 In this section, I discuss Lurlene McDaniel’s “Dawn Rochelle Series” (Six Months
to Live, I Want to Live, So Much to Live For, and No Time to Cry) and one non-series book, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, alongside another teen sick-lit text, Invincible
Summer, by Jean Ferris.33 The Dawn Rochelle Series chronicles Dawn Rochelle’s
diagnosis with leukemia on the verge of her 13th birthday in Six Months to Live (1985),
her treatments for the disease, including chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant in
I Want to Live (1987); her attendance of cancer camp and friendships with other girls,
who eventually die of cancer; and finally, her budding romantic relationships with both able-bodied boys and boys with cancer. Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (1991), details
Carrie’s remission and her relationship with Keith Gardener as he relapses and is told
there are no remaining treatment options for his cancer. Finally, Jean Ferris’s Invincible
Summer (1987) follows the relationship of Robin and Rick, who both have acute lymphocytic leukemia, through their diagnoses, brief recoveries, and Rick’s death.
McDaniel’s fiction especially trades in authenticity and feeling—“nothing feels as real as a Lurlene McDaniel book.” It attempts to posture itself as a form of documentary realism to enhance the affective dimension of the books by blurring the reality between
“real victims” and its own fictional characters while it simultaneously attempts to
cultivate a real vulnerability of the body, within the text and within readers—“real”
because it is felt and felt because it is real. In contrast to other teen sick-lit authors,
33 The final book, To Live Again (2001), nearly eight years after No Time to Cry, details Dawn’s struggle with “another medical crisis” that causes partial paralysis. I will not discuss this book in this 198 McDaniel consistently notes how important it is for her texts to convey a “medical
reality.” She often cites her own exposure to illness, such as her son’s diagnosis and life
with juvenile diabetes and her own treatment for breast cancer, as influencing her
decision to write novels; she says that she found “writing about the trauma…and effects”
of her son’s disease to be “therapeutic.”34 McDaniel’s biography as provided by her
Random House website notes that she ensures “medical accuracy” in her fiction by
“conduct[ing] extensive research,” which consists of interviews with health care
professionals, work with “appropriate medical groups and hospice organizations,” such
as the Tennessee Organ Donor Services. McDaniel often acknowledges gratitude to “real
people” in her dedications—“the human element”—who are fighting or living with
cancer, including doctors, patients, volunteers, or the families of people with cancer. Her
character, Dawn Rochelle’s last name derives from Rochelle Lynn Dove, to whom Six
Months to Live is “lovingly dedicated,” while Till Death Do Us Part’s (1997) dedication
reads like a tombstone: “This book is lovingly dedicated to Jennifer Dailey, a victim of
cystic fibrosis, a lovely flower, plucked up by the angels after fourteen years on this
earth, March 12, 1997. Dear Jennifer, your family and friends will miss you. May your walk
in heaven be joyous!”35 By including this information, McDaniel’s postures her fiction as
chapter, since it is well outside of this chapter’s historical period. 34 Random House. Lurlene McDaniel Webpage.
readers and the characters on the page. McDaniel, through her extensive experience,
cultivates an image of expertise through her first-hand experience with illness and her
experience with health professionals that apparently qualify her to present illness stories.
Additionally, teen sick-lit usually features in-depth descriptions of procedures
and treatments sprinkled with didactic explanations of medical jargon. In recounting
treatments and procedures, especially in Lurlene McDaniel’s work, the novels exhibit a
precision and attention to using proper medical terms and current treatments in order to
cultivate an image of authenticity or documentary realism. For example, Six Months to
Live features in depth descriptions of spinal taps; “imaging” strategies, chemotherapy and
its aftermath of nausea, vomiting, and hair loss.36 Invincible Summer describes the vomiting, weight-loss, and mouth ulcers that occur after chemotherapy.
While many children’s literature scholars, advocates, and critics celebrated a turn to frankness inherent in the transition into “literary realism” for young adults, even as they lamented its dreadful aesthetics, still others nostalgically mourned the loss of innocence in literature for young adults. “[F]ed-up literary critic” Barbara Feinberg states
Services, whose valuable input helped in the creation of th[e] manuscript.” Meanwhile Baby Alicia is Dying (1993) thanks the staff of Childkind, an organization that began in 1989 as a group home for children born with HIV/AIDS, and If I Should Die Before I Wake ends with information on how to become a hospital program volunteer. A Time to Die (1992) is dedicated to Karen Leigh Fleming, October 6, 1967-February 20, 1991), a victim of cystic fibrosis.” 36 Imaging was a popular alternative treatment for cancer in the 1980s in which cancer patients mobilize their imagination to conjure war imagery of their body battling enemy cancer cells. Dawn 200 in her part-polemic, part memoir Welcome to the Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the
Mystery of Making Things Up¸ that she recalled her son’s English teacher “extolling the
beauty” of certain books because they “made children cry, as if this were the pinnacle of
something to be desired” while she searched for the reason why these “grim books
[we]re in [italics in original]” and what made them “synonymous with progress.”37 In seeking the answer to her question in a children’s literature section of a local library, she is told that not only does realistic fiction win lots of awards and popularity among teachers, but also that “realistic fiction helps children enlarge their frames of reference…[and…see] the world from another perspective” while “developing a kind of courage for facing problems in [young reader’s] own lives.”38 Feinberg questions the
medicinal value of literature, asking “How had trauma—endless stories of childhood
trauma—managed to garner the cachet of multiculturalism, and hence the protection” of the “strict, humorless watchdog of Political Correctness?”39 YA literature scholar Marc
Aronson, posing a similar question, cites and agrees with the answers of teenagers and
librarians, but argues that the grimness of problem novels is something that caters to teen tastes. He argues that teens enjoy bleakness and crave “intense feeling” such as
Rochelle, the protagonist of McDaniel’s series, often imagined cancer cells as blobs being battled by a teddy bear army. 37 Feinberg, Lizard Motel, 34. Likewise, Marc Aronson argues that “physical ailments” and “grave diseases” were the province of the problem novel. See Aronson, Exploding the Myths, 55. 38 Ibid., 35. Likewise, YA literature scholar Marc Aronson cites debates on the American Library Association listserv about YA lit’s penchant for “bleakness.” See Aronson, Exploding the Myths, 70. 201 “bleak despair” to make a book seem “real.”40 The sense that reading a problem novel will incite emotional or spiritual growth in its reader fuels the notion that reading “grim literature”—or literature that performs the affective labor of inciting sadness—is
“healthy” for teens, who are also naturally predisposed to desiring excessive emotionality.
Teen sick-lit readers were encouraged to grow through reading books that had medicinal value, within their pages, fictional protagonists were forced to come-of-age through their relationship with disease and oftimes, mortality. This medicinal value of reading for teens, I argue, was achieved through the pedagogical impulse and perceived gains of the literature’s affective labor of sadness. McDaniel’s titles—She Died Too Young;
Mother, Help Me Live; Baby Alicia is Dying; Too Young to Die—produce the expectation of sadness for readers. “Cryin’ and dyin’” describes both the prescriptive and affective function of teen sick-lit; readers expect death, illness, and a painful emotional experience.
This literature performs affective labor in two senses. Hardt and Negri define affective labor as an immaterial labor—a labor that emerges in the final decades of the twentieth century as a commodity and as a result of the abstraction of labor itself— which consists of “the creation and manipulation of affect,” a form of “caring labor” that is “entirely immersed in the corporeal, and the somatic” that produces “social networks, forms of
39 Feinberg, Lizard Motel, 37. 40 Aronson, Exploding the Myths, 55. 202 community, and biopower.”41 While the labor itself is material, the product(s) of
immaterial labor which are either intellectual productions or emotional responses, are
not material even though they have transformative power and economic, cultural, and
social value. As opposed to emotions themselves, affects involve a partnership of body
and mind, and affective labor is that which “produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.”42 Combining the
affective and intellectual dimensions of immaterial labor, McDaniel’s texts (and teen sick-
lit more generally) present the deep sadness they engender readers to “feel” as “real,” in
part because the texts toil to create medical authenticity (i.e. the text “feels real”) while
they manufacture the intense feeling of sadness and sympathy as a form of bodily
involvement with reading (i.e. sadness “feels real”).
While Hardt and Negri sardonically refer to affective labor as “service with a
smile,” the cultural labor of teen sick-lit is service through tears. In one sense, teen sick-lit
is meant to instantiate spiritual and emotional maturity through readers’ exposure to the
“grim reality” of life. However, when placed in a larger sociocultural frame, the affective
labor of sadness performed by problem novels, including sick-lit, participates in the
social construction of angst and “despair” as inherently characteristic of adolescence;
“happiness” and “innocence” as descriptive of childhood; and an objective clinical gaze
and emotional reservation as the province of adults. Rather than achieving the
41 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 292-293. 203 documentary realism to which the novels might aesthetically or formally aspire, this
affective labor participates in producing the very category of adolescence while it
cultivates teen bodies and selves into emotional citizen-subjects. Egoff writes that the realistic adolescent novel “[takes] the approach that maturity can be attained only through a severe testing of soul and self…featur[ing] some kind of shocking ‘rite of passage’ such as the uprooting of a child’s life by war, the death of a close friend or parent, an encounter with sex.”43 The novels participate in and instantiate the
construction of this developmental narrative, by imagining realist stories about teen
angst as epitomizing not only the genre called “Young Adult Literature” but also the
very condition of being a teenager.
Designed to instigate the growth of their readers by imagining a relationship
between their protagonists and the teen readers outside of their pages, teen sick-lit
presents readers with “serious” (read: adult) issues to mark and incite the young reader’s
entrance into “young adulthood.” The inseparability of YA literature and problem novel
emplots literature itself into a coming-of-age narrative of development into adulthood by its participation in constructing an image of the coherent adult subject that emerges after weathering the storms of adolescence.44 Or to put it another way, the adults involved in
42 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 108. 43 Feinberg, Welcome to the Lizard Motel, 40. 44 Jacqueline Rose addresses this issue in her The Case of Peter Pan. See especially in Ch. 1 “Peter Pan and Freud.” Such a fantasy of adult coherence as opposed to teen angst is at play in Aronson’s work, when he writes that problem novels read “very much like the booming adult industry of self-help 204 the production of problem novels—parents, authors, librarians, etc.—participate in
reifying a developmental narrative premised on “natural,” albeit temporary, teen angst,
and the YA problem novel becomes both the proof of and a tool in ensuring this
developmental narrative’s continual (re)construction.
This depth of feeling produced through authentic experience is also meant to
differentiate teen sick-lit novels from the un-emotionality, distance, and “coldness,” of
the medical establishment by emphasizing spiritual, rather than only bodily health. Teen
sick-lit certainly offers “real feeling” as a means of instantiating adolescence and growth
through its pedagogical project of presenting teens overcoming problems
“authentically.” For McDaniel, medical knowledge does not always lead to salvation.
Spiritual references are most common as a way of coping with death in the novels; most
of her novels neither use spirituality to question or resist medical authority nor to foster
an ill person’s autonomy.45 McDaniel attends an Orthodox Presbyterian Church and
describes herself as very “‘into’ Calvinistic theology.”46 Indeed, with titles such as
and coping books” albeit generally in a first-person novel (55). Although Aronson meant this comparison to operate as descriptive of the genre, Rose would argue that this likeness is central not only to the novels’ design but to an entire discursive construction of age, in that adults ensure and assiduously cultivate their own coherence by constantly reasserting adolescence as its opposite, as “naturally” characterized by incoherence and angst. 45 Jean Ferris’ Invincible Summer features various crises of faith in which the protagonist, Robin, questions the existence of God in the face of hers and her boyfriend, Rick’s, cancer. See Ferris, Invincible, 29, 32-33, 35, 151. However, the existence of God is unresolved for Robin at the end of the book, while the book itself maps human life onto nature, like the passing seasons which organize the book into “Summer,” “Fall,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer” chapters. The use of seasons and other imagery in nature to parallel the life cycle is a persistent theme in the literature. See also Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). 46 Lurlene McDaniel, “Question from Ph.D. Student writing about you.” 17 February 2008, personal email (22 February 2008). 205 McDaniel’s earliest publication, If I Should Die Before I Wake (1983), As I Lay Me Down to
Sleep (1991), or Lifted Up by Angels (1997), Christian iconography unsubtly pervades
McDaniel’s texts in epigraphs and plotlines.47 Jean Ferris Invincible Summer espouses
“belief” rather than organized religion; Robin’s grandmother, Libby, “thought everybody should believe in something. She didn’t care what they called it, God, or
Fate, or the Wind in the Trees…”48 However, as opposed to McDaniel’s books, which
foster a sense of resolution via faith, Invincible Summer’s Robin is more ambivalent
about faith and religion, rarely attending church, lampooning the mild-mannered
“Reverend Hamster” as he delivers his sermon, and questioning his faith that God never
dishes out more difficulty than people can handle.49 However, the novel still encourages
“prayers to unknown saints,” not as “a life insurance policy” but as a way of realizing
that “sometimes the prize is peace and rest.”50 Thus, spirituality, if not formalized
religion, represents a mode of coping and resolution in much teen sick-lit.
Though not explicitly defined as a “Christian Writer” in promoting her books,
McDaniel is described as an “inspirational novelist,” whose books are nonetheless very popular among Christian youth and began to gain immense popularity amid the rise of
47 Six Months to Live revolves around famous Ecclesiastes 3, “To everything there is a season…”. Saving Jessica (1996) features the following epigraph: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers…Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions an in truth (1 John 3:16 and 18).” Till Death Do Us Part (1997) quotes from 1 Corinthians 13:4 4-8 with “Love is patient, love is kind…”. 48 Ferris, Invincible, 29. 49 Ibid., 32. 50 Ibid., 151. 206 conservatism and religious revivals in the 1980s.51 Characters in her books often have
spiritual discussions about fate and the afterlife. Writes McDaniel, “‘I study medicine and
traditional grief therapy techniques to give the novels a sense of serious medical
reality…[and]…also study the Bible to instill the human element—the values and ethics
often overlooked by the coldness of technology.’”52 Indeed, the technology that keeps ill
teens alive, in the case of the bubble boy from earlier chapters and the ill protagonists in
teen sick-lit, is often at odds with “healthy development.” This coldness is represented in
the book by the medical authority, which is sometimes presented as a source of frustration for the protagonists. For example, in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Keith critiques his doctors, saying that once they “know for sure that you’re beyond their treatments and cures, they act like you don’t exist,” and in the hospital, Keith “became a non-person, an embarrassment to them” once “there was nothing left to do medically.”53
In this statement, Keith notes the connection between his body as a project for medicine and the lack of emotional support offered by his doctors. Once his problematic docile body became as a “lost-cause,” his personhood is also lost in the face of medicine’s insensitive pragmatism.
51 McDaniel was once the fiction editor of Faith n’ Stuff, the Magazine for Kids. 52 Random House. Lurlene McDaniel Webpage. 53 McDaniel, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, 80. 207 Interestingly, McDaniel’s resistance to medical “coldness” or dehumanization
might be said to be one of the core guiding principles of disability studies and bioethics.54
However, McDaniel’s texts are generally populated by good doctors fighting the good fight, while a pitying posture is encouraged in readers and able-bodied characters toward ill characters and the unsuccessful doctors in the novels. Although the “human element” embodied in McDaniel’s spiritual approach claims “values and ethics” to be its province, such ethics are only achieved and espoused from the superiority and distance of third- person narration and only allow “patients” to stray from medical authority when medicine has exhausted its capabilities.
Although the books work to represent the “authentic” bodily experience of illness, the covers of McDaniel’s books connote illness with props and settings rather than with visibly ill teen bodies. For instance, although Six Months to Live has been reissued many times, generally the covers feature a brunette, curly-haired girl sitting on a hospital bed, donning a robe, and clutching a teddy bear. She bears none of the physical signs of illness described in vivid detail in the books—weight loss, baldness, bruising, etc.
While earlier covers showed a melancholy Dawn alone, many of McDaniel’s more
54 As such, it might be provocative to consider McDaniel’s activism, as a cancer survivor and parent of a disabled child, to be a form of disability activism. Most historians place the history of disability activism within a liberal, progressive history of post-1968 Civil Rights or depathologizing movements. However, considering McDaniel to be a disability activist may illuminate some cracks or elisions in this master narrative of disability rights, activism, and cultural production, highlighting a problematic totalizing view of disability politics and disability studies as one driven solely by liberal identity politics. Reading McDaniel into a history of disability activism and disabled self-representation exposes some of the persistent splits with disabled community and communities, and it imagines how certain types of disability activism are mobilized in conservative as well as liberal political projects. 208 recent covers for Six Months feature a girl and a boy, who usually appear in various
“couples” poses—holding hands, hugging—usually with the female character in the
foreground. Although many include hospital imagery such as beds or hospital gowns,
others feature photographs outside of the hospital interior, either outside or in
bedrooms, and emphasize the coupledom of the young people on the cover rather than
the visibility of illness.55
Yet, after venturing past the image of wistful couples on the covers, the first page
of the book often features a snippet from the text that operates like a teaser-trailer to a
movie; it is exclusively the dramatic moment of diagnosis, the onset of illness, or the
moment of a serious medical procedure, such as when someone volunteers to donate an
organ or bone marrow to the ailing protagonist. For example, No Time to Cry, the final installment of the Dawn Rochelle series, includes the following snippet on the opening page:
Dawn staggered to the bathroom, convinced that a warm shower would make her feel better. But when she shed her nightgown and looked into the mirror, her heart wedged in her throat. A fine rash covered her arms and torso. She started shaking so violently that she had to grab ahold [sic] of the sink for support. Dawn knew what the rash meant. She’d read too many pamphlets and booklets following her transplant. A rash was often the very first sign of bone marrow rejection.56
55 Alana Kumbier notes that the girls on the covers of such books actually appear “healthy” (“Chronic Popularity,” 73). 56 Lurlene McDaniel, No Time to Cry (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). 209 From the opening moments of the book, readers are taken directly to the climax and
exclusive plot-driven focus of the novel: whether the protagonist will live or die from his
or her disease. The traumatic epigraph serves to unsettle the coupledom usually featured
as staple cover art, but also to immediately deliver on readers’ expectation of illness and tragedy.
Supplying documentary-style authenticity to the fictional stories by relating true stories or authorial experiences with medical professionals, McDaniel’s brand of documentary realism is intrinsic and essential to the stories’ pedagogical function. The
novels cultivate a “clinical gaze,” by didactically recounting in-depth lists of symptoms,
treatments, etc., which contributes further to the blurring between nonfiction and
fiction on which the novels’ medical dramas rest.57 Through this cultivation of
57 Teen sick-lit could very well be one form of cultural response to a perceived childhood/adolescent cancer epidemic. It is worth mentioning that teen sick-lit experienced its surge in popularity in the 1980s, a decade that witnessed a surge in childhood cancer cases. The National Cancer Institute reports that childhood leukemias and brain tumors seemed to escalate in the early 1980s while rates in succeeding years since have not demonstrated consistent upward or downward movement. Contestation exists over whether or not a true increase in cases truly occurred, as some physicians argued that the advent of new form of imaging equipment, most importantly the MRI, might have facilitated the visualization of brain tumors and other cancers that could not be easily visualized with older equipment. Newspaper articles about childhood cancer steadily increased throughout the 1980s into the 1990s, especially reportage about the dangers of prolonged exposure to electromagnetism produced by power lines and the benefits of breast-feeding in preventing childhood cancer. Additionally, throughout the 20th century, even when childhood cancer represented only a fraction of persons with cancer, poster children were a very visible and crucial a component of media campaigns and fundraising efforts for cancer as they were for other diseases, such as polio. Historian Gretchen Krueger argues that, “unlike most adult cancers, acute leukemia and other common childhood tumors “responded to drug therapies in observable, measurable ways—thus making young sufferers the ideal subjects for publicists, journalists, investigators, and politicians interested in highlighting advances in cancer research and treatment beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s.” Moreover, as more children achieved remission and long-term survival, “heroic accounts and images of children…selective in nature” to craft “optimistic “cure” or “hope” stories to raise money for cancer research or Ronald McDonald Houses” also “ignored the negative realities such as the limited gains made in certain pediatric cancers, the high costs of treatment, and the high prevalence of mental and physical disabilities caused by experimental chemotherapy protocols.” See Gretchen Krueger, “‘For Jimmy, and the Boys and Girls of America:’ Publicizing Cancers in Twentieth-Century America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 1 (2007): 70-93. For more information about the alleged 1980s youth 210 authenticity, McDaniel emphasizes the vulnerability of the body, so that while engaging
in sympathy for the ill protagonists, readers are meant to participate in diagnosis of
symptoms and experience the often brutal side-effects of chemotherapy or other
treatments. For example, Dawn Rochelle “look[s] down self-consciously at her legs” at
the “huge, angry-looking bruises glar[ing] back at her,” the same bruises which had been
a “road sign that had said Cancer” to her doctor.58 Likewise, If I Should Die Before I
Wake’s Keith Gardner demonstrates a poor appetite and has an overly-extended stay in
the hospital with a dislocated shoulder before his relapse, while Dawn Rochelle develops
a suspicious rash after her bone marrow transplant in I Want to Live; these symptoms are
“road signs” which the reader is meant to decode.59 Invincible Summer’s Robin ventures
to the library to research unexplained bruises on her arms and “wished she still thought
her fever and lingering fatigue were the results of the flu.”60 In involving the reader in
diagnosis, the books encourage the reader’s hyperawareness of his or her own body in
relation to the ill textual bodies whose symptoms they are meant to read.61
cancer epidemic, see National Cancer Institute, U.S. National Institutes of Health. "Childhood Cancers: Questions and Answers."
the reader, it often also cultivates idolization, combining the clinical gaze of symptom
analysis with an idolizing, awestruck gaze. This idolization is produced partially through
the typical overcoming narrative of disability and disease, whereby audiences, usually
presumed as able-bodied, rally around a tragic hero fighting her disease or disability.
However, this idolization also operates in teen sick-lit through the titillation of enviable
budding romance for the female protagonist, a romance which is usually connected to
her illness in some way.
As a female-dominated field of cultural production and reception, teen sick-lit
also falls under that Hardt and Negri and socialist feminist scholars have called the
immaterial labor of “women’s work.” Rather than solely based on “domestic labor” (i.e.
cleaning and cooking) or domestic spaces, this labor “involv[es] producing affects,
relationships, and forms of communication and cooperation among children in the
family, and in the community.”62 Problem novels (and teen sick-lit specifically) present
guidance as “caring labor” that paternalistically rears children into young adults.63
and symptomologies of their own bodies to make their symptoms legible. In one way, teen sick-lit is part of the rise in a self-diagnosis market to which websites like those aforementioned appeal. 62 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 110. 63 I situate teen sick-lit within the lineage of the problem novel because illness itself is never considered in the text to be a natural state of being but instead a problem to be overcome or accepted in order for spiritual and emotional growth to occur in its protagonists, whether they are sick themselves or whether they are supporting a friend with an illness. Likewise, in teen sick-lit, the valences of the everyday “problem” of illness—symptomologies, treatments, support groups, hospitals, and often what Arthur Frank calls “remission society”—is the core around which each story is built rather than being one aspect among many in a story. This chapter will not talk about what other scholars have called “autopathography,” or an autobiographical account of oneself that focuses on a disease, disorder, or disability that affects the artist. For more information about See Frank, The Wounded Storyteller. 212 Additionally, YA literature, which arrived as a fully-realized genre by the 1970s, and
specifically the problem novel “emerged almost simultaneously with the first soundings
of the women’s liberation movement, but it remained unaffected by it for a long time,
even though the majority of novels written at the time were by women and directed
predominantly at girls.”64 Rather than being unaffected by the women’s liberation
movement, I argue that McDaniel’s brand of teen sick-lit demonstrates an assiduous reconsolidation of traditional, heteronormative femininity, showing an anxious disavowal of liberal feminist ideals that were more of a piece with 1970s problem novels.
In McDaniel’s texts, adherence to traditional gender roles is both encouraged and enforced, and this adherence is also linked to “getting well” when girls with leukemia engage in beautification. Dawn describes her hospital roommate and soon-to-be best friend, Sandy, as “Barbie-doll cute” with “cheeks [that] glowed with pale pink blusher.”65
Dawn is often seen putting on makeup and contemplating her appearance and whether or not she would still be desirable to boys. When she begins chemotherapy, she
“wishe[s] Jake had kissed her” because “[n]ow that she had cancer, he probably never would” as chemotherapy “would make her ugly and sick” and “[p]robably no one would ever want to kiss her as long as she lived.” In this chapter’s epigraph, Dawn “wonder[s]” whether or not a “‘normal boy’” would ever find her desirable. When both girls begin to
64 Julia Eccleshare, “Teenage Fiction: Realism, Romances, Contemporary Problem Novels,” in International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, Second Edition, Volume I, ed. Peter Hunt, 387-396 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 65McDaniel, Six Months, 24. 213 go bald from chemotherapy and as Sandy contemplates getting rid of a box full of now
“useless” combs and ribbons, Dawn’s mother arrives with a hair-stylist to bob the girls’
hair, and then they happily try on different wigs.
However, the books often struggle with and designate the differences between
“natural” and artificial feminine beauty. Immediately after the happy scene of trying on
wigs, Six Months to Live transitions abruptly to a description of the “toll” chemotherapy
has taken on Dawn’s body: “A fine rash covered her arms and legs…her blood vessels
erupted, causing deep purple bruises to appear like splotches on her body. Her skin took
on a blackish cast as the drugs affected the pigmentation. Scabs formed on her lips, and
she could no longer bear to look at her own reflection in the mirror.”66 As if to underscore the falseness of the wigs and makeup, the text jars the reader back to recognition of the “ugliness” of cancer in stark contradistinction to the trappings of femininity—makeup, wigs, and beautification rituals—that directly precede it; meanwhile, Dawn laments, “‘It isn’t me,’” as she decries her emaciated reflection.
In other moments in the series, makeup does not represent a mode of getting well or feeling better, but rather, it represents a potentially dangerous form of duplicity for Dawn. In I Want to Live, after discovering that her leukemia has relapsed and while deciding whether or not to undergo a bone marrow transplant, Dawn goes to the mall with Rhonda who is “lucky…to have nothing more serious to decide than what outfit to
66 Ibid., 45-46. 214 wear!”67 She puts on makeup, on which she has spent nearly her whole allowance,
prompting Rhonda to remark with surprise at Dawn’s putting on so much makeup
because she thought Dawn’s parents were strict about it. Dawn replies “with a flip of her
hand” that she “, “…feel[s] like living dangerously” even though Rhonda says to Dawn,
“…This doesn’t seem like you. Living dangerously and all.”68 Dawn decides that she is
“bored and tired of being sweet little Dawn” and stops to look in the mirror and
remarks, “She didn’t look like Dawn anymore. She looked older, more grown up.”69 As seen in other examples, gazing in the mirror is usually associated with marking the progression of disease in McDaniel books, but here, it marks a premature progression into being “grown up,” which also has been associated with being sick or dying “too young.” While Rhonda and Dawn are in the mall pizza parlor, Dawn notices couples sitting at other tables, and she wonders, “what it would be like to go on a date, a real date with a guy to talk to and hold hands with. Would she think of anything to say? Or would she just sit and stare stupidly at him?”70 As the two girls contemplate their dating future, they are titillated when two older boys take notice of them; the attention unnerves Dawn but excites Rhonda. One of the boys, Ricky, rests his arm on the back of the restaurant booth behind Dawn and begins to flirt with her; mistaking her reluctance to talk about herself with coyness, he says, “A good-looking girl like you
67 Ibid., I Want to Live, 202. 68 Ibid., 203. 69 Ibid., 203-204. 215 must have a hundred things to tell.71” As she sits with Ricky, Dawn begins to reminisce
to herself about the boys in her life, including her love interests and brother:
She thought about Mike. ‘Who wants to date a one-legged boy?’ She thought about Greg. He’d kissed her. She thought about Jake. He’d never kissed her. She thought about Rob. He loved Darcy. Who would love Dawn? She turned her face. It was inches from Ricky’s. Suddenly, the though of Ricky touching her made her skin crawl.72
As she is confronted with casual flirting, she begins to juxtapose love with physicality, and she reevaluates her relationships with Greg and Jake as being based on physical attraction rather than love. Dawn jumps up abruptly and runs to the ladies room. She questions herself internally, “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” as she feels
“sick to her stomach” but not “because of any chemotherapy.”73 Dawn’s duplicity makes
her sicker than her treatments, and she washes off all her makeup, careful to also “clea[n]
out the sink, drying it with paper towels until no traces remained of her ‘dangerous
living.’”74 Dawn’s and Sandy’s makeovers in the hospital or at camp could be considered
therapeutic because they were not a form of “dangerous living,” or in other words, they
were safely contained in the (presumed non-erotic) spaces of doctors and patients and were not meant to attract men. Thus, the heteronormative imperative of the novel becomes complicated by notions of “modesty” and appropriate sexual expressiveness.
70 Ibid., 205. 71 Ibid., 208. 72 Ibid., 207-208. 73 Ibid., 208. 74 Ibid., 208. 216 Makeup is also used as a rehabilitative strategy with the tomboyish Marlee, an
unruly camper whose defiance challenges Dawn’s authority as a camp counselor in So
Much to Live For. Described as “mean and nasty” by fellow campers, Marlee consistently
resists the efforts of camp authorities and fellow campers to include her in activities.
Dawn attempts to spruce up the cabin for the other camping girls, and when she and the
girls arrive and find the cabin trashed, it appears that Marlee was the culprit. Marlee trips
a “one-armed girl” while on a hike, snatches the scarves from other campers heads “right
in front of two guys” embarrassing Fran, her bunkmate, and also refuses the camp
activities (except diving, which enables her to demonstrate her athletic skill in front of
another boy), designed to promote a sense of unity and fun among fellow campers.75 She denies the group of girls the ability to win the “Clean Cabin Award” by purposely leaving her bunk in disarray and refuses to make crafts.76 In other words, as an unruly
crip, she resists rehabilitation.
In addition to her unwillingness to join the community, Marlee’s utter lack of
care for her appearance evidences her unhealthy attitude toward her disease.
“…[P]artially bald, with wispy tufts of hair standing straight out,” Marlee does not
bother to wear headscarves like other campers, and in spite of her plucky challenge to
Dawn’s authority, as she stares at Dawn through one glass eye, she looks “more pitiful
75 Ibid., So Much to Live For, 292. 76 Ibid., 295. 217 than mean.”77 Although Dawn describes camp as a place where “everyone felt perfectly free to ‘come as they were’” whether “on crutches…bald…with partial limbs…with sores and bandages…[and]without pretense or shame about how awful they might look or
feel,” Dawn, the doctors, and the book’s third person narrator, all take improving
Marlee’s poor appearance as the main strategy in a rehabilitative project, in which Dawn
is assisted by her love interest, Brent, Sandy’s brother.
When a frustrated Dawn expresses her lack of understanding of Marlee’s
coarseness, Brent offers a solution: “Well, maybe it would help if she fixed herself up a
little…She could make a little effort, you know, some makeup, covering her head—stuff
like that.”78 Dawn resists him, “But that’s the point of this place. No one has to get fixed
up.”79 Brent follows up, linking Marlee’s mental state with her unkempt appearance, “I’ll
bet that Marlee never pulls herself together.”80 Dawn concedes to Brent quickly, saying
“[m]aybe she doesn’t know how” to fix herself up, in spite of Brent’s assertion that he
“thought most girls knew how to do that stuff from birth.”81 Although Brent believes
Dawn is “just naturally pretty” and that femininity comes from a natural, innate force,
Marlee apparently needs special assistance in cultivating desirable, and thus, healthy,
77 Ibid., 296. 78 Ibid., 306. 79 Ibid., 306. 80 Ibid., 306. 81 Ibid., 307. 218 femininity, which is consistently equated with “pulling herself together” emotionally
toward her disease.82
With the younger girls eager to know what it’s like to get kissed, Dawn and the
other girls attempt to lure Marlee into their circle via makeup. Marlee resists three times,
amid being called a “party pooper” and storms out of the tent.83 Dawn pursues her and
defends the group’s intention not to make Marlee feel “left out,” but Marlee says “flatly”
that she doesn’t wear makeup. Marlee’s stubbornness makes “anger boil” inside Dawn:
“She wanted to shake the girl” because “people had bent over backwards to reach out to
Marlee” without her gratitude or cooperation.84 When Dawn gets up “icily” to leave
Marlee outside the tent, Marlee confesses that she does not wear makeup because she
tried unsuccessfully to apply eye makeup after losing her eye; “…it kept watering and
watering” until “eye shadow and mascara were running down my face” which made her
“look like a freak.”85 Worse still, the makeup caused her lashes to stick together and
caused her eye socket to dry out. Instead of acknowledging Marlee’s emotional and
physical resistance to makeup, Dawn presses, “There must be women who have glass
82This strategy for Marlee’s rehabilitation is also linked to Dawn’s blossoming romance with Brent; “she felt a tingly warmth spread through her” as Brent asks her to be his date to the fifties dance. At the dance, Brent dresses as Elvis and is the belle of the ball: “Every time he gyrated, the girls would squeal and shriek” (310) That Brent’s and Dawn’s romance occurs at a 1950s dance underscores the novel’s conservative espousal of traditional, heteronormative gender roles, stationing 1980s girls back in the 1950s, a moment before feminism, associated with conservative gender roles (Ibid., 308). 83 Ibid., 319. 84 Ibid., 320. 85 Ibid., 320-321. 219 eyes and know how to manage makeup” like “actresses in Hollywood.”86 Marlee asserts
that she was “ugly” before cancer and asks why she should bother with makeup since
“no amount of [it]” would change her ugliness. Connecting learning to apply makeup
with Marlee’s re-learning to dive with damaged depth perception caused by her eye’s
removal, Dawn says that Marlee worked hard and “kept trying” to dive, and she “can do the same thing with makeup and mascara” if she “keep[s] practicing.”87 Better still, Dawn
informs Marlee, to her cautious delight, that Brent thought she was a wonderful diver.
In spite of Marlee’s physical inability to wear makeup, the book insists through Dawn
that Marlee only “feel[s] ugly” because she’s not trying hard enough to feel and look
attractive. The next chapter begins, acknowledging that this night was “a turning point”
for Marlee, who returned to the tent, allowed Dawn to apply makeup, and donned a
borrowed wig and outfit; “the result was dramatic.”88 When Dawn and Brent convince
Marlee that Brent finds her attractive (even though he actually wants to pursue Dawn)
and simultaneously help her to cultivate her own femininity, her resistiveness is tamed,
and she is successfully rehabilitated into a full member of camp society. Fighting cancer
is one thing; fighting rehabilitation is something else. At first, Marlee is configured as an
86 Ibid., 321. 87 Ibid., 320-322. 88 Ibid., 324. Audre Lorde describes a similar experience with a nurse who encourages her to wear a prosthesis to conceal the loss of her breast after her radical mastectomy, in spite of its causing her physical and emotional discomfort. See Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997), 49-50. 220 unfeminine outsider; when she is recuperated into a properly gendered sexual object for
Brent—a “normal” boy—she is considered to be rehabilitated.
In contrast, Invincible Summer goes to great lengths to describe the unmade-up ill
body as something desirable and even sexy. Robin is afraid to let Rick, who is
experiencing a brief remission, see her looking like a “ghoul” and a bald “bag of bones;”
she worries that he’ll lose interest in her amid all the beautiful, healthy college girls.89
Rick reassures her that she “always look[s] beautiful to [him]” and wants to be with her, even if she would be more comfortable with his wearing a blindfold.90 As Rick’s health worsens, Robin regrets her decision to keep Rick from seeing her while she was ill; when she recalls her humiliation the one time she vomited in front of him, she asks,
“How could she not have understood the tenderness with which he’d held her
afterwards, and the way he told her that it didn’t matter?”91 When Rick lays on the bed
with Robin, he “could feel her bones, like twigs” and as a result, “‘wish[es] he could get
[under the blankets] with her.’”92 As opposed to McDaniel’s characters, who constantly
dwell on their lack of curves, Robin’s ill body is continually described as something
desirable. Robin asks about Rick’s ex-girlfriend and asks, “Do you wish you still went
with her? I bet she was big and healthy and sexy, wasn’t she?;” she continues to prod
89 Ferris, Invincible Summer, 91, 94. 90 Ibid., 91. 91 Ibid., 139-140. 92 Ibid., 103. 221 him to “get a normal girlfriend” and “forget about [Robin].”93 Rick is unconvinced, and
when Robin says determinedly, “You wouldn’t make love to me now…not on a bet,”
Rick replies, “I’d make love with you in a second if I thought you’d enjoy it.”94 As he is leaving, he rolls onto his stomach and “kisse[s Robin] as if she were [italics mine] big and healthy and sexy,” saying “Think that over” as he leaves the room.95 Like McDaniel’s texts, Invincible Summer denies Robin any of her own satisfaction with her appearance and instead “proves” her attractiveness by showing that she can still serve as an object of male desire. However, in contrast to McDaniel’s books, which can’t imagine an attractive male or female ill body. Invincible Summer configures Robin’s body as
something “sexy” to Rick, albeit through the ableist language. The novel describes his
kissing her not as if she were ill, but “as if she were big and healthy and sexy.”96
Persistently in teen sick-lit, cancer is implicated in a coming-of-age process from the outset of the novels, as most feature girls or boys on the verge of adolescence at their time of diagnosis, and the texts constantly reflect on how illness “ages” the protagonists.
For example, Dawn’s progression to adulthood in Six Months to Live is epitomized by her teddy bear, Mr. Ruggers. After her diagnosis, Dawn’s father holds her hand on the way to her bedroom, and the narrator says, “Dawn couldn’t remember the last time her
93 Ibid., 106. 94 Ibid., 106. 95 Ibid., 107. 96 It might be interesting to consider this image of “big-ness” as sexy amid cultural preoccupations with eating disorders in the 1980s, specifically anorexia. By associating “thin-ness” with ugliness and illness 222 dad had taken her hand and led her. Maybe it happened when she was four, when she
was crossing the street, or after she’d fallen off her bike…She took one long last look
around her bedroom, avoiding the one-eyed stare of Mr. Ruggers.”97 Dawn is confronted
by the menacing stare of her teddy bear, who reminds her that, in her own words, she is
“just a kid…and now, a victim of cancer.”98 In the next book in the series, I Want to Live,
Dawn tells her older brother she is “‘too old for teddy bears’” while she is receiving
chemotherapy, and he replies melodramatically, “‘You’re never too old for teddy bears,
Dawn. You’re just too young for cancer.’”99 At other points, cancer is presented as something that isolates a sick teen from her peers, because it makes them more mature.
When Dawn returns home from the hospital after going into remission, she laments that
“[i]t was hard to get back into the swing of her old life” because “[s]o much had changed.
She felt older, more seasoned. Things that were once very important were no longer important.”100 In spite of following the doctors’ orders “exactly,” cancer makes Dawn
feel—“she grope[s] for a word”—“old.”101 Likewise, in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Keith
Gardner, a boy in remission from leukemia, woos Carrie, who is also in remission, as he
likens himself to an old man when he says, smiling, “‘I never used to think about living
and “big-ness” with health and sexiness, Ferris could be participating—whether consciously or not—in the body politics surrounding eating disorders of the period. 97 McDaniel, Six Months,11. 98 Ibid., 4. 99 Ibid., I Want to Live, 155. 100 Ibid., Six Months, 71. 101 Ibid., 80. 223 long. I’d see an old guy and think, ‘Hurry up, old man.’ Now I think, ‘It must be good
to have your joints ache because they’re old and not because they’re eaten up with
cancer.’”102 Likewise, Carrie often struggles with being regarded as a child in spite of the
horrors she has witnessed, recoiling at her mother’s attempts to buy her Cinderella jewelry and to pain her room pale pink which would be “‘nice for a little girl’s room’”:
“Carrie started to tell her she wasn’t a little girl anymore, that having cancer and
watching kids die from cancer sort of took her out of the ‘little girl’ category.”103
Of course, the other measure for teen girls’ coming of age is their romantic partnerships with other boys. Though heterosexual romance is a key and consistent feature in teen sick-lit, it is also the source of ambivalence. On the one hand, girls pursuing boys is connoted with immaturity; casualness about dating is configured to be an indulgence of the healthy. For example, female cancer surviving teens throughout the series persistently joke about girls who “seem to waste so much of their time and energy on the dumbest things,” girls for whom “a Saturday night without a phone call or a date is grounds for suicide.”104 Dawn’s friend Rhonda represents this lack of mature
perspective often; when she says Dawn has “all the luck” for having Brent Chandler and
Jake Macka pursuing her at the same time, the narrator speaks, “Dawn didn’t remind
102 Ibid.. Now I Lay, 34. 103 Ibid., 83. 104 Ibid., Six Months to Live, 94. 224 Rhonda that her luck also included leukemia.”105 In spite of this ambivalence about
certain types of romance, these stories work to channel female protagonists into teen
romance not only to evidence coming-of-age through recognition of love versus
infatuation but also to serve as a mode of healing.
Although McDaniel’s novels include a variety of disabled and able-bodied love
interests for Dawn and other girls with cancer, the books consistently reestablish the
boundaries between well (and thus desirable) boys, and sick ones. At camp, just before
Marlee’s makeup session, the girls pessimistically ask, “‘Aw, who wants to kiss a girl
who’s bald and barfing?” to which Dawn replies, almost accidentally, “It can happen.”106
The girls are riveted and incredulous that Dawn was kissed while she “looked all wasted from chemo,” but argue that kissing a “chemo geek” at camp does not count: “All right, so some guy kissed you at camp. But what about a normal guy—one who doesn’t have cancer.”107 Throughout the novels, Dawn’s love for Jake Macka is consistently
unrequited and interrupted by her cancer, but it is a staple of all of the Dawn Rochelle
books. Although she has her first kiss with Greg, a fellow cancer survivor, the novels
mainly imagine it to be “practice” for the real thing. Greg and Mike were “tall, well-built
and very cute.”108 The boys’ healthy appearance is reiterated throughout the text in
comparison with Dawn’s and Sandy’s baldness and skinniness, marks of unhealthiness
105 Ibid., No Time to Cry, 422. 106 Ibid., So Much to Live For, 316-317. 107 Ibid., 317. 225 (Sandy regrets appearing in a bathing suit in front of the boys without “a curve left!”).
With full heads of hair in contrast to Dawn and Sandy’s baldness and skinniness, Greg and Mike “looked vital and healthy,” “firm and muscular,” “tanned and lean,” “so strong and healthy.”109 The boys “made [Dawn] feel feminine and exciting” with their attention; and Dawn felt “awed pleasure in [Greg’s] presence” because he “was planning a full and active future” in spite of having cancer “just like her.”110 The book contains and disciplines their romance carefully; although the four campers “spent velvet summer nights at barbecues, camp movies, and on long moonlight walks” and Greg and Dawn shared one kiss, Greg and Mike were all at once “friend, beau, and big brother” to Dawn and Sandy. 111 Although Greg is an able-bodied competitive swimmer and Olympic hopeful, Mike is “self-consciou[s]” about his artificial leg, which is revealed to the girls’ surprise when they all go swimming; Sandy invites him into the water, saying she
“doesn’t care” about Mike’s leg but jokes that she “does” care about “bein’ around a boy who has more hair than I.”112 The boys perform their able-bodiedness through a demonstration of their athletic prowess in the pool. While the boys horse around with the girls, Dawn “couldn’t help but glance” at Mike’s leg beneath the water, but he quickly proves his gracefulness in spite of his disability with “a beautiful back flip under
108 McDaniel, Six Months to Live, 85. 109 Ibid., 85, 88, 110 Ibid., 85, 92. 111 Ibid., 94. 112 Ibid., 91. 226 the water.”113 Initially, Mike represents a viable love interest for Sandy, but when he
demonstrates interest in Dawn at camp the following year (Greg, having earned a college
swimming scholarship, does not return.), he says bitterly that “[n]ot to many girls are
hot to go out with a one-legged guy” and concedes that he “know[s he’s] not like Greg”
(“or Jake,” thinks Dawn) but would still like to keep in touch with her.114 Through
Dawn’s thoughts, the narrator commends Sandy for her embrace of a “different” guy,
but disciplines the possibility of his pursuing a relationship with the now-healthy Dawn.
As a body incapable of ever being fully rehabilitated, Mike would never represent a
viable romantic interest for Dawn within the story’s logic, as he would never be normal
and able-bodied, “like Jake” or Brent.115
Likewise, in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, although Carrie is initially interested in
Keith Gardner, her interest in romance fades in the face of his relapse. Carrie’s nurses
joke with her about her attraction to Keith in the beginning, and one nurse purposely
makes them work together to plan activities for an upcoming picnic to foster the growth
of their relationship. Keith’s establishes his self-made, individualist masculinity through his love of nature and hands-on work: “Books are all right. But give me real life…and the
113 Ibid., 93. The boys also demonstrate their health and able-bodiedness by pulling a harmless prank on one of the camp doctors, with the girls in tow, to exhibit their rebelliousness: the boys steal the doctor’s underwear, and Sandy demonstrates her femininity by embroidering flowers and bees on the man’s skivvies before the boys run them up the flagpole. 114 McDaniel, I Want to Live, 178-179, 182. 115 I will not discuss Dawn’s relationship with Brent at length in this chapter, although it is certainly relevant. Dawn dates Brent for awhile, but realizes that it’s based on bonding over the death of her best friend and his sister, Sandy, rather than any true romantic attraction. Thus, even though he is not 227 great outdoors…anytime.”116 His family has a cabin in the woods, and he enjoys chopping wood with an axe; he also restores old cars—his ’57 Chevy is his “one true love, next to baseball.”117 An all-American, baseball-playing boy, Keith “like[s] being in
control of [his] life,” so he “like[s] being a pitcher instead of a catcher, or an
outfielder.”118 He also demonstrates an able-bodied, masculine chivalry during a game involving fellow cancer patients, as he mercilessly strikes out countless batters until “a ten-year-old girl with a leg brace came to the plate” and “he walked her.”119 He even defends his masculinity from a presumed attack when he confesses that he plays classical rather than rock guitar; Carrie is clearly attracted to his guitar-playing, in spite of his assertion that “[i]t’s not macho.”120 Like David Vetter, his masculinity and coming-of-age is also represented by his “choice” regarding his death, because “…[t]he way [he] see[s] it,
you get one [choice]: you can decide where. I don’t want it to be in a hospital with that
ill himself, within teen sick lit’s logic, his life was altered by illness such that Dawn could pursue a fulfilling friendship, but not a romantic relationship, with him. 116 McDaniel, Now I Lay, 15. 117 Ibid., 25. 118 Ibid., 18. Cancer is actually described as being anti-American through war imagery of gunfire in Vietnam as Carrie and her father discuss his reluctance to go to the hospital with her on the Fourth of July. He relates a story about Gabe hunter, a soldier and double-amputee, and hearing his screams. (120- 122.) Her father says, “It never makes sense to me why kids have to die. Didn’t make sense when it happened to my buddies in Nam, doesn’t make sense to me now,” and he asserts that “[death]’s got an odor about it…[it] smells rank and nasty” and “[o]nce you’ve smelled it, you never forget.” This heavy American iconography calls forth the notion that dying early means you do not have the time to be a self- actualizing American and connotes disease as personal sacrifice akin to losing limbs or life in war—the cost of independence being debated between father and daughter on Independence Day in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. It also places the odor of death and hospitals as a developmental transition—“once you’ve smelled it, you never forget.” War imagery is pervasive in the Dawn Rochelle series, through imaging techniques in which Dawn imagines teddy bear armies coming to fight her cancer. For more information on war imagery and cancer, see Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. 119 Ibid., 39. 120 Ibid., 25. 228 stinking smell of medicine all around me.”121 While his disease is characterized by its
unpredictability, its artificiality, and its diminishing of autonomy, Keith’s masculinity is
epitomized by autonomy and naturalness.
However, once Keith becomes ill, his younger sister, Holly, asks Carrie if she is
attracted to Keith, and Carrie ponders the issue. Although “emotions churned inside
her” as she recalled “sneak[ing] longing looks at Keith during support-group meetings”
and “tummy flutter[s],” Carrie argues that “something had changed” in their relationship
since Keith’s relapse.122 Although Carrie “liked him,” she felt “more than gooey feelings
and sweaty palms,” the markers of young, immature love based on physicality.123 Now
“[s]he cared about him, longed to be with him, wanted to talk to him, tell him her deepest secrets and favorites dreams,” and although “[i]t was simple to see herself as
Keith’s girlfriend” Carrie says “miserably” that it “can’t be.”124 Although she felt
“linked” to him “by some strange telepathic power—mentally joined like surgically
separated Siamese twins” and “[t]hey spoke without speaking, communicated without
language” to one another, Carrie is no longer romantically or sexually attracted to Keith,
a type of love that meant “gooey feelings” or “sweaty palms.” She “didn’t love him. She
didn’t,” because “[l]ove was supposed to make a person feel good, and now she only
121 Ibid., 79. 122 Ibid., 96. 123 Ibid., 96. 124 Ibid., 96. 229 hurt…”.125 Once Carrie has experienced adult love that “hurts” and learns from Keith’s choice of how to die, she takes control of her life and makes a proactive decision to move out of her mother’s house and into her father’s.
Just as a mature love evidences coming-of-age for female protagonists, the books encourage heterosexual romance as a salve for cancer--a form of salvation, even as fantasy, for the female protagonists in Lurlene McDaniel’s texts. On her deathbed,
“color returns to [Marlee’s] cheeks” as she asks whether or not Dawn’s kiss with Brent
was “wonderful;” she continues, “I wished I could have been kissed, just once. For real.
Not like in my dream…You don’t mind me dreaming about Brent kissing me, do
you?”126 When Marlee says she is scared of death and asks “what’s waiting” for her,
Dawn offers, “Maybe another dream about Brent…trying to quiet Marlee’s fears;”
Marlee’s last words are “And you tell Brent hi from me.”127 The tragedy of Marlee’s premature death is exacerbated by her failure to experience adolescent love and
physicality, while the fantasy of it acts as a comforting dream that helps her to die
peacefully. Likewise, one of Dawn’s imaging techniques involves rescuing Rapunzel
(presumably Sandy), who is trapped by “the wicked witch Leukemia;” Dawn rides on a
horse with her teddy bear, Mr. Ruggers. As “Mr Ruggers raised his lance,” Dawn
“pressed herself closer to his warm bear body” when he suddenly changes into Jack
125 Ibid., 106. 126 Ibid., So Much to Live For, 386-387. Robin also says multiple times in Invincible Summer that she doesn’t want to die a virgin. 127 Ibid., 388. 230 Macka,” causing her to “blus[h] and let go” because she “felt awkward hugging Jake so
tightly.”128 Without Jake and of course, his trusty lance, Dawn cannot rescue Sandy or
herself; likewise, the blossoming romance between her and Brent helps her to rescue
Marlee.
Although Dawn experiences other romances throughout the books, the series encourages her continual, monogamous pursuit of Jake, an able-bodied boy, as paralleling (and facilitating) her survival of cancer. Her romantic object choice configured as a choice between “two different worlds,” Dawn realizes that Mike and
Greg might have experienced and Brent might understand her world of cancer, but ultimately, the book encourages her to choose Jake, because he represents healthiness.129
Following a memorial service that was the groundbreaking of a new cancer facility
(named after Marlee Hodges), Dawn and Jake stand before a “Tree of Life” mural, whose leaves bear the names of cancer survivors. Jake encourages her to choose a leaf on which to write her name and says, “You know that old saying ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life?’ I always thought it was corny, but now it seems to fit. What do you think,
128 Ibid., Six Months, 54. 129 Ibid., No Time to Cry, 424. In stark contrast to the boys at cancer camp who fall for Dawn while she is bald from treatments, Jake constantly says how much he loves Dawn’s hair, that he is glad to see it’s “growing long again,” and that “before [she] got sick, [he] used to stare straight at the back of your hair…[and]…sometimes wanted to touch it to see if it was as soft as it looks.” Jake’s touching Dawn’s hair is their first true romantic encounter in I Want to Live. See McDaniel, I Want to Live, 169. 231 Dawn? Is that true?”130 Jake’s prompting causes a flood of hopeful thoughts about her
future:
Perhaps her cancer would be permanently cured. Maybe she’d got to medical school…Maybe she’d get married. And maybe she’d be able to have children someday in spite of the grim prognosis. Maybe life was for living. She said, ‘Yes, Jake Macka, it’s true.’ He brushed his lips lightly across hers, then tucked her under his arm, against his side. ‘Then let’s go live it.’ She hooked her arm around his waist, and together they walked down the deserted hallway toward the light streaming through the windows.131
Prior to this scene with Jake, she meets up with Brent, and they agree, amicably to break up because they realize Sandy’s memory is “the [only] glue that holds [them] together;” after he kisses her on the cheek and she looks into his face, “she knew the past was truly over.”132 Stuck in the past, Brent and Dawn could never achieve the futurity embedded
in the book’s image of heterosexual romance. The story of Dawn Rochelle ends with an
image of romantic coupledom—reproductive futurity embodied in the promise of
marriage, children, and its curative and future-giving essence. Rather than “gooey
feelings,” this is adult love. In the shadow of an Edenic tree of life, Dawn and Jake walk
toward “light streaming,” not as the angelic light of death, but as the life-giving sun.
In contrast, Invincible Summer’s Robin and Rick do not wait for the promise of
health and reproductive futurity in order to engage in a romantic and sexual
relationship. Through their relationship, the novel resignifies traditional spaces and
130 Ibid., No Time to Cry, 533. 131 Ibid., 532-533. 132 Ibid., 523. 232 markers of illness into sexy emblems of romantic intrigue.133 For their first Christmas as
a couple, Rick gives Robin a custom-made piece of jewelry, a silver hospital bracelet
bearing her name “Gregory, Robin,” to commemorate their first meeting and first date
in the hospital. This remakes a traditional symbol of illness into a romantic symbol of
their relationship. Additionally, rather than only configuring the hospital space as
antiseptic, the novel resignifies the hospital space into an erotically-charged zone. When
Robin and Rick watch Casablanca together in the hospital, the nurses remark that a
hospital is “not a nightclub,” to reestablish discipline on a space that is not supposed to
the site of a first date.134 Later in the novel, Robin and Rick have tests at the hospital to
determine whether or not their cancers remain in remission, and Robin loses her
virginity to Rick in his hospital room: “The planning, the anticipation, the motel
reservation, the new nightgown, the Christmas perfume, all proved unnecessary when
confronted with love and need and opportunity.”135 The couple also ventures to hotel on
two other occasions to have sex, once while Rick is ill and after she gives him “the kind
of kiss” one should “not give an invalid in front of his mother.”136 Although the novel
reminds us that invalids are not supposed to be kissed passionately, their sexual
relationship continues as Rick’s health worsens, as he describes being “starved for
133 I should mention that Jean Ferris’s characters are slightly older than McDaniel’s. Robin and Rick’s ages aren’t specified, but we know that Rick is in college while Robin is still in high school. Dawn Rochelle’s saga begins at 13, but by the end of the books, she is roughly as old as Robin. 134 Ferris, Invincible, 47. 135 Ibid., 126. 136 Ibid., 140. 233 touching” since his parents think he’s “contagious, or breakable, or contaminated.”137
After investigating the hotel room and trying all the lights, Rick says to Robin in double entendre that “[e]verything works” and that he “guess[es they] can stay.”138 Like Robin’s desirable ill body, Rick’s body is also described as attractive as a result of his illness.
Recalling the scene of her erotic bony figure that makes Rick desire to be in bed with
her, Robin thinks that Rick looks “thinner,” which enables her to “feel the heat
radiating from his bones all down the length of her body.”139 When they eat at a fancy
restaurant, Robin “observed how sharp his bones seemed, the planes of his face defined
in clean angles,” and “[r]ather than looking gaunt, he looked somehow purified, refined
down to his framework.”140 The novel presents eroticized ill bodies and a fulfilling sexual
relationship, but also eventually contains it within a desire for marriage and children.
Robin wishes during dinner that they could get married, and Rick suggests the “pretend”
to be married, which acts as a veritable proposal, since he says that “no one else has ever
had that offer from me…[o]r ever will.”141 The novel also charts a transition in Robin’s
thinking about babies that occurs as Rick’s health is in decline. In the beginning of the
novel, Robin describes the newborns as looking “raw and unfinished” and has trouble
137 Ibid., 152. 138 Ibid., 153. 139 Ibid., 153. 140 Ibid., 158. 141 Ibid., 158. 234 imagining that they would grow into “real people.”142 However, by the end of the novel,
they “no longer loo[k] raw and unfinished” but now look “fresh and promising, a new
crop of people starting out,” although “[s]ome would be straight and strong and others would develop poorly, the way plants did, even in the same soil…a mystery.”143 The
daughter of a farmer, Robin acknowledges while looking out at her father’s crops after
Rick’s death that, “[w]ith care, the cycle would go on and on and on.”144 It is important
that the novel eroticizes signifiers of illness and encourages potentially transformative
crip sexuality, because it is starkly different from the portrait of longing to “kiss a normal boy” offered by Lurlene McDaniel. Expressing the novel’s resistance to espouse normality as the ultimate and elusive goal, Rick espouses the desire not “to just function” but to be “more than whole…better than normal;” and arguably, Robin and
Rick achieve this goal in their nontraditional relationship with one another. However,
Robin and Rick’s relationship is also contained within a heteronormative “cycle” of marriage and reproduction, and illness is still configured as “developing poorly” in the
“same soil” as “normal” healthy people.
Thus, McDaniel’s teen sick lit encouraged traditional heteronormative gender performance as a means to achieving normalcy and health through heterosexual relationships and present traditional gender performance and heterosexual romance as a
142 Ibid., 38. 143 Ibid., 160-161. 144 Ibid., 165. 235 motif that also tends to parallel the pursuit of bodily health via medicine and spirituality.
However, even though McDaniel’s texts are more conservative in their depiction of
gender, sexuality, and disability, Marlee tears at the borders of McDaniel’s novel as an
unruly crip, challenging the conventional approaches to rehabilitation that exist to make
people with diseases and disabilities “identical” to able-bodied individuals without ever
making them equal.145 Her practical joke on the campers near the end of the story, in
which she purposely pops out her glass eye while standing on a stage in front of
everyone, preys on the pity of others not only to demonstrate the proscribed
“acceptance” of disability but also to mock ableist pity. Although Marlee is a resistive, queer/crip figure, her unruliness is ultimately disciplined in the end, as she is forced into makeup and fantasizing about boys to evidence her normality in spite of her disability.
However, Jean Ferris’s novel, although presenting images of sexiness and desirability of
the ill body through ableist language, does not foreclose the possibility of a fulfilling
sexual relationship between people with illness. Additionally, teen sick-lit affectively
involves the reader—body and soul—through their participation in diagnosis and through their experience of sadness as “real” experience. This involvement is not only a
presupposed draw to the books, in that is the pitch and promise that the novels make to
readers from their titles, coverart, and epigraphs, through the serial nature of their
stories’ tellings, but the books also cultivate this emotional involvement as an
145 Stiker, History of Disability, 136. 236 instantiation of spiritual growth in the reader meant to parallel the coming-of-age of the
protagonists. Teen sick-lit positioned readers to “feel” and learn from adolescent
encounters with romance, illness, and sadness. Meanwhile, private corporations, parents
and government organizations positioned reading as a similarly potent, rehabilitative
experience for the national body.
“The Case of the Vanishing Reader:” Aliteracy and the Birth of YA Literature
Teen sick-lit rose in popularity and pervasiveness amid foment over a perceived
reading crisis threatening America. Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin’s letter of
transmittal to Congress that accompanied the Center’s congressionally-authorized 1983-
1984 study entitled “Books in Our Future,” warned that American democracy and the
ability of American “citizens…to remain free and qualified to govern themselves” was
being “threatened by the twin menaces of illiteracy [the inability to read] and aliteracy
[the unwillingness to read].”146 The book itself, apparently, had less than “six months to
live,” and the death of reading culture represented a threat to an American democracy,
epitomized by a healthy, reading citizenry. “Books in Our Future” was a $65,390
146 The Library of Congress. "Promoting Literacy, 1980-2002: News from the Center for the Book."
scientists, educators, and scholars.147 A cultural crisis fully-equipped with a vaguely
menacing moniker, “aliteracy” incited and legitimized an explosion of new national and
local initiatives and organizations dedicated to promoting literacy and reenergizing a
uniquely American love of books in the 1980s. In 1986, Public Law 99-494 officially
designated 1987 as the “Year of the Reader” and “encouraged efforts ‘aimed at restoring
the act of reading to a place of pre-eminence in our personal lives and in the life of our
nation.”148 President Ronald Reagan further distilled the target audience for reading intervention when he named 1989 “The Year of the Young Reader” by presidential proclamation in 1988. The Center for the Book spearheaded a series of cultural events centered on reading in the wake of Reagan’s proclamation, including the assembly of the literary time capsule described in this chapter’s introduction. The campaign to
encourage American readers continued in President George H.W. Bush’s administration,
which joined the forces of national, state, and local organizations to form The Barbara
Bush Center for Family Literacy, spearheaded by the First Lady. While new
technologies threatened to lure readers away from reading, initiatives tried to make the
book sexy again, prompting Boorstin to remark humorously that “[r]eading has often
147 Ken Ringle, “Technology Isn't Enemy Of Books, Report Says; Conquering Illiteracy Set as Nation's Aim,” The Washington Post, December 8, 1984, A12. 148 Edwin McDowell, “New U.S. Law is Intended to Promote the Love of Books.” The New York Times. December 29, 1986, C13. 238 been compared to sexual activity…much of it takes place in bed and few are prone to underrate the prowess they bring to the task.”149
Although the initiatives targeted all Americans by urging “family reading,” youth literacy represented a particular focus for national and local programs, while new forms of commercial edutainment were designed to promote youth reading. Gen-X’ers, or
“birth-dearthers,” born between 1965 and 1983, were identified as a “‘different breed altogether that did not grow up valuing reading’” and were purportedly “more aliterate” and “computer-crazy” than their baby boomer predecessors.150 The national focus on youth aliteracy, especially among teenaged Gen-X’ers, coupled with a then-booming YA literature market attempted to solve the national “problem” of aliteracy through the YA problem novel, equating a healthy desire and ability to read with a healthy individual citizen, nation, and democracy.
As teen sick-lit and other YA books rose in popularity, news reports emerged about the new cultural crisis of “aliteracy” and frequently opened with alarming statistics. The New York Times shuddered, “They are everywhere—people who have the ability to read, but never look between the covers of a book,” with reading practices that center only on “bare essentials” like “road signs, labels on food packages, television
149 Ringle, “Technology Isn’t Enemy.” 150 Roger Cohen, “The Lost Book Generation.” The New York Times, 4A. 239 listings, and product instructions.”151 More fearsome still were the “Twenty-seven million Americans [who] cannot even read the warning on a container of pesticide” and
the graduates of “urban” (read: non-white) high schools, of whom “15 percent read at
less than the sixth-grade level.”152 Although “Books in Our Future” provided few
concrete statistics or no direct plan of remedy, newspapers, reading advocacy groups,
federal and local governments, and television programs produced and participated in
constructing a cultural crisis in which the nation’s health was at stake.153 Reporters and advocates often needed little hard data to support their claims, because “many who concede[d] the absence of statistics [we]re nevertheless sure in their bones that the aliteracy problem [wa]s there.”154
151 Gene I. Maeoff, “Dismay Over Those Who Shun Reading.” The New York Times (1857-Current file); Sep 28, 1982; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2004), C1; Ken Ringle, “Technology Isn’t Enemy of Books, Report Says: Conquering Illiteracy Set as Nation’s Aim,” Washington Post, December 8, 1984, A12; Rushworth M. Kidder, “How Illiteracy, and Aliteracy, Waste the Wisdom of the Ages,” Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1985, 21; Edwin McDowell, “New US Law is Intended to Promote Love of Books,” The New York Times, December 29, 1986, C13; “A Nation of Lookers-Into,” The Economist, September 27, 1986, 26; Tony Stephens, “Pen and Paper v. The Electronic Society, Literacy: Are Standards Falling?” Sydney Morning Herald, March 2, 1987, 6; Roger Cohen, “If the Written Word is Really Dying, Who is Patronizing the Superstores?” The New York Times, September 30, 1990, Section 4, Page 6; K. Collins, “Aliteracy…You Wouldn’t Read About It.” Sunday Mail (QLD), December 1, 1991; George F. Will, “Tempting Readers,” The Washington Post, June 6, 1991, A21; Deirdre Donahue, “Books Pushed to the Back of the Shelf,” USA Today, June 24, 1992, 1D. 152 Rushworth M. Kidder, “How illiteracy, and aliteracy waste the wisdom of the ages,” Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1985, 21. 153 Reporter Ken Ringle wrote, “The report calls for the abolishment of illiteracy in the United States by 1989, but offers no specific new program for accomplishing such a major national goal. Instead, it provides a curious laundry list of ‘encouraging examples of what we all can do’” (“Technology Isn't Enemy”). 154 Gene I. Maeoff, “Dismay Over Those Who Shun Reading.” The New York Times, September 28, 1982, C1. 240 In spite of efforts to excite readers that would span two presidencies, by 1987,
Allan Bloom’s (ironically) bestselling book, The Closing of the American Mind, reported that incoming college students had lost the spark of intellectual curiosity and rigor that had characterized previous generations. Fears of a shrinking reading public were mapped onto more generalized anxieties about increasing class stratification as the American economy transitioned from a manufacturing to a service economy in the 1980s. “Two classes of people” will develop, reported The New York Times, a “narrow elite” of readers and a large majority “who cannot be bothered to read.” Others feared “a shrinking elite” that would still comprehend “the tactics of repose and concentration which great books demand” of citizens in contrast to two other reading publics: those that engage in “the momentary entertainment” of the “airport book” and worse still, those that “rea[d] computer screens for information and figures.”155 Reading thus became an issue of class struggle in the media. Illiteracy, “and the even greater waste of aliteracy,” threatened to trap “fine writing in the hands of fewer and fewer interpreters whose translations and commentaries [would] become progressively oversimplified” while the reading public became “increasingly unable to think for itself” and “gr[ew] more and more susceptible to the manipulations of the elite.”
To accentuate the threat of aliteracy imperiling American readers, news media often disparaged new technologies, such as television, computers, and video games, for
155 Kidder, “How illiteracy.” 241 their interference with American reading practices and configured young people as
acutely at risk in comparison with other reading populations. In a media-saturated world, young people were especially “[b]ombarded by…electronic games” and
“hypnotized by a gamut of television stations” with little oversight by absent “harried
single parents or in dual-income families where the habit of reading has been lost.”156
Interfering with family values in a post-feminist world of working moms, television made the stakes of aliteracy higher for this generation’s indolent and unsupervised citizens, as one reporter noted that although there had “probably always been readers who could find no motive for reading” the existence of “such people” was now
“underscored” in a society with “obvious” pervasive alternatives to reading, namely “a country in which more than 98 percent of the households have television sets.”157
Grassroots organizations emerged to fend off the tube, such as 1980’s Society for the Eradication of Television (S.E.T.), which offered membership to anyone willing to carry a card that read “I do not have a working TV set in my home and encourage others to do the same.”158 Conversely, another group, named the Couch Potatoes, (again,
156 Roger Cohen, “Lost Book.” See also Keith Henderson, “Literacy Campaign Moves to TV,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1986, 19. 157 Maeoff, “Dismay Over Those Who Shun Reading.” 158The organization was formed by Mary Dixon in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980. Much of the group’s reasoning for why homes should rid themselves of television sets is drawn from the alleged adverse affects of TV on childhood and adolescent development and behavior. The website also features a mantra drawn from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) that links increased television intake with a decrease in reading: “The most important thing we've learned, so far as children are concerned is never, never, never let them near your television set—or better still, just don't install the idiotic thing at all. . .They sit and stare and stare and sit until they're hypnotized by it, until they're 242 ironically) published books, such as The Official Couch Potato Handbook (1982), Dr.
Spudd’s Etiquette for the Couch Potato (1982), and even a newsletter, The Tuber’s Voice: The
Couch Potato Newsletter (1982) to promote (un)healthy viewing practices.159
In spite of bookstores’ and publishing’s economic success, the media quickly turned toward failing young readers as the intolerable cost of victory; ironically, noted the New York Times, such bookstores opened amid the lowest average verbal SAT scores since 1980.160 In spite of new offerings and increased attention, the nation’s reading
aptitude and desire was in ill health. Some reporters dismissed this proliferation of youth
literature as an “illusion of a burgeoning new generation of readers and book lovers”
because “the percentage of students who read for pleasure every day drops by nearly half
between elementary school and high school, from 45 percent in fourth grade to just 24
absolutely drunk with all that shocking ghastly junk…‘What used the darling ones to do? 'How used they keep themselves contented before this monster was invented?’…They used to read. They'd read and read and read and read and then proceed to read some more.” The organization retains an internet presence. See The Society for the Eradication of Television.
Science Monitor named “the case of the vanishing reader.”162
In an attempt to fend off techno-phobic cultural panics about the demise of
books in an electronic morass, the Library of Congress consistently emphasized
potential partnerships among books, computers, and the tube. In a national seminar
entitled Television, the Book, and the Classroom (1978), Stanton expressed
“impatien[ce]…with the notion occasionally expressed that the ordinary citizen is
weakminded to the point that a few hours of television each day can turn him into a
video-guided vegetable.”163 Rather, Stanton emphasized the partnership and dual
responsibility of the book and television not in “the Age of Television,” but rather, “an
era of mass communication.”164 Rather than deadening intellects, Stanton argued that
television stimulated people’s interests and curiosity in countless subjects; for example
the miniseries Roots generated astronomical book sales in hardcover and paperback and
proved that books and television could have a lucrative and reciprocal marketing,
economic, and creative relationship.165 Additionally, far from the book’s being “doomed
161 Marilyn Gardner, “The Case of the Vanishing Reader.” The Christian Science Monitor. January 28, 1992, 13. 162 The metastasizing magazine market was also blamed for reading’s decline. The Economist reported that a magazine audit firm, Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), said “look-into-ship” was becoming an alternative to reading, in that most people (i.e. 94% of American adults) were “look[ing] into” at least one magazine per month. See “A nation of lookers-into.” The Economist, September 27, 1986, 40. 163 The Library of Congress. Television, the Book, and the Classroom: A National Seminar, April 26, 1978 (Washington: The Library of Congress, 1978), 7-8. 164 John D. Backe, introduction to Television, the Book, and the Classroom: A National Seminar, April 26, 1978, 1. 165 Television, the Book, and the Classroom, 11-12. 244 by the computer age” as some reporters asserted, the Library of Congress’s Center for
the Book argued that it was a “mirage” to think “computer literacy” or television- viewing could ever replace “book literacy,” since the book is “independent of outside power sources," "can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations," and best of all, is "always 'user friendly.'"166
Meanwhile, commercial industries including television and restaurants seized on
the Center for the Book’s message of inter-media partnership and drummed up their
own business in the process. Pizza Hut’s “Reading is FUN-damental” campaign also
commenced in this period and culminated in the foundation of the company’s well-
known 1985 program, “BOOK-IT!” In exchange for meeting reading goals, participating
children were rewarded with Pizza Hut coupons, offering free personal pan pizzas or
other discounted menu items, and were given other promotional materials, such as t-
shirts or holographic BOOK-IT! buttons as prizes.167
Beginning in the late 1970s, CBS’s “Television Reading Program” provided
junior-high and high school students with matched-to-broadcast scripts of selected CBS
network specials along with supplemental reading lists; CBS educational consultants also
prepared Reading Enrichment Guides for teachers to rouse classroom discussion and
166 Ringle, “Technology Isn’t Enemy.” 167 Teachers registered their class with the BOOK-IT! Program and received educational materials to use in class, such as reading charts to track students’ individual and class progress. By the late 1980s, Pizza Hut came into schools to throw a free pizza party for an entire class if all students met their individual and collective reading goals. 245 facilitate TV-script-based creative activities.168 PBS developed Reading Rainbow (1983-
2006), hosted by actor and executive producer LeVar Burton.169 As discussed in chapter
2, ABC’s offered its After School Specials, whose screenplays were often derived from emerging YA novelists.170 Moreover, in 1985, in a joint undertaking, ABC and PBS formed Project Literacy in the US (PLUS), while NBC partnered with the Center for the Book on its anti-aliteracy campaign.171 In the mid-1980s, NBC also broadcast a number of pro-reading PSA’s that featured stars, such as St. Elsewhere’s Norman Lloyd and The Cosby Show’s Keisha Knight Pulliam—to promote their own shows while promoting reading—while the network also encouraged local affiliates to assist in organizing community-based reading programs.172 Meanwhile, cable TV company,
American Cablesystems, launched a campaign to promote reading, even “urg[ing] the
168 The program was developed out of an experiment in Philadelphia when an advance copy of the script for a two-part TV dramatization of the Roosevelt family was printed as an insertion for the Philadelphia Inquirer with additional copies printed and sent for all of the city’s junior and senior high school students. Students worked with the script on various assignments, and the show drew excellent ratings as a result of the “sense of participation.” Frank Stanton in Television, the Book, and the Classroom, 16-17. 169 Each episode explored a children’s literature theme through various segments and stories while offering book recommendations for children to encourage visits to local libraries. Reading Rainbow won a Peabody Award and 26 Emmy Awards, ten of which were in the category of “Outstanding Children’s Series.” 170In keeping with larger national concerns about reading practices in the face of the distractions posed by new technologies like television and video games, quite a few After School Specials in this period also focused on illiteracy—illiterate parents or children who conceal their inability to read from their loved ones and schoolteachers. See the following ABC’s After School Specials: “Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia” (1984), “The Hero Who Couldn’t Read” (1984), and “Daddy Can’t Read” (1988). 171 Keith Henderson, “Literacy campaign moves to TV,” Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1986, 19. 172 Ibid. 246 company's 300,000 subscribers in various regions to turn off their sets for an hour each
day and read with their families.”173
However, reporters noted that although readers, especially young readers beleaguered by new technologies, were “on the endangered species list,” the publishing industry certainly “was not,” provoking a New York Times article’s titular question: “If the Written Word is Truly Dying, Who is Patronizing the [Book] ‘Superstores?’”174
Although both participated in delineating a reading crisis, newspapers and “Books in our
Future” also both depicted a thriving publishing industry, one that jumped from $3.2 billion in 1972 to $8.8 billion in '83.175 Likewise between 1973 and 1984, bookstores
nearly doubled their numbers, sprouting to 19,580 from 11,786. 176 Although statistics
are always questionable, newspapers chose to focus on the success of the publishing
industry not to call the reading crisis into question, but in order to critique changes in
the quality of reading material and consumer choices. Book “superstores” such as Barnes
and Noble rapidly permeated suburban landscapes, and were “designed to be everything
a mall store is not; gentle lighting, wooden shelves, armchairs…knowledgeable
173 Ibid. 174 See Louise Sweeney, “Readers, not books, may be the endangered species of the high- technology age.” The Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 1984, 1; and Cohen, “If the Written Word is Truly Dying.” 175 Meanwhile, annual published book titles increased from 38,053 in 1972 to 53,380 in '83, while US expenditures on books increased by 47.8 percent from '79 to '83 ($7.3 billion to $10.8 billion). See Sweeney, “Readers, not books.” 176 Ibid. 247 staff…recondite titles…and even coffee bars” aimed to cultivate “‘browser-
friendl[iness].”177
While superstores cultivated a sense of class privilege, newspapers argued that
lazy, low-brow readers were lacking not only in interest in reading but in sophistication.
Although superstores offered “recondite” titles amid a thriving publishing market in the
1980s and early 1990s, news media disparaged what consumers were actually buying.
One report noted that popular fiction comprised two-thirds of the total number of
books bought in 1991, while half of mass-market paperbacks were romance novels.178
Meanwhile, a librarian lamented, “‘Just when we needed more quality fiction [for teens], they gave us romances and Choose-Your-Own-Adventures.”179 “Goodbye serious
reading,” one newspaper said sardonically, “Hello, fluff.”180
Certainly, class anxieties were evident in cultural fears about aliteracy, but such
fears were also fueled by the assertion that reading was part of the pedagogical and
disciplinary project of producing good citizens and a healthy democratic society. Not all
lamented the proliferation of “fluff,” however. Repudiating class anxieties inherent in
reading debates, Frank Stanton, former president of CBS, argued before the Library of
177 In 1987, the company acquired B. Dalton Bookseller; overnight, this acquisition of 797 retail bookstores transformed Barnes & Noble into a nationwide retailer and the second-largest bookseller in America. In the early 1990s, B&N began establishing what is now the Barnes & Noble superstore, which today represent over 96 percent of our retail sales (Cohen, “Written Word.”). 178 Gardner, “Vanishing Reader.” See also Deirdre Donahue.“Books Pushed to the back shelf,” which reports that “60% of American households did not purchase a single book in a given year…not even How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time. Or French for Cats.” (USA Today. June 24, 1992, 1D). 179 Robert Lipsyte, “For Teen-Agers, Mediocrity?” The New York Times, May 18, 1986, BR30. 248 Congress that an “ image of books as the talisman of a privileged minority or an
intellectual elite is a thing of the fading past, and that is a very healthy development in a
democratic society.”181 Instead of rotting American minds, more reading selections,
including “fluff” and companion books growing out of TV programs rather than
classics, evidenced the health of democracy, epitomized by access to information. This
equation of reading with participatory democratic citizenship took on special
significance during the “Second Cold War,” when programs such as 1982’s “Banned
Books Week” and even a 1988 Soviet-US children’s “book exchange” emphasized
democratic access to information in contrast to the censorship associated with
communism and the Soviet Union.182 Endorsed by the Center for the Book and
sponsored by organizations including the American Library Association (ALA), Banned
Books Week was meant to “celebrate the freedom to read” and “remin[d] Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.”183 Participation in the nation
through reading was essential to produce and maintain a healthy citizenry.
As the publishing industry boomed, paradoxically, while interest in books allegedly waned, children’s and YA book markets experienced remarkable growth in the
1970s and 1980s. This cultural focus on the “problem” of aliteracy aligned government,
180 Gardner, “Vanishing Reader” and Donahue, “Books Pushed to the back shelf.” 181 Television, The Book, and The Classroom, 8. 182 Hedi Monar, “Wooing the Young Reader.” The New York Times. August 7, 1988, ED10. 183 American Library Association. "Banned Books Week."
new technologies, to fostering a love of reading, especially in young readers. That this
focus on the “problem” of aliteracy occurred in the same era in which the “problem
novel” was being created to lure teen readers positions reading teens as individual
barometers of the nation’s health. Young adult literature itself is a projection of an adult
fantasy of childhood and coming-of-age, or in the words of literary scholar Jacqueline
Rose, “[t]here is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one
which the category itself sets in place….”.184 Thus, young adult literature is only partially
a reflection of what children want or need from literature. Rather, it discursively
produces teenagers, through what adults demand of teen readers through literature. YA
literature always operates in a disciplinary relationship with its less-than-adult consumers
as much as it operates in the discursive construction of adults as coherent subjects in
opposition to the chaotic teens within the novels and without.185
In conclusion, this reading of teen sick lit through the lenses of intimate publics, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness forces a new consideration of the historically- specific role that the affective labor of sadness has played in the constitution of the category of “teen,” a rumination that forces the consideration of affect’s relationship to cultural production, citizenship, and age. I have argued throughout this chapter that teen
184 Rose, Peter Pan, 10. 250 sick-lit’s pedagogical project reveals the complicity of heteronormativity and ableism and
its role in a pedagogical project for teens which involves the cultivation of sadness to
instantiate development of teen readers into proto-adult citizens. As discussed in
previous chapters, this proliferation of the problem novel, and later, of teen sick-lit, took
place within a larger cultural demand for issue-based entertainment for young adults,
beginning in the late 1960s. This chapter has considered how such novels participated in
constructing images of health through gender normativity, heterosexuality, and
disability through a linkage of gendered reading practice with literary content.186 Thus,
individual reading practice among teens became a mode of citizenship training and a
barometer of national health in 1980s America. In a fledging YA literature market, teen
sick-lit and other problem novels were not only popular but also were insulated from
critique because of their supposed “medicinal” value, in spite of their ableist,
heterosexist, and often anti-feminist values. As certain feminists began decrying the
medicalization of the female body in the 1970s and 1980s, teen sick-lit, which
medicalized the teen body, was being born out of the ashes and oftentimes espousing
185 Ibid., 141. Jacqueline Rose argues “What I am referring to is the very constitution of the adult as a subject, a process which the adult then repeats through the book which he or she gives to the child.” 186 Kumbier’s project was mainly to identify “good” (meaning both non-stereotypical and/or aesthetically superior) representations of disease and disability—such as Voigt and Lowry, and “bad” literature, like McDaniel and Elizabeth Benning. 251 traditional heteronormative gender roles against which feminists had rallied in the
1970s.187
If aliteracy represented an indifference to reading—or worse, indicated an
indifferent approach to democratic citizenship—teen sick lit traded in an excess of
feeling, an angst-ridden melodrama that presumed to incorporate the body of the reader
into citizenship and growth through the experience of sadness. This affective labor not
only operated pedagogically, but it also produced a linkage, in the words of queer cultural historian Ann Cvetkovich, between “political and therapeutic cultures” and
“political and emotional life.”188 Teen sick-lit operated, as “repositories of feelings and emotions…encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves, but in the practices that surround their production and reception.”189 In the case of teen sick-lit, on one level,
a public of readers, and on the other, a public of inherently-angst-ridden (and angst-
craving) “teens” themselves, were discursively produced through the affective labor of
“grim” literature, in that exposure to “reality” in the form of sadness and loss, was meant
to incite growth into adulthood much as reading was meant to sustain democracy and
citizenship.
187 See Catherine K. Reissman, “Women and Medicalization: A New Perspective,” in The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, ed. R. Weitz, 42-62 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 188 Ann Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 10. 189 Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 7. 252 Although I have focused on literature aimed predominantly at teen girls, I want to resist the association of domesticating affective labor solely within the province of women’s labor or cultural productions for women or girls. Analyzing the work of affective labor in problem novels more generally means thinking of affect not only in terms of gender (or even more specifically, femininity) and sexuality—what Lauren
Berlant names a “‘female’ complaint”—but also in terms of generation and age. Thinking through the process by which an intimate public of emotionally excessive teens (which includes both teen boys and girls in both gender-neutral and gender-specific ways simultaneously) is discursively constructed in opposition to the emotional stability of adults. As this developmental narrative is told within stories of “overcoming” disability, disease, among other “problems” that cause suffering and pain to achieve adulthood, scholars must reevaluate the relevance of affect theory to the study of age and dis/ability as well as to the more traversed realms of gender and sexuality.
However, in considering Invincible Summer and the linkage of illness and teen romance more generally, I also want to suggest that the linkage between political and therapeutic cultures might produce something other than disciplined, restrained, heteronormative teen sex by suggesting an alternative form of heterosexuality outside of inevitable marriage and reproduction. In a certain sense, illness suspends the rules of the timeline of teen sexual development, often tacitly legitimating pre-marital sexual contact that might otherwise be discouraged. Most importantly, the linkage of romance and
253 illness has the transgressive potential of eroticizing that which is usually supposed to be antiseptic and asexual, turning hospital rooms and ill bodies into spaces of sexual exploration. Moreover, it might also suggest that the bodily future of reproductive futurity or normalcy, embodied by marriage and kids—in the words of Rick, “survival at any cost”—might not always be the “prize.” In the case of teen sick-lit, on one level, a public of readers, and on the other, a public of inherently-angst-ridden (and angst- craving) “teens” themselves, were discursively produced through the affective labor of
“grim” literature, in that exposure to “reality” in the form of sadness and loss, was meant to incite growth into adulthood, much as reading was meant to sustain democracy and citizenship.
254
Chapter 4: “Crazy by Design:” Neuroparenting Teens in the Decade of the Brain
“The teenage brain may, in fact, be briefly insane. But scientists say, it is crazy by design. The teenage brain is in flux, maddening and muddled. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.” Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen, 8.
According to the popular movie D.A.R.Y.L.’s (1985) taglines, Daryl is a “smart,
nice, liked by all” near-adolescent, who can “fly a jet, race a car, and outsmart a
computer;” however, though he was “smart, nice, liked by all,” he was “targeted for destruction.”1 While his family and friends suspect that the creepily extraordinary Daryl
is more than what he seems, they could never predict the truth: that “D.A.R.Y.L. (Data
Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform)” is a cyborg prototype for a top secret military
project to create a robotic “fearless, technically-skilled devastating soldier” in an era of
military accumulation.2 Steadfastly polite, compulsively honest, and prodigiously skilled
at baseball, video games, and piano, Daryl’s impeccable behavior unnerves his
unknowing foster parents, Andy and Joyce Richardson (Michael McKean and Mary
Beth Hurt). Daryl’s eerie “perfection” is especially noticeable alongside his best friend,
Turtle (Danny Corkill), whose normality is marked by age-appropriate behavior, such as
1 D.A.R.Y.L. dir. Simon Wincer, DVD (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1985). This film was among the seventh highest-grossing film in its opening weekend in 1985, during which it grossed $2, 649, 832.00. Statistics from The Numbers Website. “D.A.R.Y.L.”
flawless Daryl, Turtle provokes his older sister by calling her “Hookie,” a nickname
based on “hooker,” to make fun of her dating habits and pretends to spike an opposing
baseball team’s sodas with vodka. In contrast, Joyce complains that Daryl never
misbehaves and that he is “a better mother than [she is]” because he irons, cooks, cleans,
and generally “doesn’t leave any room for [her] to do anything!” Unaware of his true
identity, the all-too-perfect and too-adult Daryl initially struggles to blend in among
unpredictable humans, until Turtle, having overheard Joyce’s complaints, pulls Daryl aside and explains that kids have to “mess up sometimes” to make “grownups…feel
useful.” Daryl then purposely strikes out after a full day of homeruns and curses at his
foster parents to invite their discipline.
Through its presentation of “normal” vs. “synthetic” adolescents, D.A.R.Y.L.
questions the desirability of a perfect, predictable—and thus, robotic and
programmable—youth. While Turtle’s parents struggle ineffectively to curb his pre-
adolescent rebelliousness, Daryl’s doctors are able to travel through caverns of his silicon
mind, represented onscreen like a futuristic three-dimensional videogame, to find
“errors” that cause unwanted “human” behaviors, thereby “fixing” D.A.R.Y.L’s willing
rebelliousness by manipulating his neuron-wires with the punch of a key. However, in
the end, the film does not present this as desirable; only by overcoming his brain’s
programming to seize humanity in all of its unpredictability, or in other words, by
256 learning to be imperfect and incite the discipline of his parents, can Daryl be rehabilitated into normality.3 This film previewed an approach to teenagers that emerged in the 1990s, one that focused on understanding behaviors by understanding brains. By the 1990s, popular neuroscience discourses would construct an image of adolescence, defined by imperfect and not-yet developed brains, making Daryl’s implanted technology a stark contrast to the all-too-human and fallible gray matter between the ears of his peers.
During this decade, neuroscientific discoveries were represented within policy, news media, and parenting manuals to argue that, while all teenagers had “imperfect” or not-yet-developed brains, science could help parents foster these developing brains in productive ways by promising parents that adolescents were not yet complete and could still undergo a fair bit of tinkering and rewiring to remove unwanted behaviors. I call this new compassionate medicalization model for dealing with teens, which is an outgrowth of the rehabilitative citizenship I have traced in former chapters,
“neuroparenting.” Emerging in parenting texts, government policy, and news media descriptions of teens in the 1990s, neuroparenting was premised on neuroplasticity (i.e. the idea that the brain continues to change its own wiring during development as a result
3 D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) engages issues of cognition, normality, and disability—issues upon which Roger Ebert seized in his review of the film: “D.A.R.Y.L. is sort of Charly in reverse…Instead of a retarded [sic] man who is allowed, through science, to have a brief glimpse of what it would like to be normal, what we have here is a super-intelligent thinking machine, who gets a taste of being a real little boy.” Roger Ebert, “The Impact of D.A.R.Y.L.” Cinemania. < http://www.geocities.com /barretoliver03/butthead.html> Accessed 27 May 2008. 257 of environmental stimuli and experiences) and a new understanding of the teen brain
that redefined teens as “flexible” but in possession of (or possessed by) “temporarily
disabled” brains. Neuroparenting involved “blaming the brain” for “symptoms” of
adolescence, such as laziness or bad-decision-making, while it also configured teens as
physiologically in need of (and responsive to) intervention that could “build” and mold
the brain before its development was complete. Although it was an approach applied to
able-bodied teens, it configured them as disabled, and in so doing, it traded within a new compassionate, more-inclusive rehabilitative logic that also had begun to take hold for disabled people by the 1990s in the wake of the passage of the Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA). This new neuroparental understanding of the always-already temporarily and neurologically “disabled” able-bodied teen also necessitated that “truly” mentally ill and disabled teens become visible only as metaphors for ab/normality rather than as actual, self-actualized disabled selves. This neurological discourse made Daryl’s controllable brain seem not only possible, but also—in contrast to the film—favorable for parents, teenagers, the American nation, and the world.
New discoveries in adolescent neuroscience existed in orbit with a more general rise in the visibility and popularity of neuroscience and brain imagery. On July 17, 1990,
President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the 1990s “the Decade of the Brain,” an initiative that would become not only transnational, but also intricately linked to notions of disability and citizenship. Linking a triumphal story of medical exploration
258 that might lead to “improved treatments” for or “prevention” of disabilities such as
paralysis, epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism, muscular dystrophy, and depression, Bush
added that neuroscientific research might also aid the “war on drugs,” “prevent harm
done to the preborn children of pregnant women who abuse drugs and alcohol,” and
“enhance our understanding of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”4 Here, a
better understanding about the functions and malfunctions of the brain would not only
rehabilitate diseased or disabled bodies, but also combat other national ills, such as drug
abuse, bad motherhood, and AIDS.
While other scholars have examined the brain as a cultural figure, these scholars
do not focus on teenagers.5 This chapter traces the positionality of and intense cultural
focus on teenagers within the Decade of the Brain to examine the teen brain’s
relationship to discourses of national mental and bodily health within the critical valences of race, class, gender, and sexuality. D.A.R.Y.L. had foreshadowed a central tension that would repeatedly appear in cultural representations of neuroscientific discoveries about adolescents by the 1990s. On one hand, medical, scientific, parental, and governmental authorities biologized adolescence as a neurological “condition,” thus
4 President George H.W. Bush, “Presidential Proclamation 6158.” Project on the Decade of the Brain.
taking. A humanistic notion of teenage imperfection as normal and desirable, like that in
D.A.R.Y.L., was something that entered parenting guides and news media in the wake of
neuroscientific discoveries that “explained” the physiological roots and reasons for teen
rebelliousness. Popular scientific discourses worked to construct teens as biologically-
inclined toward risk-taking, poor decision-making and generational conflict or, in other
words, as risks to themselves. In fact, by the late 1980s, citing an increase in teen
accidents and violence, various private foundations, medical professionals, and the
Federal government took action by undertaking a joint program of research “on why
teen-agers take so many foolish risks - and how such dangerous behavior can be
curbed.”6 A “notoriously reckless group” defined by “acrobatics on skateboards” and
“sex without contraceptives,” adolescents, the story reported, comprised the only age group with an increasing mortality rate, with reportedly three-quarters of teen deaths caused by accidents, homicide, and suicide. According to the New York Times, all of this
“indicate[d] a lethal propensity for risk-taking.” By the 1990s, neuroscientists explained this “natural” human-teen behavior by arguing that as an underdeveloped organ, the teen brain was not the same as a complete, rational adult brain that marked the culmination
of human development. For many parents and government agencies who focused on
How The Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love. (New York: Harmony Books, 2006); Louann Brizendine, M.D., The Female Brain. (New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006). 6 Daniel Coleman, “Teen-Age Risk-Taking: Rise in Deaths Prompts New Research Effort.” The New York Times, November 24, 1987, C1. 260 teen problems, this new biological approach to teen-rearing reassured parents that the sometimes-illogical behavior of teenagers was natural and, best of all, temporary.
Adolescence became a temporary disability—a passing stage of “craziness”—to be emotionally, physiologically, and neurologically overcome in order to reach responsible adult citizenship. Rather than inciting only repressive power, popular depictions of neuroscience argued, teens’ difference from adults had to be respected and treated compassionately. However, it also enabled a new view of social explanations for teens’ wayward behavior: Since teen brains became understood as “plastic,” and thus still physically susceptible to good as well as bad influences, compassionate parental and governmental disciplinary intervention into teens’ proper development into good citizens became not only socially, but neurologically imperative.
On the other hand, this biologizing discourse worked to define adolescence as an abnormal condition. This discourse of neurological abnormality rose alongside (and indeed depended on) neurological explanations for other “abnormal” conditions, such as homosexuality, violent criminality, poverty, and disability. In this chapter, I argue that teenagers, and specifically their brains, played a central role in debates about multiculturalism, feminism, and disability rights.7 First, I analyze how neuroscience
discoveries and their presence in news media worked to construct the teen brain as
7 Todd Ramlow argues that “[d]iscourses of disability and queerness circulate around the category of youth to reunify a polity fractured by multiculturalism and diversity, as well by violence and uncertainties about the future” (115). See Ramlow, “Bad Boys.” Lee Edelman also makes a similar argument about the heteronormativity of politics embodied by “reproductive futurity,” or the shared belief in the promise of “our” children. See Edelman, No Future. 261 inherently different from the adult brain. To be clear, I am not judging whether brain
research is true or false or “good” or “bad” for teenagers, rather I am analyzing the
cultural use and representation of neuroscientific discoveries as they shift cultural
understandings of adolescence, encouraging parents to treat teenage differences with
compassion rather than punishment. This discourse produced teenagers themselves as
temporarily but legitimately “crazy” and reconstructing bad behavior as a physiological
inevitability rather than a moral lapse or parental failure.
Secondly, I place neuroscientific discoveries about the teen brain within ongoing
cultural and political debates about the human body in general that aimed to promote
notions of the value of biological “diversity” through a combination of scientific
discovery and intercultural exchange. This seemingly compassionate welcoming of
difference occurred at a cultural moment in which “embracing difference” formed the
rallying neoliberal cry of multiculturalists, pro-globalization advocates, disability rights
and HIV/AIDS activism that emphasized “inclusion.” A neoliberal discourse of
“tolerance” existed in tension with neuroscientists’ and geneticists’ biologizing impulse
not only to cure disease and disability but also to find the biological roots of specific
valences of identity, including adolescence, race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic
status. In the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into existence, the Decade of the Brain promised cures to some of those with “disorders” that had been fighting for accommodation in the first place.
262 Thirdly, this chapter examines the way in which the epidemic of school-
shootings, principally the Columbine Massacre of 1999, and “superpredators” (a name
given to primarily youths of color who engaged in particularly morally-objectionable
violent crime), worked to focus governmental and parental interventions on white teen
boys and their mental health. I argue that coverage of the shootings constructed images
of “normal” white teen male rebelliousness, and specifically teen masculinity, as always-
already potentially pathological.8 While news media and parenting guides represented adolescent brain discoveries as a way of making adolescence intelligible and manageable, this chapter also argues the underdeveloped teen brain became construed as always- already-maladjusted, threatening, and unmanageable, especially as journalists and governmental institutions positioned this brain image within a rise in violence involving juvenile offenders.9 The potential for teen violence raised the stakes of neurological findings; teens, writ large, were now not only dangerous to themselves, but potentially
8 In doing so, I expand on cultural theorist Todd Ramlow’s notion of “metaphoric abstraction,” or the process of producing youth as a category of “cultural disqualification” by defining it through stigmatizing metaphors of queerness and disability. See Todd Ramlow’s extremely productive work on the category of youth as one of “enfreakment.” See Ramlow, “Bad Boys,” 115. 9 Especially in superpredator stories, many newspapers reported a rise in juvenile violence more generally. See an op-ed piece by the creator of the superpredator label, John J. Diulio, Jr. (“Stop Crime Where It Starts.” The New York Times, July 31, 1996, A15). See also Peter Atkinson, “Superpredators,” Sunday Mail, January 21, 1996; Mary Leonard, “Are 90s Teens This Terrible: Parents Who Rocked ‘n’ Rolled Through the ‘60s are Endorsing Increasingly Harsher Measures to Keep Their Children in Line.” The Boston Globe, March 2, 1997, D2; Richard Zoglin, "Now For The Bad News: A Teenage Timebomb,” TIME, January 15, 1996,
neuro-biologized notion of teen deviance, coupled with a panic over adolescent boy
rebellion and highly-publicized school shootings, fueled and was fueled by what has
become known as a 1990s crisis in masculinity for men and boys. A response to
feminism’s focus on the education and upbringing of young girls, the boy crisis
spotlighted debates about shifting notions of masculinity and its value and argued that
perhaps now boys were more imperiled within (or by?) a “post-feminist” world than
girls were. However, amid schoolyard violence involving non-white children and its
fraught relationship to the rise of multiculturalism, the fearsome specter of the
superpredator—the un-rehabilitatable, non-white criminal—provided a foil to the
imperiled white, heterosexual, suburban, middle-class boys who were the victims and
perpetrators of school shootings; the “boy crisis” was also, and exclusively, a crisis of
whiteness.
Finally, I argue that this configuration of teenagers as blameless, both for the
imperfections of their developing brains and for the bad decisions caused by these
imperfections, was indebted to a new compassionate neoliberal conception of disability—namely, that “impairment” was a natural variation from the norm while
“disability” was something created by an inaccessible environment or social stigma. That
neuroparenting emerged directly after the passage of the ADA signals a shift in the
cultural meaning of disability in the late 20th century. While disability activists worked
264 to demedicalize disability, remove it from the narratives of cure and pity, and demand
civil rights, rehabilitative notions of teen normality in spite of less-than-optimal brain
function emerged and mobilized discourses of disability and mental illness to produce a
new image of the teenager as “brain-damaged” but “plastic.”10 Many proponents of
neuroparenting found these biological explanations for teen behavior liberating; some
gay rights activists and advocates for the mentally ill of the period shared this feeling, as
they imagined that a “return to the body” would engender a triumph of liberal
tolerance—physiologically transforming morally contentious issues into supposedly
“neutral” issues of health and the human body. Still, others feared the disturbing ease
with which contemporary brain discoveries resonated with a transnational legacy of
eugenics, as anti-psychiatry and African-American civil rights activists raised vociferous
objections to new pathologizing discourses and reconsolidations of medico-legal power.
Thus, the brain and neurological explanations for difference, identity, or behavior, were
highly contested.
As opposed to the hopeful tone of “curing disease” within media coverage of the
mysteries and miracles of the Decade of the Brain research, stories about teens’
incomplete brains, bad decisions, and potential violence were far more anxious in tone.
Teens were, at once, a population that was both naturally predisposed to risk-taking and
10 Henri Jacques Stiker argues that the transition of “therapeutic agency” in the 1970s from physicians to social workers marked “the beginning of demedicalization,” an evolution made possible “only through the intermediary of rehabilitation and reintegration,” which made power “less concentrated—in the hands of the physician—…and less visible.” Stiker, History of Disability, 145. 265 unnaturally risk-prone. Both neurological explanations for teenagers—that adolescence
was a natural, biologically driven state of turmoil or that it was an abnormal condition,
needing constant management by medical, legal, and familial institutions—coexisted
simultaneously in and on the teen body. In any case, the figure of the teen brain was
used to configure teens as “mentally ill,” temporarily disabled, and in need of surveillance and medical intervention. While past experts had blamed puberty for
objectionable adolescent behavior, by the close of the 20th century, experts had reframed
and redefined adolescence as the result not only of spiking hormones but also “major
changes in the architecture of the brain.”11 As the twentieth century drew to a close, the
brain became a cathected cultural figure in debates about multiculturalism, disability,
AIDS, and mental illness. Alongside other marginalized groups such as African-
Americans and gay men, teen bodies and minds in particular—always already “crazy by
design”—became highly visible loci and foci of these debates. Teens had become a
species, characterized by “‘biological risk’” factors, which shifted increasingly from the
“raging hormones” of earlier generations of adolescents to the underdeveloped brains of
late 20th century adolescents.
11 Tom Siegfried, “Adolescents’ risky rebellion reflects rewiring in the brain,” The Dallas Morning News, August 22, 2000, Lifestyle. 266 “Crazy by Design” in the Decade of the Brain
Invoking imagery of the cosmos, USA Today reported in 1992 that the “new
frontier of the 90s and the 21st century” would not be “the [outer] space between planets and solar systems,” but rather the “trek” to the “inner space…between your ears.”12
While NASA may have dominated the public and popular scientific imaginations of the
1970s and 1980s, neuroscience would provide the new frontier for “‘man defining himself…[and]…understanding our nature at the deepest level.’”13 From proving the
mundane and quotidian—with brain research illustrating that a cup of coffee “really does
perk up the brain” or that “enjoying a caress” has a “scientific basis”—to containing
medical mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Huntington’s disease,
the “‘curses of mankind that rob us of our humanity,” the brain had become a significant
cultural force and a dynamic participant in national politics by the 1990s.14 Journalists playfully invoked imagery of the unconquered frontier and beautiful untouched landscapes in describing the mapping project, configuring the “terrain” of “the gelatinous three-pound world called the brain” as filled with “islands of emotion..seas of semantics..[a] land of forethought…and the peninsula of musical appreciation.”15
Additionally, journalists eagerly broke the brain down into its component pieces to
12 Tim Friend, “Scientists trek to inner space,” USA Today, October 26, 1992, 6D. 13 Ibid. 14 Mike Snider, “Cup of Coffee really does perk up brain,” USA Today, November 12, 1993, 1D; Sandra Blakeslee, “A Separate Pathway Slowly Carries a Caress to the Brain’s Attention,” The New York Times, November 23, 1994, C7; Friend, “Scientists trek.” 267 demystify its functions, sometimes by incorporating readers’ bodies and brains into
short comprehension tests while reading articles about neuroscience discoveries. For
example, Sharon Begley wrote in direct address to her readers, “If you have one of 1,000
test copies of this magazine, sometime while you read this article a specially embedded
microchip will give you a mild electric shock;” she explained further, “[d]eep inside your
brain, a little knob-shaped organ [the amygdala] no bigger than a chickpea is going like
gangbusters right now (at least if you're the gullible type).”16 Later in the article, she
ordered readers to “[s]upply a verb for each noun: pencil, oven, broom. And tell which animals in this list are dangerous: tapir, lion, lamb” to spur their cerebral cortexes into motion.17 Readers were swept into the examining room from their living rooms as the
brain arrived on the scene as a potent cultural force.
The “Decade of the Brain” proclamation incited a partnership between the
Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health to implement the
proclamation’s goal of “enhanc[ing] public awareness of the benefits to be derived from
brain research.”18 This interagency project sponsored activities, publications, and
programs meant to introduce members of Congress, their staffs, and the general public
to “cutting-edge research on the brain” and “encourag[e] public dialogue on the ethical,
15 See also John Yemma, “Imaging moves scientists closer to 'brain atlas'.” The Boston Globe, June 22, 1996, 6. 16 Sharon Begley, “Mapping the Brain.” Newsweek, April 20, 1992, 66. See also, William Allen, “Mapping the Brain,” St. Petersburg Times, April 12, 1994, 1D. 17 Begley, “Mapping the Brain.” 268 philosophical, and humanistic implications of these emerging discoveries.”19
Additionally, public awareness events, such as “Brain Awareness Week,” instituted in
1996, gathered expansive coalitions of science, advocacy, and other health organizations to sponsor educational activities for the general public, including lectures, lab tours, classroom visits, and exhibits across North America, “to demonstrate the importance of basic neuroscience research to the health and well-being of the American public.”20
The 1990s witnessed a flurry of new brain discoveries. According to the UK- based Wellcome Trust, over 35,000 neuroscience papers were published per year between 1991 and 1994 (half of which were from the US).21 A decade colloquially known as “The Years Between Your Ears,” the 1990s also hosted the development of
“neuroinformatics” (i.e. a research field involving the development of databases and modeling tools ) which enabled neuroscience to enter globalized medicine and a global marketplace by producing more sophisticated technologies. These wide-ranging technologies not only made visualizing live brains possible for the first time in human history but also centralized neurological information flows through the creation of internationally-accessible computer databases.
18 Bush, “Presidential Proclamation 6158.” 19 Project on the Decade of the Brain. < http://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/> Accessed 29 May 2008. 20 Society for Neuroscience. “Brain Awareness Week.”
diseases or globalizing medical information, a number of efforts aimed at visualizing,
mapping, and understanding the “normal” brain were also undertaken by scientists and
seized upon by media outlets. This visualizing of the “normal brain” included
unprecedented voyages into the live “healthy” adolescent brain, which was analyzed for
the first time in history.22 Like disability, the brain itself “far outstrip[ped] [its] biological
bas[e]” and participated as a biopoliticized cultural figure in debates about national
health, gender, race, and sexual politics. In the case of teens, the brain’s biopolitical
power lay in whether or not it could produce evidence of the synaptic source of teen
rebelliousness, thus defining unruly teen behavior as “natural” and prediscursive; in
other words, the brain could potentially determine whether or not, as neuroparenting
book titles proclaimed, “your teen is crazy.”23
Due to rapid developments in imaging technologies and neuroinformatics, for
the first time in history, images of live brains began circulating widely in popular culture
as entertainment, education, and objects of controversy. This pop cultural proliferation
22 Barbara Strauch describes a study undertaken by Dr. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health within the National Institutes of Health. The NIH reports that Giedd’s team has acquired over 3000 MRI scans at the date of this writing in 2008, making their undertaking “the largest pediatric neuroimaging project of its kind.” See Jay Giedd, “NIH Faculty Profile.” < http://gpp.nih.gov/Faculty/Mentors/ NIMH /JayGiedd.htm> Accessed 29 May 2008. See also Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 12. 23 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “From Wonder to Error—A Geneaology of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 8. The phrase “your teen is crazy” is drawn from the title of a parenting book released in the wake of the proliferation of adolescent neuroscience research. See Bradley, Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind. (Gig Harbor: Harbor Press, 2003). 270 of brain imagery was due in large part to the sophistication of medical imaging
technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed topography (CT),
computed axial topography (CAT), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
positron emission topography (PET), and single photon emission computed topography
(SPECT), throughout the 1980s and 1990s.24 As early as the mid-1980s, images of the
brain already appeared in popular magazines and made claims about what “normal” and
“mentally-ill” brains looked like. For example, a 1983 issue of Vogue featured an article
entitled “High-Tech Breakthrough in Medicine: New Seeing-Eye Machines…[that] look
inside your body, can save your life.” Alongside the piece, three PET scans of brains
appeared with boldface, white, single-word captions describing the brain below it:
“NORMAL,” “SCHIZO,” and “DEPRESSED.”25 Similarly, in the 1990s, Newsweek ran
a cover story entitled “Mapping the Brain,” which featured six PET images meant to
establish a visual contrast between “normal” brains and disabled or unhealthy brains: a learning brain alongside a brain performing a routine; the brain of a “retarded patient” that is “much more active” than the brain of a “normal volunteer,” and a “clinically- depressed person” alongside a “healthy person.”26
24 See also Eric Racine, Ofek Bar-Ilan, and Judy Illes, “Brain Imaging: A Decade of Coverage in Print Media,” Science Communication 28, no. 1 (2006): 122-143. 25 See Dumit, Picturing, 6-8. See also Joseph R. Hixson, “New Seeing-Eye Machines…Look Inside Your Body, Can Save Your Life,” Vogue July (1983): 238-239, 254-258. 26 Begley, “Mapping the Brain.” Note that the Newsweek article draws a careful distinction between a “retarded patient” and a “normal volunteer,” a distinction that enables the disabled person to appear as a medical subject while the “normal” person appears autonomous. See also Dumit, Picturing, 160. Other brain stories appeared in Newsweek in the same period. See also Sharon Begley, “Thinking Looks Like This: PET Scans Show the Brain Recalling and Cogitating. (Positron Emission Topography).” 271 By the mid-1980s, neuroimaging had already sparked controversy, with the
introduction of a CT scan of John Hinckley Jr.’s brain as evidence to substantiate a
biological explanation for Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.27
This trial sparked a nationwide debate on the insanity defense.28 Although many scholars, including historians Joseph Dumit and Sander Gilman, have argued that, legally and socially, there is no definitive correlation between an abnormal brain and an insane person, brain images in popular culture continually establish a relationship, whereby an abnormal brain connotes mental illness, which indicates insanity.29 In turn, brain scans increasingly became regarded as authoritative evidence in courtroom cases in spite of (some) neurologists’ protestations to the contrary. Dumit argues this occurred due to a collapse of the brain with the psyche, because “[f]or the first time (outside of large tumor detection), there was the possibility of seeing an abnormal brain rather than
Newsweek 118, no. 22 (1991): 67; and Sharon Begley,“Gray Matters: New Brain-Scanning Technologies Show Differences Between Men and Women,” Newsweek, March 27, 1995, 48. 27 See Dumit, Picturing, 109-133. See also Lincoln Caplan, The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984). 28 Dumit argues that although the use of brain imaging scans done with CT, MRI, PET, and SPECT are on the rise in courtrooms, most neurologists and other experts oppose the use of such scans in this capacity, especially with respect to claims that the images can aid jurors in deciding issues of insanity, competency, and neurotrauma. See Dumit, Picturing, 110. See also Mary Ader, “Investigational Treatments: Coverage, Controversy, and Consensus,” Annals of Health Law 5 (1996); 45-61. For more information about the controversial nature of these scans as diagnostic tools or in/as expert testimony, see Jennifer Kulynych, “Psychiatric Neuroimaging Evidence: A High-Tech Crystal Ball?” Stanford Law Review 49, May (1997): 1249-1270; Helen S. Mayberg, “Functional Brain Scans as Evidence in Criminal Court: An Argument for Caution,” Journal of Nuclear Medicine 33, no. 6 (1992), 18 ff; J. Rojas-Burke, “PET Scans Advance as Tool in Insanity Defense,” Journal of Nuclear Medicine 34, no. 1 (1993): N13ff; and Dumit, Picturing, 107-138. 29 Dumit, Picturing, 124. Contestations over the role of the medical expert and medical knowledge in the courtroom dates back to at least the 19th century. See Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003); and Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), especially Duggan’s fourth chapter, “Inquisition of Lunacy.” 272 diagnosing an abnormal mind;” this possibility would confirm a cultural belief (or
hope?) “that the brain of an insane person should somehow be different from a sane
person’s” and that medicine finally offered a “way to…distinguish them (the mentally
abnormal) from us.”30
While the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the largest
source of funding for Decade of the Brain’s research and initiatives, US and EU scientists
actually jointly designated the 1990s as the “decade of the brain” and collaborated on
research. While scientists assiduously crafted borders to separate the brain into component parts, the brain itself crossed national borders to become a harmonious global image of scientific promise and international collaboration. Bush’s proclamation may have provided a news hook that often made the Decade of the Brain seem a
uniquely American enterprise, but it actually involved global participation and
transnational collaboration among scientists, governments, and media outlets that
covered brain stories with fervor. As early as 1992, Japan dove into the global
neuroscience boom with enthusiasm as an ad hoc group of neuroscientists emerged,
promoting a “Century of the Brain” campaign to match US and EU “decade of the
brain” campaign.31 Then-Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto highlighted “expanding
brain science and genetic research” as a key step in making “Japan, a science and
30 Italics in original. Dumit, Picturing, 118-119 and 127-128. 31 Masao Ito, “Editorial: Japanese Science Funding.” Science, vol. 276, no. 5315, 1011, May 16, 1997. 273 technology-based creative nation,” while scientists successfully argued that scientific
funding was crucial to establishing international scientific collaboration of the likes of
the EU and US in 1996.32 Moreover, the “economic promise of neuroscience” was framed in the language of international competition when the Society for Neuroscience sought government funding for its research. As Dr. Lewis L. Judd, M.D., Chair of the
Governmental and Public Affairs Committee for the Society for Neuroscience, warned
Congress, “To lose our lead and competitive edge would be an economic tragedy and
detrimental for the health of the nation.”33 Thus, the space race of previous generations
metamorphosed into the inner-space race of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, U.S. and E.U. scientists collaborated internationally, especially in
the area of neuroinformatics, a research field at the intersection of information
technology and neuroscience involved in developing information databases to compile
brain discoveries, creating modeling programs to visualize the brain three-dimensionally,
and generating computational models of the nervous system. “Mapping the Brain and its
Functions: Integrating Enabling Technologies into Neuroscience Research (1991)” a
32 In 1996, the Science Council of Japan formally requested that the government promote and fund brain research and initiated the formation of the Science and Technology Agency (STA), which issued a report, “The Age of Brain Science” that provided a 20-year timetable of neuroscience goals. By the end of the decade, Japan had established a $61 million Brain Science Institute at its Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo. See Masao Ito, “Editorial: Japanese Science Funding.” Science, vol. 276, no. 5315, 1011, May 16, 1997. 33 Lewis L. Judd, MD, “Statement Concerning Fiscal Year 1995 Appropriates for the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Eye Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.” Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies. Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony. March 1, 1994. 274 report funded jointly by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the National
Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF),
trumpeted the value of global neuroinformatic access and created the “Human Brain
Project (HBP).” The HBP was an unprecedented neuroinformatics project to create a
“global…‘corporate brain,’” a computer database of brain scans and histories to act “as a
central resource for researchers around the world.”34 While geneticists in the same
cultural moment collaborated globally on the Human Genome Project, the HBP,
funded jointly by the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), NIMH, and the National Institute on
Aging, joined the efforts of 15 research institutes and agencies of the US government, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and the Department of
Energy— “even the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]” was reportedly interested.35
Finally, American scientists also collaborated with the European Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the participating governments of the Mega-Science Forum (MSF) (later renamed the Global Science Forum [GSF]) in
1996, and ten years later, this globalizing effort spawned the International
Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), a multi-national organization meant to coordinate international neuroinformatics efforts. Sixteen countries produced the
34 Ruth McKernan, “A global map of the mind,” The Independent, December 7, 1992, 14. 35 Ibid. 275 working documents that form the legal basis for the INCF, which resides in the
Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.36
Outside of the laboratory, scientists and governmental officials presented the
Decade of the Brain to Congress and the American public as a narrative of curing brain
disorders and lessening the suffering of diseased and disabled people while concomitantly
stemming the economic drain that their care placed on the economy in medical costs
and lost productivity. Before the Decade was officially named, neuroscience was already
experiencing rapid growth but relatively low visibility. The Presidential Proclamation
meant to raise awareness of neurological disorders but did not include actual funding for
neuroscience research. In part, the official proclamation was prompted by simultaneous
reports, issued by NINDS and the National Advisory Mental Health Council, that
declared neurological disorders to be among the most pervasive and costly problems
facing America in the coming decade and argued that such diseases were preventable, if
significant funding were to be allocated to neuroscience research. Advances in treatments
for Alzheimer’s, and memory more generally, were a dominant news focus in the late
1980s through the 1990s, while fostering autonomy and independence of American citizens “crippled” by brain disorders became the focal point of statements before
36 The sixteen countries were Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. “Background.”
Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education to request government funding for neuroscience research to fulfill the Decade of the Brain’s goals. He included brain disorders among other “troubling society problems” like substance abuse and addiction (both “inextricably intertwined with the epidemic of violence in our society”), the “rapid rise in suicide rate in our youth,” the “mental enfeeblement” of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the “scandal of the homeless mentally ill.”38 Dedicated neuroscientists represented the “only real hope” for the “tens of millions of our citizens who suffer from brain disorders” to be able “to live more
productive and less disabled lives in the future,” as neuroscience could fuse “such
important national policy as educational reform and more enlightened and effective
rehabilitation policies.”39
37 Marjorie Kaufman, “Long Island Q&A: David G. Amral, What Makes Memory Tick?” The New York Times, April 10, 1994, 14LI; Liz Hunt, “Memory Tablet Helps Roll Back the Years,” The Independent (London), November 21, 1996, 5; Philip J. Hilts, “Studies Suggest Estrogen Lowers Alzheimer’s Risk,” The New York Times, November 10, 1993, A23; Richard Saltus, “Nerve Regeneration in Brain Seen as Hope on Alzheimer’s,” The Boston Globe, November 11, 1993, 10; Rick Weiss, “Estrogen Replacement May Fight Alzheimer’s,” The Washington Post, November 16, 1993, Z5; Tim Friend, “Estrogen Promising Against Alzheimer’s,” USA Today, November 21, 1996; Sally Squires, “You Must Remember This…; As time goes by, scientists learn more about how the brain creates memories…and sometimes loses them,” The Washington Post, December 14, 1999, Z10. CBS also ran multiple pieces about Alzheimer’s in 1996, especially in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s announcement that he had the disease in 1994. See Sharyl Attkinson, “Hope for Patients Suffering with Alzheimer’s; New Drug May Improve Memory,” CBS News Transcripts, November 17, 1996; Charles Osgood, “Ampakine CX-516 Gives Promise for Helping the Memories of Those Stricken with Alzheimer’s; More Clinical Trials Must be Done.” The Osgood File. CBS News Transcripts, November 18, 1996; Charles Osgood, “New Study Shows Estrogen Therapy Improves Memory in Women with Alzheimer’s Disease.” The Osgood File. CBS News Transcripts, November 21, 1996. 38 Judd, “Statement Concerning Fiscal Year 1995.” 39 Ibid. 277 However, although the new brain research of the Decade of the Brain was fueled
(and often funded) by a narrative of “more productive and less disabled lives” for disabled people, visualizing and mapping the live, “normal” brain was ranked among its most crucial goals. Cultural theorist Claudia Castañeda argues in her Figurations: Child,
Bodies, Worlds that narratives of brain development “continue to be based on the
assumption that it is possible to identify patterns of development in terms of the normal
(ability) and the abnormal (disability)” where “normal” stands as a coherently
monolithic “measure against which all abnormal development is compared.”40 This process which fixes a hierarchy of bodies based not only on race, class, gender, sexuality, but also on the terms of ability, disability, and age. Reportage of brain research assiduously crafted a unified population of “healthy” brains in contrast to unhealthy ones. “The revolution in brain research” of the last 20 years that had previously “centred on the dead or diseased,” reported British paper The Independent in 1995, now probed the “living, pulsating brain in a healthy human being” directly rather than “only imagin[ing it] from the dead tissue on a pathologist’s slab or the abnormal behaviour of a disordered mind.”41 After all, maintained Newsweek, “[r]esearch on brain-damaged people” risked not being “representative” of the presumed-normal population of “us.”42
The true “power of the new imaging techniques,” according to some journalists, was not
40 Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 63. 41 Steve Connor, “Science: The Last Great Frontier,” The Independent, May 21, 1995, 52. 278 only their curative promise for ill brains but rather their voyeuristic ability “to peer inside the minds of the healthy.”43
What science writer Sharon Begley called the “triumph of materialism” invoked the brain to “prove” that a host of cultural differences, including gender, race, sexuality, and eventually, generational conflict between adolescents and adults, were reducible to biology.44 This “triumph” could be seen in the ubiquitous brain scan imagery and biochemical explanations for behavior that permeated American culture throughout the
1990s. In 1992, a proliferation of newspaper and magazine articles reported the medical finding that the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers connecting the right and left brain hemispheres, was larger and more bulbous in women’s brains than in men’s, lending neurological evidence to substantiate the titular phrase of the 1992 bestselling
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.45 Newsweek and Time ran parallel feature stories about gender differences and brain anatomy, as journalists, scientists, and readers surmised that the corpus callosum might be “‘the basis of woman’s intuition’” or provide an explanation for women’s superior verbal skills in contrast to men’s stronger visual-spatial ones.46 Likewise, neurobiology also attested that women held certain advantages for taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Citing a report from the
42 Begley, “Mapping the Brain.” 43 Ibid. See also Allen, “Mapping the Brain.” 44 Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 2002), 24. 45 For a discussion of these articles, see Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 115-145. 279 Society of Neuroscience, a Washington Post article “Neurobiology: Seasonal Advantage
on the SAT?” fretted that “[m]illions” of adolescent “American males may be damaging
their academic futures by taking the [SAT]…while in the grip of raging hormonal
imbalances.”47 Although women performed the same on the SAT in the fall and the spring, men scored nearly 25% higher on tests involving spatial reasoning in the spring—
“when their testosterone levels were [naturally] the lowest” in their annual cycle.
The ever-inescapable brain was even linked to the failure of impulse control that culminated in the impeachment of President Clinton, when, during the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, a psychotherapist called into the Larry King Live show to remind viewers that Clinton “clearly ha[d] demonstrated a history of compulsive disorder, eating junk food, running continually…and [had] a history of addiction in his family.”48
The caller wondered why, when “all serious clinicians and researchers” had already recognized “the biochemical nature of behavior,” King’s guest star, radio talk show therapist “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger, could not respect the “medical model” rather than a moral framework to explain Clinton’s sexual transgressions. When Dr. Laura resisted the “specious argument” that humans are mere “bags of chemicals” without “overrides” or “choice,” King reminded the good doctor, after all, “This is called the decade of the
46Ibid., 115. 47 The article also reported that women performed better on spatial problems when their testosterone levels were at their peak. See Curt Suplee, “Neurobiology: Seasonal Advantage on the SAT?” The Washington Post, November 18, 1991, A2. See also Begley, “Thinking Looks Like This.” 48 Larry King, “Larry King Live,” first broadcast on September 16, 1998 on CNN. News, Lexis- Nexis Academic,
human behavior, animated positions assumed by both liberals and conservatives.
Together brain scientists and media outlets resignified differences in brain
physiology as proving the gender difference and complementarity that undergirded
heteronormativity. A mere year beforehand, Simon LeVay’s controversial The Sexual
Brain (1993) cited brain research from the early 1990s to argue that homosexuality was a
neurological condition. In 1991, LeVay had compared a part of the hypothalamus, the
portion of the brain that regulates appetite, body temperature, and sexual behavior, of
men who had died of AIDS with those of men and women presumed to be
heterosexual—and found the gay men's organ to be smaller than heterosexual men’s and
nearly the same size as heterosexual women’s.49 Size (of hypothalami, at least) apparently
mattered much. Biologizing the mutually-constitutive nature of gender and
heteronormativity, the findings equated male homosexuality with femininity. The
findings were hotly debated both in the press and by gay and lesbian activists and
citizens. Likewise, in 1992, scientists from the UCLA School of Medicine reported,
based on autopsy studies, that a brain structure called the “anterior commissure” was
34% larger in homosexual men than in heterosexual men.50 Canadian scientists followed
49 Neena B. Schwartz, “Genes, Hormones, and Sexuality,” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 15, no. 1 (Jan/Feb2008): 22. Marita Sturken interestingly discusses HIV/AIDS as an immune system’s failed memory. See Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 220-254. 50 Cox News Services. “Sexual Preference linked to brain region, study says,” The Gazette. November 18, 1994, A12; Joyce Price, “Scientist Links Brain Anomaly, Homosexuality.” The Washington 281 up in 1994 with the claim that the corpus callosum was 13% larger in homosexual men, using MRIs of 21 living men “including 10 heterosexuals” as evidence.51 Amid a flurry of articles in the U.S. and abroad about the biological roots of homosexuality that appeared in this period, it was even reported in the early-to-mid-1990s that gay men had more ridges than usual in their fingerprints and that a greater percentage of gay men were left- handed; this “bolstered” the theory that sexual orientation was determined in utero.52
Times. August 30, 1991, A3. See also Simon LeVay, (1991). "A difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men". Science 253 (5023): 1034–7. 51 See “Sexual Preference linked to brain region, study says,” The Gazette. November 18, 1994, A12. See also “Study Links Genetics, Male Homosexuality Research: Canadian scientists say gay men have more ridges in fingerprints,” Los Angeles Times, Dec 26, 1994, 32. There was also a highly-publicized discovery in genetics that linked homosexuality to the a gene on the X chromosome inherited by from the mother. The study appeared in Science magazine in 1993. For a critical discussion and historical overview of various genetics findings related to homosexuality, see Schwartz. “Genes, Hormones, and Sexuality.” 52 “Study Links Genetics, Male Homosexuality Research: Canadian scientists say gay men have more ridges in fingerprints. It bolsters Theory that sexual orientation is determined before birth.” Los Angeles Times, Dec 26, 1994, 32. I found hundreds of articles on the genetic and neurological arguments for a biologized notion of sexual orientation. Selected primary source articles include: “The Gay Brain: Corpus Callosum,” The Gazette, November 18, 1994, A12; Richard A. Knox, “Gene may help explain the origin of homosexuality,” The Boston Globe, July 16, 1993, 1; “Sexual preference linked to brain region, study says,” The Gazette, November 18, 1994, A12; Ian Katz, “US scientists find sex on the brain,” The Guardian, August 30, 1991; Joyce Price, “Scientists link brain anomaly, homosexuality,” The Washington Times, August 30, 1991, A3; Steve Connor, “Homosexuality linked to genes; Ethical dilemmas loom as genetic study of gays' families suggests predisposition is inherited through men's mothers,” The Independent, July 16, 1993, 1; Natalie Angier, “Zone of Brain Linked to Men’s Sexual Orientation,” The New York Times. August 30, 1991, A1; Curt Suplee, “Brain May Determine Sexuality: Node seen as key to gay orientation,” The Washington Post, August 30, 1991, A1; Dolores Kong, “Researcher finds clue in brains of gay men; Reports difference in nucleus linked to sex,” The Boston Globe, August 30, 1991, 3; Lynda Hurst, “New study on what makes men gay splits homosexual community,” The Toronto Star, September 14, 1991, D5; “‘Gays’ wary of problem with brain,” Courier-Mail, April 1, 1991; Paul Taylor, “Brain difference may be link to sexual orientation But discovery does not prove 'you are fated to be gay or straight when you are born,' scientist warns,” The Globe and Mail, August 30, 1991; Lois Rogers, “Tatchell warns on dangers of gay genetic research,” Evening Standard (London), August 3, 1992, 7; David Gelman with Donna Foote, Todd Barrett, and Mary Talbot, “Born or Bred,” Newsweek, February 24, 1992, 46; Sharon Begley with Mary Hager, “Does DNA make some men gay?” Newsweek, July 23, 1993, 59. Brain research was also linked to a neurological explanation for transsexuality in the 1990s. See Natalie Angier, “Study links brain to transsexuality,” The New York Times. November 2, 1995, B15. 282 Linking homosexuality to disability rather than to environmentally-produced mental
disorders (as earlier psychiatrists and therapists had done), Dr. LeVay and others argued
that if homosexuality were to be “viewed as something innate, rather than, say, a
perverted reaction to a bad upbringing,” then homosexuals might be “more easily
accepted by mainstream society.”53 Some experts, like Villanova University professor of
psychology Dr. Ingeborg L. Ward referred to the efforts of gay men and lesbians whose
activism in the 1970s had resulted in the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), when he remarked that the gay community had “‘worked very hard and long to persuade psychiatrists that [being gay] shouldn’t fall into the category of mental illness’” and hoped that new neuroscience research would provide that viewpoint with a “‘scientific basis.’”54
The Decade of the Brain fostered many other controversial “brain discoveries”
such as the “bell curve debate” following the publication of Richard Herrnstein’s
infamous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), which
analyzed the relationship of intelligence quotient (IQ) to crime, unemployment,
premarital pregnancy, poverty, and most controversially, race. The book sparked fiery
debates among scientists, journalists, activists, academics, and the general public, mostly
about how the book’s central argument about “innate cognitive stratification” that
53 Angier, “Zone of Brain.” 54 Ward in Angier, “Zone of Brain.” 283 extends to claims that racial variations in IQ are determined largely by genetics rather than structural inequities.55
For many, the central location of the brain in The Bell Curve and the genetic/neurological origins of homosexuality debates bore an uncanny resemblance to earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century eugenics, or “scientific racism.” Thus, it is important to recognize that these discourses of biologization were not new, even though they rested on new neuroscientific discoveries. In the late nineteenth century, eugenics, phrenology, and sexology emerged as highly visible disciplines that grew within academic, medical, legal, political, and popular discourses, providing embodied evidence to legitimate and undergird racist, heteronormative, sexist, and ableist social hierarchies.56 Central to their Social Darwinist projects was the mapping of racial
55 For more reading on the bell curve debate, see Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, The Bell Curve Debate (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995); Steven Fraser, ed. The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1981 and 1996); Joe L. Kincheloe, ed. Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Feinberg, Daniel P. Resnick, and Kathryn Roeder, eds. Intelligence, Genes, & Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997). Just six years after the publication of The Bell Curve, brain research was cited as possibly having the potential to rewire racist brains into more tolerant ones. Newsweek’s Sharon Begley reported the following: “James McClelland of the University of Pittsburgh had Japanese adults listen to a computer repeat two English words over and over in random order: "road, road, load, road, load," etc. The subjects indicated on a keyboard which word they had heard. Their ability to distinguish "r" from "l" "jumped significantly" after training, McClelland reported. He has grander dreams than eliminating accents. McClelland suggests that neural circuits that bypass conscious awareness might underlie racial and other stereotypes. Perhaps the sight of, say, Asian features triggers in some people a cascade of electrical impulses leading directly to the cluster of neurons that mean fear or hate. ‘We could think about structuring situations to present a stimulus that originally elicits the fear response, and then train the brain to have a different reaction,’ McClelland suggests.” See Sharon Begley, “Rewiring Your Gray Matter,” Newsweek. January 1, 2000. 56 Many histories of American eugenics exist. See Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from the Colonial Times to the Present (New 284 difference, cognitive inferiority, animality, and sexual perversion onto the “aberrant”
brains of socially-marginalized and disenfranchised groups, like African-Americans,
disabled people, gender inverts, immigrants, and working-class people.
Some critiques of neuroscience developments of the 1990s, especially the
accusation that they were applied unevenly to criminalize African-Americans, were
present at the time. Some representatives of gay and lesbian groups opposed research
into biology of homosexuality “out of concern the information w[ould] be misused…as
an excuse for discrimination”—or in the foreboding words of one journalist, if “a single identifiable cause [for homosexuality]” were to be found, “how long before some nerdy genius [would] fin[d] a ‘cure’?”57 As I will discuss later in the chapter, African-American
activists vociferously protested findings that attempted to determine and predict
neurological and genetic markers in “inner-city” children that indicated a propensity
toward violent and criminal behavior, highlighting neuroscience’s potential complicity
with scientific racism.
Stories about teens’ unfinished brains and their bad decisions had reached fever
pitch among other controversial brain discoveries. As mentioned in the first part of this
York: Harlem Moon, 2008). On the linkage of sexology and eugenics, see Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Duggan, Sapphic Slashers. On eugenics in film, see Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 57 Angier, “Zone of Brain;” Dolores Kong, “Researcher finds clue in brains of gay men; Reports difference in nucleus linked to sex,” The Boston Globe, August 30, 1991, 3; Gelman, Foote, Barrett, and Talbot, “Born or Bred.” 285 chapter, by the late 1980s, government agencies, parents, medical professionals, and
private foundations sensed there was a problem brewing amid reckless youth. Teens
were a danger to themselves, and were literally “‘dying of their own reckless
behavior.’’’58 In an attempt to save teens from themselves, scientists at the National
Institute of Mental Health devised ways “to identify teen-agers most likely to take dangerous risks” along with the risks they were most likely to take.59 For example, one
such scientist developed “profiles” of likely risk-takers—“‘bad girls’” and “‘macho
boys”—based on a study she undertook on girls aged 11 to 14 in “inner-city schools” of
San Francisco, a designation which hinted at a non-white population without officially declaring it. Through this research, she deduced that not only were “Bad girls” characterized by “drinking, fighting, hitchhiking, arguing with strangers, seeking entertainment in high-crime areas and carrying a knife,” but also that a “hallmark of the
most reckless girls,” was their desire to become sexually active within the next year, a
desire less common among girls engaging in fewer risky behaviors.60 No such definitive
sexual marker emerged for “macho boys,” who often drank, smoked cigarettes and
marijuana, rode motorcycles, and got knocked unconscious. Getting knocked up or
knocked out seemed the most present threat for bad girls and macho boys, respectively.
58 Coleman, “Teen-Age Risk-Taking.” 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 286 Although the “bad girls” and “macho boys” theory pointed to environmental
stimuli, still others argued that “biology, too” was an embodied driver of teen risk-
taking. One scientist discovered that “sensation-seeking,” a personality trait that
“include[d] the desire for thrills and adventure, the enjoyment of physically risky
activities and the need for sensory and social stimulation such as loud music or parties,”
peaked during the late teen years but declined gradually throughout life.61 Doctors then
biologized “sensation-seeking,” correlating it with higher testosterone levels and lower
levels of monoamine oxidase (MAO), an enzyme that regulates levels of serotonin and
other brain chemicals; people with lower MAO levels, they argued, tended to seek out
addictive substances and were more likely to have a criminal record.62 Teens, especially teen boys, were especially at risk through the combination of high hormone levels and low MAO levels, and thus, teen recklessness began to be understood as having a basis in
biology. Other findings often played up gender binaries between teen girls and boys.
Boys became “emotional powder kegs” of “anger, aggression, sexual interest, dominance, and territoriality” because of testosterone’s “powerful effect on the amygdala.”63
Meanwhile an understanding “brain chemistry” could “help girls,” configured as always-
61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 65 287 already-inherently-emotive-subjects, “deal with emotional fluctuations” and chemical
surges that “amplifi[ed]…a wide range of emotions” causing “their moods go haywire.”64
Within a stew of controversial “adult brain” discoveries and concerns over teens’ dangerous brand of risk-taking, adolescent neuroscience made its initial foray into the brain scene, due in large part to NIMH’s Dr. Jay Giedd’s unprecedented project to scan the brains of “healthy” teens for the first time in human history. The adolescent brain was not studied in the past for various reasons, both practical and ethical. First, it was difficult to conduct long-term studies among adolescent animals, because the period of adolescence in primates and other animals is so brief.65 Regarding human subjects,
“relatively few” adolescents died, so practically, it was easier for scientists to study the brains of babies or the elderly; moreover, misguided by the myth that the brain of a teen was the same as an adult’s, earlier generations of scientists thought there remained little left to learn. Revealing how much a narrative of curing-disability-at-any-cost had been implanted into the fibers of the Decade of the Brain, author Barbara Strauch confirms that studying “normal” teenagers was a murky ethical issue. Although scanning the brains of diseased or disabled teens seemed ethically unambiguous enough (“a good argument can be made for doing brain-scanning research on those with disorders— science is helping those who need it most”), Strauch characterizes the issue of the government’s exposing “children with no problems at all to powerful MRI scanners” as
64 Ibid. 65. 288 “considerably thornier.”66 However, after the NIH Ethics Review Board was convinced
that MRI machines had not caused any increased birth problems for female lab technicians who operated the machinery throughout their pregnancies, they gave
Giedd’s project the green light and began the first-ever long-term brain-scanning study of normal children in 1991.67
Through the 1990s, Giedd's research team at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the
National Institute of Mental Health acquired over 3000 MRI scans in the largest
pediatric neuroimaging project in the world.68 Chosen carefully to “matc[h] the racial
and socioeconomic mix of America,” healthy volunteers (i.e. those “without [diagnosed]
mental illness, learning disabilities, or behavioral problems,” or those not “wearing braces on their teeth at the time of the visit”) between the ages of 5 and 25 were required to complete behavior questionnaires and undergo an MRI scan and cognitive testing
(“computer games”), after which they could be invited back for follow-up visits at 2-year intervals. Families were paid for their participation and given “souvenir pictures” of
their children’s brains. Maintaining a strict division between normal and abnormal
bodies and brains, Dr. Giedd asserted hopefully that the importance of his amassing
images of normal brains promised cures for diseased or disabled brains because they
65 Strauch, Primal, 12-13. 66 Ibid., 71. 67 Ibid., 72. 68 National Institute of Mental Health Child Psychiatry Branch.
This project and others of the 1990s unsettled long-held beliefs about the brain development of able-bodied teenagers, most notably, the myth that human brains were fully developed after age 5. The concept of “plasticity” configured the period between 0-
5 as a “critical period” in development. It was during this time period that scientists believed that the brain was more plastic and after which the brain became “fixed” and immutable; once the first five years of life had elapsed, the brain became fully-grown and no longer malleable. Belief in this theory was bolstered by the knowledge that the adolescent brain is the same size as a fully-grown adult’s brain, so scientists thought a teen’s hormone besieged-body was the only thing that was changing during adolescent development.70 Jean Piaget, who is generally regarded as the founder of developmental psychology, dubbed the final stage of development, from 11-16 years as “formal operational thinking,” or when a child learns abstract thinking; following Piaget’s thinking, psychologists had assumed that teens basically had complete, fully-functional adult brains “that simply needed more experience to become fully mature.”71 Castañeda
69 Strauch, Primal, 12. In addition, healthy volunteers’ brains serve as controls in The Child Psychiatry Branch’s studies of childhood-onset psychiatric illnesses, such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Schizophrenia, according to the Branch’s website describing the project. See National Institute of Mental Health Child Psychiatry Branch Website. 70 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 16. 71 Ibid. 290 argues that, at least from a neurobiological perspective, adolescence is the “critical period” of plasticity that “establishes the boundary between the child as a uniquely flexible body in contrast to the more inflexible (if not completely stabilized) fully adult body.”72
Teen bodies, as always-already-crazy, irrational, and explosive materialized as simultaneously neurologically “proven” and as a preexisting condition into which neuroscience intervened. Brain discoveries of the 1990s indelibly altered this conception, because neuroscientists found that the adolescent brain, “far from being an innocent bystander to hormonal hijinks,” underwent another period of “exuberance” comparable to that which occurred in early brain development of children. Specifically, this phase entailed two major processes: “blossoming,” the overproduction of new dendrites (the branches at the end of brain cells), and “pruning,” the slashing of underused cell branches and synapses in order to streamline and specialize the brain.73 Before Giedd’s and others’ research, teen brains were thought to be completed projects, but by the 1990s, they were described as “work[s] in progress,” “giant construction project[s],” “raw, vulnerable”—in other words, “brains tha[t were] still becoming what…[they] w[ould] be.”74 The empirical “discoveries” were often inextricable from what they claimed to prove about natural “development” and to explain about teenagers’ crazy behavior; as Castañeda
72 Castañeda, Figurations, 53. 73 Strauch, Primal, 7-8 and 63. 74 Ibid., 8. 291 describes, “the ‘facts’ of neurobehavioral development precede[d] the child’s figuration,”
even while the “flexible” child-body provided “the site in which these processes and
qualities c[ould] be observed.”75
Neuroscientists studying adolescents attempted to find the biological roots of
good judgment and responsible behavior as well as deviance. Most discoveries about the teen brain emphasized the importance of the prefrontal cortex (PFC); the “limbic brain,” a system that includes sections such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus; and finally, the cerebellum. Brain scans conducted on adolescents showed that when they were asked to interpret facial expressions, teens used the amygdala, an almond- shaped “seat of fear and anger” in the middle of the brain that is responsible for instinctual actions such as “fight-or-flight, anger, or ‘I hate you, Mom,” rather than their
PFC, the “rational part of the brain” used to “sort out the complex nuances of emotions” or “the place that helps us cast a wary eye, link cause to effect, decide ‘maybe not’—the part, in fact, that acts grown-up.”76 Scientists reported that the teen brain’s
reliance on the amygdala frequently resulted in “misread” emotional signals, as teens
often misinterpreted a fearful or surprised face to be an angry one.77 The prefrontal
cortex (PFC) is described as the brain’s “most human” (i.e. mature and adult) part.78
Giedd discovered that the frontal lobes, “the very area that helps make teenagers do the
75 Castañeda, Figurations, 52 76 Strauch, Primal Teen, 204 and Walsh, Why Do They Act, 78. 77 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 78. 292 right thing,” were among the last portions of the brain “to reach a stable grown-up
state,” possibly remaining incomplete until well into a person’s mid-twenties.79 Often
called the “conscience” or the “brain’s…CEO,” the PFC, which is involved in “planning
ahead, considering consequences, and managing emotional impulses,” was still very
much under construction during adolescence and was “no match for overwhelmingly
hormone-driven impulses.”80 Thus, not only did neuroscience offer explanations for
teens’ impulse-driven decision-making processes, but also it assigned developmental
designations to parts of the brain: the stable PFC henceforth became equated with
adulthood while the more primal and impulsive amygdala became configured as
teenaged. Development was then represented as a process of “progressive inhibition,” in
which the frontal lobes became more adept at inhibiting inappropriate actions,
evaluating risks, and making “good decisions.”81
While neuroscientists broke down the adolescent brain into discrete areas that
experienced change, science writers/journalists translated their findings into explanations for teenage behavior and advice for more enlightened parenting. They
emphasized a concern over the now-biologized teen penchant for risk-taking without
the oversight of an “adult” PFC and created a veritable symptomology of adolescence by
mapping teen traits onto brain regions. Adolescence had become at least partly
78 Strauch, Primal Teen, 204. 79 Ibid., 16. 80Walsh, Why Do They Act, 31, 65. 293 demystified. “Until recently,” parenting books explained, “we had no idea why
adolescents sometimes act the way they do,” and although no one can explain adolescence entirely, neuroscience granted the tools to “explain adolescence better than ever before.”82 Adults had long been “puzzled about why otherwise ‘good’ kids—smart
kids—take deadly chances.”83 Now scientists had explained that until the process of
pruning the frontal lobes was completed, the Kansas City Star concluded that “most
young people d[id]n't have all the brain power needed for good judgment.”84 Linking an
undeveloped brain to some of the same national problems cited by President Bush’s
“Decade of the Brain” proclamation, journalists argued that, considering that teens’
brains weren’t fully developed until age 25, “it [wa]s no big surprise that accidents [we]re
the leading cause of death among adolescents, or that teens [we]re more likely to become
crime victims than any other age group” while “the vast majority of alcoholics and
smokers g[o]t started during their teen years” and “a quarter of all people with HIV
contract[ed] it before age 21.”85
Demystifying adolescent monstrosities, parenting books promised that
“[s]eemingly unrelated behaviors, like sleeping late, acting territorial, bursting into tears
81 Strauch, Primal, 32. 82 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 12. 83 Mara Rose, “Teen-agers' brains not fully developed,” The Kansas City Star, September 25, 2000. 84 Ibid. 85 Matt Crenson, “Parents just don't understand: Brain changes, not hormones, explain many adolescent behaviors,” Associated Press (AP), December 26, 2000. 294 for no reason, and taking risks” would “make much more sense when you know what’s
happening inside the adolescent’s brain.”86 “Every parent dreads it,” journalists wrote
ominously, “Almost overnight a sweet, cheerful, obedient child mutates into a churlish
monster prone to recklessness and unpredictable mood swings. This is not ‘The
Exorcist.’ This is adolescence.”87 Indeed, “this new understanding of the adolescent
brain” promised to assist parents in “see[ing] how to be more helpful to the teens
in…[their] lives.”88 By the end of the decade, multiple parenting and education books
synthesized new discoveries in adolescent neuroscience for flummoxed parents and
teachers of unruly teens, boasting sensational titles such as The Primal Teen (2003); Yes,
Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind (2003); and Why Do
They Act That Way?: A Survival Guide to the Adolescent Brain for You and Your Teen
(2005). Books specifically for teens, rather than parents, also incorporated
neuroparenting knowledge. For example, the bestselling Deal with It! A Whole New
Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL (1999) devoted an entire section to the
brain, with one subsection called “Surviving the Insanity.”89 Also targeting a teen audience, the cover of Dale Carlson’s The Teen Brain Book: Who and What Are You
(2004) pitched itself to teens with the following promise: “Understand your brain, how
86 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 12. 87 Crenson, “Parents just don't understand.” 88 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 12. 89 Esther Drill, Heather McDonald, and Rebecca Odes, Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL (New York: Pocket Books, 1999). 295 it works, how you got the way you are, how to rewire yourself, your personality, what
makes you suffer.”90
Echoing this paternalistic neuroparenting approach to the adolescent-brain-
under-construction, journalists declared triumphantly that although “[o]n the outside,
teen-agers appear[ed] to be nearly grown up…inside the skull, a vital part of their brain
[wa]s closer to a child's than an adult's” and that “[n]ew findings in neuroscience and
pediatric psychiatry link[ed] brain immaturity to teens making foolish judgments and
reckless decisions.”91 “Limbic fireworks” were represented as the culprit behind “[a] lot
of teen impulsiveness and anger.”92 If teens responded to social cues with the amygdala,
the brain’s “primal emotional center” rather than its rational center, neuroscience helped explicate “why teenagers…often seem[ed] to overreact, emotionally erupt for no
apparent reason.’”93 The guilty amygdala became “responsible for the hair-trigger anger
we see in our teenagers when we tell them they can’t stay out till midnight with their
friends.”94 The fact that some circuits “involved in emotional regulation” were still
undergoing “myelination” (i.e. the development of insulating “sheaths” around neurons
90 Dale Carlson and Nancy Teasdale, ed. The Teen Brain Book: Who and What Are You (Madison: Bick Publishing, 2004). Bick Publishing has published numerous guides for teenagers on various issues. Interestingly, the publishing house features series of manuals for “Friends of the Disabled,” all published in the 1995 and including six titles: I Have a Friend Who is Blind, I Have a Friend with Mental Retardation, I Have a Friend Who is Deaf, I Have a Friend with Learning Disabilities, I Have a Friend with Mental Illness, and I Have a Friend in a Wheelchair. 91 Rose, “Teen-agers' brains not fully developed.” 92 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 29. 93 Strauch, Primal, 67-68. 94 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 30. 296 that increase the speed and efficiency of neural impulses) during adolescence, newly
“account[ed] for the lightning-quick flashes of anger” that often accompanied a parental
request to an adolescent child to “get off the computer” so other family members could
use it.95 Meanwhile, research confirmed that “teen ‘laziness’ also appear[ed] to be brain-
based” because an underactive Ventral striatal (VS), one circuit involved in motivation, possibly was responsible for many teens’ “lack [of] drive.”96
Although science and news media portrayed teens at the mercy of their brains, parental influence was not necessarily rendered irrelevant within the new neuroparenting discourse. Instead, experts invited parents to train their teens’ brains to encourage the development of the proper circuitry essential for successful adulthood by abandoning “parenting training” that was now “obsolete” in the face of neuro- discoveries.97 Amid the medicalization of adolescence came an understanding of adolescent risk-taking or conflicts with authority as naturally and biologically-rooted, but thankfully, transitory. Parents, who “evolve[d] from heroes to villains, from all- knowing pals to know-nothing oppressors” during their child’s adolescence, would always continue to engage in epic and “timeless” battles with teens.98 However, new
95 Ibid., 37. 96 Ibid., 30. 97 Bradley, Your Teen is Crazy, xvi. Although she fails to draw what I see as a crucial distinction between children and teenagers, Claudia Castañeda’s argument that, in a “neurologically defined world of the human,” the child became “the site of human potential as well as its possible failure, and in the process parents (not just mothers) and the educational system are assigned a new burden of responsibility for how children ‘turn out’” as neurological citizens-in-the-making, is convincing (Figurations, 78). 98 Sherry Parmet, “The independence struggle,” Copley News Service, January 7, 2002. 297 scientific research normalized teen rebellion as the product of biological hardwiring that
was not “a hormone-soaked rebellious binge” but rather a “quest for independence” that
was “a healthy, natural, and necessary part of growing up” for the developing teen brain.99 For example, encouraging teens to “think before they speak or act,” one
parenting book maintained, would ensure that the good neural “connections” associated
with emotional restraint would survive the pruning process at the end of adolescence.100
This advice rested on the “use-it-or-lose-it” neuroscientific principle that, after the adolescent-stage overproduction of neurons, the pruning back of underused neurons occurs so that those not “used” are lost. Even though it was certainly “not the teen’s fault that his brain [was]sn’t under his control,” the new neuroscience-inflected parenting advice encouraged parents, while “the prefrontal cortex” of their teens was being “pruned,” to “provide the guidance and structure” that the teen “w[ould] eventually internalize” once his PFC was fully developed.101 “Encourag[ing] adolescents to get involved with service projects and volunteer opportunities” was indispensable
“while major brain circuits related to social relationships” were “blossoming and pruning.”102 Meanwhile, communication breakdowns that used to be chalked up to
99 Ibid. Building from Emily Martin’s notion of “flexible bodies,” Castañeda argues, the inherent “flexibility” of the child is assigned “value” in contrast to the adult, while the “need to ensure children’s ‘normal’ development…may be one of the most persistent features of childhood since ‘normal’ and ‘normal development’ became intelligible measures of the human” (Castañeda, Figurations, 72). 100 Walsh, Why Do They Act, 33. 101 Ibid., 46. 102 Ibid., 37. 298 perennial generational conflict were also now brain-based, because adolescents faced
simultaneous neurological “whamm[ies]”: an adolescent brain, “likely to misread an
emotion” because “[e]ven though an adolescent feels she knows exactly what just
happened, she doesn’t have reliable analytical equipment in her brain”; a response from
the unruly amygdala that would “be emotional, not evenhanded or well thought out”
without tempering by the rational PFC.103 When parents battled with teens,
neuroparenting proponents asserted that the parent should no longer fault the teen “just
because a kid [wa]s being difficult or having a bad attitude”; rather, armed with
enlightened neuroparenting skills, the parent should realize “it’s his brain’s fault” and
that he “may really be interpreting the outside world, especially emotional messages,
differently” than normal—in other words, differently from adults.104
By linking formerly unexplainable adolescent behavior to underdeveloped parts of the brain, scientists indelibly altered the cultural figure of the teenager and ushered in a new, more compassionate, scientifically-enlightened, and medicalized image of teens as temporarily disabled or mentally-ill. Now, teens were “not really rebels,” although they certainly had “plenty of cause” embedded in their brains.105 Adolescence was frequently
read (and misread) as disease or disability both by parents and in expert texts. One set of
parents reportedly took their 13-year-old son, who “had become uncharacteristically
103 Ibid., 79. 104 Ibid., 79. 105 Lawrence Kutner, “Parent & Child,” The New York Times, December 2, 1993, C12. 299 rebellious” and whose “personality” and “use of language…had grown odd,” to see an
expert in adolescent medicine because they “were convinced he had a brain tumor.”106
Dr. Victor Strasburger reassured the parents that the fearsome “symptoms” were only
“signs of a normal adolescence.’”107
An extremely common depiction of adolescence in new parenting books and
news media’s reportage of new neuroscience research was the configuration of teenagers
as temporarily insane or mentally-ill. “The startling news offered” by the
“groundbreaking research” presented in neuroparenting books was “…[that] what used
to be a sad, quiet joke between Mom and Dad” was, by the 1990s, a proven
“neurological fact:” “Your kid [wa]s crazy…Adolescents [we]re temporarily brain-
damaged.”108 As featured in this project’s introduction, Michael Bradley’s Yes, Your Teen
is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind (2003) teased about teens being
mentally ill and provided a humorous list of “common adolescent disorders,” such as
“Aphasia Whenus Iwannus,” a “disability” resulting in “sudden loss of speech…[and]
hearing…most pronounced with sounds that mimic parental voices asking questions
about chores or homework.”109 Just as Strauch labeled teens “crazy by design,” Bradley
described teens alternately as “not…bad pe[ople], just brain-challenged,” “temporarily
disabled,” “brain-damaged…in a value-damaged world,” “neurologically handicapped,”
106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Bradley, Your Teen is Crazy, xv. Italics in original. 300 and exhibiting “insane behaviors” because of a “misfiring brain.”110 Nonetheless, Bradley,
along with other authors and scientists tried to draw careful distinctions between “being
truly mentally ill” and being adolescent; in fact, many of the publications, which bore chapter titles such as “Adolescent Insanity: What’s Normal, What’s Not,” were meant to
help parents distinguish “serious mental illness” from “normal teenage insanity” whose
“similarity” to true mental illness “can get confusing and frightening” for parents and
teens.111
Still, many articles about adolescence in the media and in parenting books used, with ease, the label of mental illness to describe adolescence, in spite of its potential to offend or tendency to be inaccurate. For instance, attempting to ward off criticism for espousing a potentially-offensive mental-illness-model of teen development, Bradley conceded to his readers, “…[C]alling teenagers ‘crazy’ may alarm or offend some of you who have dealt first-hand with true mental illness, especially in your own families (as I have).” However, he argued unapologetically that he fully intended to be “flippant and insensitive” and that he was only using the language of “27 years” worth of frustrated parents when he described teens this way in his book.112 Although such parenting books
sometimes worked to collapse the distinction between “true mental illness” and
adolescence, ironically, Bradley warned against the damaging effects of misused
109 Ibid., 10. 110 Ibid., 8. 111 Ibid., 61. 301 diagnoses: uses of “words like ‘antisocial,’ ‘psychopathic,’ and sociopathic’ are often
tattooed [unjustifiably] onto kids who act out.”113 Meanwhile, he consistently employed
a brain-based mental illness model of adolescence to encourage parents, “[w]hether
[thei]r child [wa]s normally brain-disordered from adolescence or more seriously ill, [to] separate the disease from the child bearing it” and to bear in mind that their [healthy] teen was “not insane, just crazy.”114
Thus, the baby boomer model of intensive and nonjudgmental parenting found a
new language, predicated on understanding the different cognitive patterns of
adolescents, by medicalizing adolescence as a form of temporary disability. The adolescence-as-mental-illness model combined with the notion that teen brains were not
complete (and thus still changeable), as previously believed, meant that parents need not
worry that teen behaviors were immutable “character flaws or signs of an evil nature.”;
instead, they were “just the result of mixed-up wiring that w[ould] straighten itself out in
time” if patient parents “calmly but firmly t[aught] brain-challenged children to become
functional adults.”115 If parents intervened in this “neurological window of opportunity”
that previous scientists and parents “never knew existed” because of the belief that “the
112 Ibid., xviii. 113 Ibid, 64-69. 114 Ibid., xvii. Italics in original. 115 Ibid., 8. 302 brain development game [wa]s…over by adolescence,” they could, like D.A.R.Y.L.’s
parent-doctors, “rewire that head.”116
“Armed, Alienated, and Adolescent:” Neuroparenting and Crisis
Within the windfall of new neurological explanations for the condition and
symptoms of adolescence, tensions existed between what types of risk-taking behaviors
could be characterized as “crucial for psychological growth…that every healthy teen-ager goes through” and what types of teen behavior indicated something more pathological
lurking beneath the surface.117 Brain research in the “Decade of the Brain” yielded insight into the source of adolescent tumult as it entered into debates about youth violence, delinquency, bad decision-making, parenting styles, and teen diseases and disabilities, such as schizophrenia, ADD, and other learning disabilities. Although the beginnings of the Decade of the Brain emphasized the importance of images of the normal brain, I argue that the school shooting epidemic (and concomitant moral panics about violent teen boys) coupled with a cultural anxiety about a 1990s “boy crisis” focused governmental efforts and brain reportage on specifically male teen mental health.
Meanwhile media coverage of the shootings constructed images of “normal” teen rebelliousness as always-already potentially pathological and produced the figure of a
116 Ibid., xvi. 117 Daniel Coleman, “Teen-Age Risk-Taking.” See also Tom Siegfried, “Adolescents’ risky rebellion reflects rewiring in the brain,” The Dallas Morning News, August 22, 2000. 303 teen brain that was always-already-mentally-ill, temporarily disabled, and dangerous if
not surveilled and disciplined.
In the nineties, as parenting books and news media configured adolescence as a
temporary neurological illness, MTV programming was engulfed in controversy,
becoming associated with an American school shooting epidemic and “‘growing
generations of psychopaths who are destroying our society.”118 Reports singled out certain television shows and music videos for public censure. Following generations of psychiatrists-turned-media-critics, Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and former head of the National Coalition on Television Violence, said although “it’s normal for adolescent males to be fascinated with boogers and rebellion,” shows like MTV’s Beavis
and Butthead (1993-1997), represented “‘a ‘Sesame Street’ for psychopaths.’”119 She based
this argument on the show’s witless duo’s exhibition of “the dreaded triumvirate of
childhood behaviors that frequently indicate sociopathic behavior in adulthood: Bed-
wetting, a fascination with fire and a compulsion to torture animals.” Moreover,
following well-publicized incidents of children and teens engaging in animal cruelty and
intentionally starting house fires—behaviors allegedly inspired by Beavis and Butthead—
MTV announced it would remove all references to fire in future broadcasts of the
program. In the same year that critics worried about the fictional Beavis’s and Butthead’s
118 Rod Dreher, “Beavis and Backlash: MTV’s Moronic Duo Fills America with Fear and Loathing,” The Washington Times, October 17, 1993, D1. 119 Ibid. 304 sick brains’ potential to infect fragile teen audiences, Pearl Jam, an American grunge
rock band, received an MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year for their song
“Jeremy;” the acclaimed video depicted a young boy who turns to gun violence in school
after being taunted by his peers and ignored by his parents. In heavy rotation on MTV
after its release in 1992, the video opened with newspaper-like text that read, “62 degrees
and cloudy” and “an affluent suburb.” Throughout the video, adjectives such as “bored,”
“disturb,” and “harmless” underscored Jeremy’s emotional upheaval. The climax of the
video occurred when a shirtless Jeremy entered his classroom, tossed an apple to his
teacher, and drew a gun from his pocket. MTV’s rules about violent imagery restricted
the video from showing its footage as originally shot, with Jeremy standing before his
classmates and putting the barrel of a gun in his mouth over the song’s insistent refrain,
“Jeremy spoke in class today.” The edited video, shot in black and white, featured a
close-up of Jeremy’s face that did not show the gun or the suicide; the camera panned
across the classroom to show Jeremy’s classmates with bright red blood staining their
shirts and faces as they sat, frozen in horror. With the removal of the footage of the gun,
the ending was more ambiguous, and caused many viewers to believe Jeremy had shot his classmates rather than himself.120
120 Eric Weisbard with Jessica Letkemann, Ann Powers, Chris Norris, William Van Meter, and Will Hermes, “Ten Past Ten.” Spin, August 2001
Shortly thereafter, teen school shootings were often thought to be an extension of the
1980s youth suicide epidemic that had imperiled white suburban youth in the previous decade.123
121 During the 1980s, news media and watchdog organizations like Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) had focused on reports of a teen suicide crisis, which peaked in 1987 with the highly publicized “Bergenfield incident,” a suicide pact among two teenaged sisters and two teen boys. Indeed, “Jeremy” was most likely inspired by the suicide of Jeremy Wade Delle in 1990, which appeared within a media feeding frenzy on teen suicides. For primary source material on “teen suicide clusters,” see Charles H. Haywood, Letter to the Editor. “Suicide as an Act of Violence is on the Rise,” The New York Times, November 28, 1984, A26; Allan C. Carlson, “Is There a Teen Suicide Crisis?; Or Are Social Scientists After More Federal Research Funds?” The Washington Post, January 25, 1987, B5; Tom Lantos, “Yes, There Is a Teen Suicide Crisis,” The Washington Post, February 7, 1987, A19; “Study Ties Teen-Age Suicide to Abnormalities in the Brain,” The New York Times, May 13, 1988, A12; Diane E. Lewis, “Seeking Ways to Spot Young People at Risk: Advocates Want Preventative Programs to Help Find Emotional Problems Earlier,” The Boston Globe, September 18, 1988, 21; Alison Bass, “Study Finds More Youths Flirting With Suicide,” The Boston Globe, January 23, 1989, 17; Adrienne T. Washington, “Silent, Inexplicable Killer Claims Another,” The Washington Times, February 12, 1993, B1; Tom Sigfried, “Turning suicide data into action could help avoid many tragedies,” The Dallas Morning News, November 1, 1999. For secondary material, see Loren Coleman, The Copycat Effect: How Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines. New York: Pocket Books, 2004 and Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 122 See Coleman, Copycat Effect. 123 The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent Suicide, 1999 reported that from 1980 to 1996, the rate of suicide among persons aged 15-19 years increased by 14%, and among persons aged 10-14 years by 100%. See U.S. Public Health Service, The Surgeon General's Call To Action To Prevent Suicide, 1999
at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington, stormed into his algebra
class and gunned down two classmates and his algebra teacher; smirking at his cowering
classmates, he quoted a passage from Stephen King’s Rage (1977) to characterize his
actions: “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?”124 In what became known as “The Pearl
Jam Defense,” lawyers argued that, in addition to Stephen King, Loukaitis had drawn
inspiration from Pearl Jam’s video for committing the murders, and jurors screened the
video in the courtroom during Loukaitis’s trial.125
Americans feared that school shootings were reaching epidemic proportions by
the mid- to late-1990s, as numerous other highly-publicized school shootings followed
the Loukaitis incident126 In February of 1997, Evan Ramsey, 15, who was often teased
with disability epithets like “retard” and “spaz,” killed the principal and one student
with a pump action shotgun.127 Also in 1997, in Mississippi, Luke Woodham, 16, opened
fire on students in his school’s cafeteria, killing two and wounding seven; two months
124 Timothy Egan, “Where Rampages Begin: A Special Report: From Adolescent Angst to Shooting Up Schools,” The New York Times, June 14, 1998,
three of them, during their prayer meeting. In March 1998, Mitchell Johnson, 13, and
Andrew Golden, 11 killed four students and a teacher outside of Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas; after a false fire alarm emptied the school, they sprayed bullets
into the crowd of students and teachers from nearby woods. A mere two months later in
Springfield, Oregon, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel killed his parents, and the next morning,
Kinkel opened fire in his cafeteria, killing two students and wounding 22 others at
Thurston High School, in spite of being arrested and released the day before the shooting for bringing a gun to school. Then, on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, the infamous Columbine Tragedy occurred: Dylan Klebold, 18, and Eric Harris, 17, wounded 23 students and killed 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. Investigations revealed that Harris and Klebold had plotted for at least a year to kill at least 500 people and blow up their school. Until the tragic Virginia Tech school shooting of 2007, in which Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and wounded 25 others, the
“Columbine Massacre” was the deadliest school shooting in American history.128
Racial and class politics of the shootings were an unacknowledged center strand of the media stories. Without acknowledging the classist and racist assumptions underpinning the shock about school shootings in white middle-class suburbs, some
127 Todd Ramlow analyzes the cultural use of such epithets and their place in cultures of bullying surrounding school shooters Andy Williams, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold. See Ramlow, Bad Boys, 107- 108 and 118. 308 journalists named the Loukaitis shooting a focusing event in which an “urban trend” of
schoolyard violence took a “rural turn.” 129 The same reporter asked with incredulity,
“why this is happening now in white, rural areas” when before, it had been contained to
“gang-related…stabbing…involv[ing] money or a fight over a girlfriend.” In the wake of the Columbine Massacre, journalists noted that it was “ironic that levels of violence
among urban youth and gangs” was “down,” while violence involving “teens in the
suburbs has not received the same amount of attention.”130 Narratives of Columbine
cultivated an image of school violence as naturally occurring in urban schools and
nonwhite populations, by spotlighting its unnaturalness in a white suburban school.
However, as cultural theorist Todd Ramlow argues, this rhetorical strategy also involved
ignoring the actual suffering of “[u]nderclass and inner-city teens [who] ha[d] faced
quotidian school violence for decades…”.131 At issue was the fact that such horrors could
be perpetrated in the suburbs by white teenagers, because the place of violence in
(presumed) non-white or lower-class gangs and “urban” centers had become naturalized.
Thus, “school-shooters” denoted the surprising violence perpetrated by white, middle- to
128 For a partial list of American school shootings, see Crime Library.
The possibility of neurological origins of violence reached a fever pitch in legal, medical, and popular discourses about the brain and exposed cracks in the foundation of
1990s multiculturalism. In February 1992, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, Director of the
National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), began publicizing the “Violence
Initiative” as the federal government’s “top priority” for psychiatric research.133
Presented as a public health project, the Violence Initiative promised to identify at-risk children who “might be more likely to go on to becoming labeled eventually as delinquent or criminal” and to design psychiatric or medical interventions that would prevent them from becoming violent or criminal. Goodwin planned to screen over
100,000 children, as young as 5, for “biological and genetic ‘markers’” that signified a predisposition toward violence.134 When legal scholars from the University of Maryland
132 Scott Bowles, “Armed, Alienated, and Adolescent,” USA Today, March 26, 1998, 9A. 133 Although those associated with The Violence Initiative maintained that they were not racists, Goodwin once commented infamously that “studies of monkey behavior could have relevance to understanding some pathologies in inner cities” because “maybe it made sense to ‘call certain areas of certain cities “jungles.”’” See Natalie Angier, “Disputed Meeting To Ask if Crime Has Genetic Roots,” The New York Times, September 19, 1995, C1. 134 Peter Breggin. “U.S. Hasn’t Given Up Linking Genes to Crime.” Letter to the Editor. The New York Times, 18 September 1992
criminal behavior, African-American activists and “the ubiquitous thistle of the
psychiatric profession” mobilized such ferocious protest that the National Institutes of
Health abruptly withdrew its $78,000 grant for the meeting, which resulted in its
eventual cancellation.135 In 1995, the meeting reconvened, again amid furious
controversy, although the organizers assured skeptics that the meeting would address
“the possibility that research on the genetics of criminal behavior” was “far more likely
to be used against minority groups” than other demographics.136 One doctor quoted in the article understood why “blacks might have a reason to feel targeted...given the grim statistics” that reported African-Americans as comprising only 12 percent of the population of the United States but “account[ing] for about 45 percent of the arrests for violent crimes.” Participants considered the level of heritability for “a tendency toward violent criminal behavior” and how the prediction of such “genetic or biochemical markers” could be used to predict which children would be “predisposed toward
aggressive, impulsive behavior” or to “anticipate which criminals ha[d] been genuinely
rehabilitated” versus which might be “good candidates for recidivism.” Many articles
135 Angier, “Disputed Meeting.” 136 Ibid. 311 also cited neuroscience research that correlated low serotonin levels with criminality,
suicide, and depression.137
The next heir to the discourse of the violent black, inner-city brain figured in the
Violence Initiative was the figure of the “juvenile superpredator.” In this period, John
DiLulio, Jr. of Princeton University published his famous and controversial
“superpredator” treatise in a November 1995 article entitled “The Coming of the Super-
Predators,” in the then newly launched conservative journal, the Weekly Standard.138
“Superpredator” was a term used to describe a new generation of children and adolescents who were growing up in an era of “moral poverty” and were “radically- impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.”139 News outlets covered the figure of the superpredator
with fervor and featured chilling headlines such as Time magazine’s “Now for the Bad
News: A Teenage Timebomb” and Newsweek’s “Superpredators Arrive” in 1996.140
137 Natalie Angier, “Elementary, Dr. Watson. The Neurotransmitters Did It.” The New York Times, January 23, 1994; Erica Goode, “Terror in Littleton: The Psychology; Deeper Truths Sought in Violence by Youths,” The New York Times, May 4, 1999, A28. 138 These findings were later published in book form. See William J. Bennett, John J. Diulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty…And How to Win America’s War Against Crime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 139 See Bennett, Diulio, & Walters, Body Count. 140 Zoglin, “Teenage Timebomb” and Annin, “Superpredators Arrive.” See also Brigitte Dusseau, “Superpredators prowl where 'killing time' is taken literally,” The Daily Telegraph Mirror, December 28, 1995; “New Age Killer Kids,” The Advertiser, January 18, 1996; Stephen Gray, “Invasion of the Superpredators,” The Sunday Times, February 16, 1997; and Lori Montgomery, “Young Lawbreakers Signal Their Certain Future as Felons,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 16, 1996, D01. 312 Presented as ruthless sociopaths, the superpredator category was supposed to function as a catch-all designation for particularly heinous juvenile criminals.141
Interestingly, the term was never applied to white school shooters of the same period; superpredator was a term largely reserved for African-American (and sometimes
Latino) youth.142 The emergence of the term was often linked to the violent death of a 5- year-old African-American boy named Eric Morse, who was thrown from 14th floor window by two laughing African-American boys (aged 10 and 11) in the Ida B. Wells
housing development (South Side, Chicago), because Morse had refused to steal candy
for them.143 Diulio commented, on two separate occasions, that superpredators were overwhelmingly black, arguing that of “an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades,…[h]alf of these superpredators could be young black males”; he also remarked that if “blacks” were
“overrepresented in the ranks of the imprisoned,” it was because they were
141 Sometimes it was a designation applied to young children who committed crimes, and other times, it was used to describe disturbing crimes by adolescents as it became a media focus of the 1990s. 142 Diulio linked the term to a rise in crime particularly by Black and Latino youth in a 1996 opinion piece for The New York Times when he wrote, “Black and Latino juveniles figure ever more disproportionately as both victims and perpetrators. James Alan Fox, a criminologist, reports that 14- to 24-year-old black males were just 1 percent of the population in 1992, but that they made up 17 percent of the homicide victims and 30 percent of the offenders” (Diulio, “Stop Crime Where It Starts.”). A search on Lexis-Nexis using the terms “Columbine” and “superpredator” yielded 14 results, though none of the articles categorized Harris and Klebold as “superpredators.” Elaine Brown, former chairman of the Black Panther Party and author of The Condemnation of Little B, argued that part of “New Age racism” was to depict young black boys as superpredators while “violent young white men, such as the teenagers who killed their fellow students at Columbine are described only as ‘alienated;” Brown links the term “new age racism” to “New Age” philosophies, in which “‘you are responsible for everything that happens to you’” (Duncan Campbell, “Review: Interview: Brown is the new black.” The Observer, April 14, 2002, 3). Brown also mentions that the “color” of superpredators was made apparent when John Diulio Jr. published an article in the Manhattan Institute’s publication, City Journal, entitled, “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours” (The Condemnation of Little B (New York: Beacon Press, 2003), 109.). 313 “overrepresented in the criminal ranks—and the violent criminal ranks, at that.”144
Diulio’s scholarship and various articles about superpredators all situated them within poor black communities or non-white gangs; moreover, the persistent invocation of Eric
Morse linked superpredators inextricably to black youths.145 Echoing the “public health”
sentiments of the Violence Initiative that preceded the superpredator, Diulio once
remarked that Medicaid should be thought “not as a health-care program but as ‘an anti-
crime policy,’” a statement that equated poverty, disability, or both with criminality.146
Controversial studies of violence and the brain entered conversations about school-shootings as well. In a veritable Hinkley-trial redux, during school-shooter Kip
Kinkel’s trial debates again raged about whether or not brain scans depicting “physical defects in Kinkel’s brain” should be admissible as material evidence that Kinkel was schizophrenic and “b[ore] diminished responsibility” for the shootings.147 Although
lawyers acknowledged that the state ha[d] a right to have Kinkel undergo a psychiatric
143 See Annin, “Superpredators Arrive;” Peter Atkinson, “Superpredators,” Sunday Mail, January 21, 1996. 144 Diulio in Brown, Condemnation of Little B, 109. 145 One report on a juvenile crime wave in Boston by “African-American, Haitian, and Cape Verdean” youths invoked the title of “superpredator” to describe them. See Tatsha Robertson, “Clergy Call for Police Crackdown on Wave of Violent Youth,” The Boston Globe, June 22, 2000, B3. 146 Zoglin, “Teenage Timebomb.” 147 “Defense Doesn’t Want State to Look for Physical Defects in Kinkel’s Brain.” The Associated Press State & Local Wire, September 9, 1999. Kinkel's lawyers only raised the issue of his sanity to request leniency at sentencing after Kinkel had already pleaded guilty to the murders. Kipland P. Kinkel was sentenced to 111 years in prison. He tried several times, unsuccessfully, to appeal based on the premise that his lawyers should have employed an insanity defense before Kinkel entered his plea. See Nick Budnick, “Kinkel Redux: Springfield murderer seeks new trial,” Williamette Week Online, January 7, 2004
magnetic imaging and other advanced technologies” did not constitute “psychological tests” and thus were “not allowed by law.”148 In spite of the prosecution’s protestations,
two doctors testified in defense of Kinkel. Georgetown University Hospital’s Dr.
Pamela Blake reviewed brain scans from 31 murderers, 20 of which exhibited “physical evidence of frontal lobe dysfunction like that of Kinkel.” 149 Another neurologist for the
defense suggested that Kinkel’s computerized scan “showed areas of reduced brain
activity that are consistent with new research into children who become schizophrenic”
and said the “‘holes’ would make the teen more susceptible to a psychotic episode” and
have “a tendency toward impulsive, violent outbursts.” Again, the abnormally-active
teenaged amygdala combined with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex had a role in
violent behavior, as those with violent outbursts struggled against a diminished physical
ability to “restrain impulsive outbursts of emotion” and react to conflict
appropriately.150 In the wake of the Columbine massacre, reports focused increasingly on
violence and the brain. The nature versus nurture argument raged in the The Miami
148 “Defense Doesn’t Want State to Look for Physical Defects in Kinkel’s Brain,” The Associated Press State & Local Wire, September 9, 1999. Kinkel's lawyers only raised the issue of his sanity to request leniency at sentencing after Kinkel had already pleaded guilty to the murders. Kipland P. Kinkel was sentenced to 111 years in prison. He tried several times, unsuccessfully, to appeal based on the premise that his lawyers should have employed an insanity defense before Kinkel entered his plea. See Nick Budnick, “Kinkel Redux.” 149 Eileen O’Connor, “Medical Expert: Brain Damage Could Have Contributed To School Shooting Spree,” CNN.com, November 10, 1999.
the brain that, “when damaged, prevent[ed] young children from developing a moral
sense.”151 As opposed to brain-damaged adults who might “lose their moral compasses
but retain an awareness of social expectations” to keep harmful impulses in check,
children and teens with such psychological injuries could not control these impulses, as
they lacked the neurological safeguards naturally possessed by adults.152
In the wake of the Charles “Andy” Williams school shooting in 2001, Daniel R.
Weinberger, director of the Clinical Brain Disorders Laboratory at the National
Institute of Health wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times that made similar
assertions. In the piece, Weinberger stated that “[t]o understand what goes wrong in
teenagers who fire guns, you have to understand something about the biology of the
teenage brain”; nonetheless, he reminded, his neurobiological perspective was “not
meant to absolve criminal behavior or make the horrors any less unconscionable.”153
Since teens’ PFC’s were “not mature” to the “critical” level for “good judgment and the suppression of impulse control,” their brains did not possess “…the biological machinery
150 Eileen O’Connor, “Caution urged for brain research on violence,” CNN.com, July 28, 2000
12, and his brain was evidently well enough developed to plan for the future.”); and argued that choice can always win out, even over underdeveloped biology (i.e. Andy
Williams’ classmates “presumably had equally immature brains, and likely none of them came close to losing control in such a manner.”).155 Without necessarily directly entering
154 Ibid. Indeed, in 2004, Roper v. Simmons, a Missouri case that questions whether or not the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment prohibits the execution of juvenile murderers, was heard by the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the 1989 case of Stanford v. Kentucky, in which a 5-4 majority ruled that “cruel and unusual” did not apply because an “American consensus against the use of capital punishment” did not exist. Justices were encouraged to consider new knowledge about the brain and the “biological reasons why teens younger than 18 tend not to be as adept as adults in controlling their impulses; an amicus brief filed by numerous healthcare organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, argued “‘to hold [teens] accountable . . . for the immaturity of their neural anatomy and psychological development” was unjust. See Jeff Jacoby, “Op-Ed: Some Juvenile Killers Deserve to Die,” The Boston Globe, October 21, 2004, A19. 155 Various letters to the editor appear in the March 13, 2001 edition of The New York Times under this title, including: Simon Turkel, Letter to the Editor. “Anatomy of a Teenaged Shooting,” The New York Times Online, March 11, 2001 Weinberger’s assessment, configuring boys as particularly at risk of aggressive outbursts. Since testosterone was “geared toward quick tension release,” teen boys were “prone to follow any impulse that might release stress,” resulting in “aggressive and angry” impulsive behavior; for girls, the “impulses firing in their brain” manifested themselves as an “amplification of a wide range of emotions.”156 Emotionality was equated with femininity, and although impulse-control was a problem for all teens, as neurologically impaired individuals, impulses that might result in violence were constructed largely as a male problem in the 1990s. Ramlow argues that the “demonization of Harris, Klebold, and other deviant youth” works by “ignor[ing] the social and political processes and inequalities that produce youth violence in favor of a simplified understanding of individual pathology.”157 This individual pathology is often fueled by the “metaphoric abstractions” com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E5DC113AF930A25750C0A9679C8B63> Accessed 6 June 2008; Laurens D. Young, Letter to the Editor, “Anatomy of a Teenaged Shooting,” The New York Times Online, March 10 2001 “adolescent condition”—enlivened a persistent cultural anxiety over the similarity of “normal” teen craziness to “abnormal” teen craziness. These forces combined to render “individual pathology” increasingly irrelevant to disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance, control, and medicalization. Even before the onslaught of school shooters, the average, underdeveloped, “normal” brain of the teen--characterized as unstable and always- already-mentally-ill--was becoming “spectacularly visible” and was mobilized to construct adolescence as a temporary and potentially destructive neurological condition. Whereas the crux of Kinkel’s defense was his construction as a neurological deviant who was distinctly different from a normal “control group,” by the end of the Decade of the Brain and the Charles “Andy” Williams shooting, the lack of restraint inherent in the teen brain was something that could construe all teenagers--an entire population--as always-already-disturbed by their own adolescence. This was most especially true of white testosterone-charged teen boys configured as inherently at risk from a critical lack of impulse control. action. See Kimberly Gross, “Framing Persuasive Appeals: Episodic and Thematic Framing, Emotional Response, and Policy Opinion,” Political Psychology 29, no. 2 (Apr 2008): 169. See also Kimberly Gross. (2001). Images of 'others': The effect of media coverage of racial unrest on public opinion. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2001). Dissertation Abstracts International, 0-493-09625-6. 319 By the end of the Decade of the Brain, the “typical adolescent” was now in need of intervention. Dr. Kenneth Howard, a professor of psychology who conducted studies of adolescents, said, although “every teen-ager had ups and downs… ‘if your kid is behaving like a “typical adolescent” -- sullen, depressed, getting poor grades, having trouble with friends—that kid needs help and it’s not a phase.’”158 After all, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, “seemed…like normal children from normal families, rattling along the bumpy emotional road that most people believe represents the normal course of the teen-age years.”159 In some ways, this involved the cultivation of mental and emotional health supports for teens that were unavailable to previous generations. However, it also incited new forms of surveillance and discipline. Now, the media argued, “the 90s has seen how dangerous misdirected teen-age rage can be,” although “your sons and daughters lash out differently” in a way that is “predictable, even normal”; normal outbursts now had a dangerous edge.160 The line between “crazy by design” and “abnormal, crazy, and dangerous” became increasingly blurred for teen boys of the 1990s. The prized “flexibility” of neuroplastic teens evidenced their fragility, once neuroscience had proven that “experience c[ould] become biology.” This biological finding “redefine[ed] violence in America as something larger than a law enforcement 158 Erica Goode, “Terror in Littleton: The Psychology; Deeper Truths Sought in Violence by Youths,” The New York Times, May 4, 1999, A28. 159 Ibid. 320 problem--rather, as a public health threat, like lead in paint and toxins in water--that takes its gravest toll on children.”161 While many news outlets focused on youth violence and mental illness, other media accounts of Columbine and other school shootings focused on another sickness pervading American culture: a masculinity crisis and its progeny, a “boy crisis” of the 1990s. By the mid-1990s, one cultural response to a perceived “masculinity crisis,” “the angry white male,” had become a highly visible cultural figure in the in the press and onscreen. The celluloid version of “Angry white male syndrome” had been immortalized in vigilante vengeance films such as Falling Down (1993) and White Man’s Burden (1995), starring Michael Douglas and John Travolta, respectively, and it also entered the news media in reference to Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.162 A reaction to multiculturalism, feminism, globalization, and neoliberal capitalism, “AWM’s” were comprised of white men, mainly working- and lower-middle class, who felt disenfranchised by “those asserting identity and equality— minorities, 160 Katie Couric, “The Fury: Why Boys Are Always the Ones to Commit Teen Violence,” Dateline NBC, first broadcast on May 18, 1999 by NBC. News, Lexis-Nexis Academic economic changes to the workforce such as the disappearance of manufacturing jobs (as a result of globalization), and the increasing impossibility of single-income families with a male breadwinner.163 Masculinity crisis literature, including Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), John Stoltenberg's The End of Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood (1993), and Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), also appeared on the scene; meanwhile, men organized in groups, such as the “Promise- Keepers,” an international Christian organization for men, and the famous Million Man March in 1995, during which scores of African-American political leaders and ordinary citizens convened on the National Mall in Washington, DC (the Promise-Keepers also gathered on the Mall in 1997).164 The perceived adult masculinity crisis was also articulated to teen boys via Columbine and the school shooting epidemic, which positioned white teenage boys as a male population in unprecedented crisis. Books about boyhood-in-crisis emerged, including William S. Pollack’s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), which argued that boys were subject to a restrictive “boy code,” an “emotional straitjacket” of athleticism and aggression that actually concealed a desire for gentler, 163 Ibid. 164 Portions of Stiffed also appeared in article form earlier than the book’s publication from 1994- 1996 in The New Yorker, Double Take, and Esquire. See also Susan Faludi, “The Betrayal Of The American Man, At Ground Zero of the Masculinity Crisis, The Ornamental Culture, Beyond the Politics of Confrontation,” Newsweek, September 13, 1999. See also Ronald F. Levant, “The Masculinity Crisis,” Journal of Men’s Studies 5, no. 3 (February 28, 1997): 221. 322 softer interiority. Pollack was often called onto talk shows as an expert on Columbine, and he argued that a “national crisis of boyhood” would continue to drive boys to commit Columbine-esque acts of violence “not just because they’re copycats, but because they’re in pain.”165 Michael Gurian, author of The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of our Boys and Young Men (2000) took a more brain-based approach than Pollack, arguing that boys’ brains made them more “‘morally fragile’” than girls; since male children were “‘primed for high risk behavior…[and] physical aggression” more than female children, they biologically had less impulse control—a weakness exacerbated by a culture industry that sent violent rather than calming messages to developing boys.166 Other reviews and child experts expressed discomfort with the quest to find the softer side of boys, spotlighting the “[r]italin-addicted white bad boys in the suburbs” who had perpetrated school shootings.167 One review asserted that Pollack’s true premise was that teen boys “want…to be more like girls” and reported his advice sarcastically: “Pollack advises us to tell our boys, ‘If you want to become a beautician, don't let the 165 Couric, “The Fury.” See also Stephen S. Hall, “The Troubled Life of Boys: The Bully in the Mirror,” The New York Times Online, August 12, 1999 In response to Pollack and feminists, like Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher, who had earlier argued that girls were in crisis, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2000). She shared the belief that boys were in crisis, but believed that boys were “under siege” by “sensitizing” “anti- boy” “celebrity academic feminists” like Pollack who had pathologized boyhood and would make boys, in Sommers words, “‘tomorrow’s second sex.’”170 Sommers opposed 167 Susan Faludi, “The Betrayal Of The American Man, At Ground Zero of the Masculinity Crisis, The Ornamental Culture, Beyond the Politics of Confrontation,” Newsweek, September 13, 1999, 48. 168 Lemann, “Battle Over Boys.” See also Patti Doten, “Without guidance, boys will be troubled boys,” The Boston Globe, July 20, 1998, C7. 169 The same article places Pollack and Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher (author of Reviving Ophelia [1994]), two feminists specializing in teen girl issues, as part of a “legion of sloppy, self- congratulatory difference feminists” who have “transported…their bleak view of teen-agerhood into the male realm.” See Lemann, “Battle Over Boys.” Other articles in the period lamented the loss of a classic “strong and silent” manhood. One article about hockey players and gender relations asserted that “[r]eal men” like Steve McQueen and Sean Connery were “a dying breed,” while screen idols like George Clooney, Ed Norton, and Kevin Spacey seem “wounded beyond therapy” and “sexy, but in an effeminate, probably-gay sort of way” that “[m]akes a red-blooded gal ache for a bottle of Jack Daniels and a rousing chorus of Street Fightin’ Man” to combat the new, unsatisfying “girlie-man power.” She lists the most “celebrated sissies of our time,” a list that includes Kevin Spacey as American Beauty’s (1999) “Lester Burnham,” male ballroom dancers, Tony Blair, boy band ‘N Sync, and Bill Gates, a “V-neck- wearing sub-geek” on whom “all that power and money [had] gone to waste.” See Leah McLaren, “Manhunt; Where has all the testosterone gone?” The Globe and Mail, April 22, 2000, R1. 170 Lemann, “Battle Over Boys.” 324 emotion-based “‘therapeutic pedagogies’” and argued that boys would be “best off in all- male classes” that “emphasized manly character and competition.”171 Still, one other journalist resisted the notion of crisis entirely, asserting that “You can assume one of two things about the teen-age boy”: that he is “oppressed, depressed, enraged, and endangered--ready to go postal at the slightest provocation”--or that, “even after ingesting huge doses of entertainment-industry product and processed food… being subjected in school to mean teachers and D.A.R.E. courses…after years of torturing and being tortured by his dearest friends, he still might come through it O.K. and even think of growing up as having been fun.”172 The school shooting epidemic dramatized a cultural contestation over shifting heteronormative gender roles in a “post-feminist” world—a world in which notions of proper adolescent development had been inexorably altered by neuroscientific discoveries. Public outcry over violent and damaging media gained new gravity with the discovery of neuroplasticity, the notion that experience could become biology. The theory of neuroplasticity, combined with the idea of the under-development-yet- troubled adolescent brain, had ushered in a new compassionate medicalization model of parenting. Against the faulty neurological wiring of teenagers, this new neuroparenting model assumed even graver importance amid the threat of school-shooters. By the end of 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid. 325 the 1990s, teens were endangered by their own brains, while their brains were endangered by an increasingly violent and sexualized pop culture industry. As the same emerging neuroscience that biologized a symptomology of adolescence was marshaled in service to biologizing other “differences,” including sexuality, gender, race, and a propensity for violence, neuroscience discourses that fueled and were fueled by the boy and masculinity crises of the 1990s demonstrated that such crises were as much about able-bodied (which is to say virile, heterosexual, and assertive) masculinity as they were about disenfranchised whiteness. Inherent in the shift to a neurologically-compromised teen was an anxiety about “poor development” into proper men. Like the previous era’s rugged, assertive masculinity, this new anxiety about the production of an effeminate (and thus queer) masculinity in plastic-teen-boys became increasingly criticized by feminists.173 Certain books about boys in crisis, like Pollack’s, felt this instability was a golden opportunity for boys to get in touch with their emotional sides, while others felt that boys were imperiled by “the “current of opinion that masculinity itself [wa]s a social evil”174 The question of whether or not boys were “disabled” either by the antiquated notion of masculine competitiveness inherited from previous generation’s men or by the new, “softer,” masculinity (a masculinity that threatened to turn boys into girls) remained open, crucial, and contested. The boy crisis, 173 Ruth Feldstein discusses the problems of male development in an earlier period. See Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 326 school-shooter epidemic, and concerns about the over-medicalization or pathologization of adolescence pivoted on the new, neuro-politically produced image of the adolescent brain, which configured teenagerness as both pathological and natural, simultaneously and biologically rooted while yet, still plastic and malleable—but in either case, inescapably lodged in adolescents’ imperfect brains. Just as Lisa Duggan situated late-19th century lesbian love murders and lynchings alongside and within the co-constitutive development of sexology and eugenics in Sapphic Slashers, I have positioned school-shooters and superpredators as fundamentally linked to the history and cultural representation of adolescent neuroscience. As I have argued previously in this chapter, this conception of biologized deviance, which played out on the bodies of adults as well as teens of the era, was, in certain respects, forged of a veritable palimpsest of earlier eugenic and sexological discourses that embodied difference to impute and maintain racial, sexual, and bodily hierarchies.175 She argues that, as the white patriarchal home became “threatened” by women’s and African- Americans’ increasing involvement in public social life in American modernity, all women—“normal” women included—were construed as having the potential to act in ways that would contribute to the home’s further dissolution, even while certain 174 Richard Bernstein, “Books of the Times: Boys, Not Girls, as Society’s Victims,” The New York Times, July 31, 2000, E6. 175 Duggan asserts the emblematic similarity of two fearsome figures that emerged in cultural narratives of the late 19th century, the “black beast rapist” and the “homicidal lesbian,” as they are both “threats to white masculinity and to the stability of the white home as fulcrum of political and economic hierarchies.” Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 3. 327 pathologized figures (i.e. Sapphic slashers or mannish lesbians) emerged as embodied figures who personified the most imminent threat. Similarly, discourses of teen “craziness” worked to collapse the distinction between symptoms of “normal adolescence” and the more dangerous symptoms of “true” mental illness so that the “most troubling figure” in neuroparenting discourse in the era of school shootings was the “normal” teen boy, whose normative neurological development into a nonviolent, heterosexual, economically-viable, able-bodied man was far from assured.176 Likewise, brain imagery of school shooters was used, at first, to make the shooter into a pathologically distinct and abnormal teen; yet, by the close of the Decade of the Brain, the pathological teen boy without the necessary “wiring” to control impulses applied to all teens, especially testosterone-drenched teen boys, regardless of whether or not their amygdalas would drive them to violent, deadly outbursts. Although “their behavior always had been annoying and sometimes even troublesome,” American teenage boys had now become “Public Enemy Number One.”177 Just as the black male rapist and mannish lesbian represented threats to modernity’s white patriarchal order, massive ongoing societal changes challenged the patriarchal order in the late 20th century. These included the destabilization of former modes of patriarchal power by feminist and gay liberation movements, the elimination 176 Ibid., 29. Here, I invoke Duggan’s argument that within the discourse of the pathological lesbian “the most troubling figure” of all was “the ‘normal’ woman….[who] became a figure of potential instability and betrayal located in the position of any (white) woman” and positioned “alongside the foregrounded image of the fixed, identifiable, deviant lesbian.” 328 of blue-collar jobs in a transitioning economy, and the rise of multiculturalism and affirmative action, all of which represented threats to heteronormative white masculinity, and by extension, white teen boy masculinity. However, embodied within the pathological school-shooter, a fantasy of containing pathological teen rebelliousness was enacted; reducing violent, pathological, masculine adolescence “to an explanation rooted in [the] body’s sickness” worked both to “strip…crime of its social implications and to “substitute somatic meanings” and “moral pedagogy” in place of “public debate” or critiques of structural inequities.178 Thus, white masculinity was not only threatened but threatening both to teen boys, themselves, and to society, in general, as violence-- previously mapped onto nonwhite, urban youths, dangerously close to insanity, and dangerously close to the racialized figure of the superpredator—became neurologically rooted and always-already-lurking within the white teen male brain. Neuroscience was, then, linked to the production of a pathological adolescence—one that imperiled all boys, especially the always-unstable “normal” ones, within its synaptic reach. As discussed previously in this chapter, part of implanting social and generational conflict “within the biology” of the teen was by medicalizing adolescence through its biopolitical recasting as mental illness. Amid the school shootings, the imminent danger that the metaphoric-madness could become material gained a sense of urgency. However, many were critical about the new cultural response that often labeled 177 Mary Leonard, “Are 90s Teens This Terrible?” The Boston Globe, March 2, 1997, D1. 329 rebelling teens “ill.” Prior to the school shooting epidemic, one newspaper opened with a sardonic advertisement for “Brain Sitters for Teens” in 1989: Sick of the breakdown in communication with a young rebel? Too tired too deal? Help is at hand. Rather than sorting out the differences that fall painfully into the generation gap, there's a popular remedy that's not only painless for parents, it may not cost them much. It's called a psychiatric hospital.179 Noting the transition from a law-based delinquency model to a medical model of adolescence, the report notes that “troublesome teens”--who might, previously, have been enrolled in military school, labeled “juvenile delinquents,” or “described…as rebels without a cause…in less enlightened times”--were now “locked up in what used to be called insane asylums” with “disturbing trendiness.” Teens placed in such institutions were often diagnosed with ‘“adolescent adjustment reaction,’” a “catch-all phrase that that could apply to a teen-ager with acne on his first date” rather than indicating true mental illness. Moreover, the article claimed that between 1980 and 1986, the number of youths (between the ages of 10 and 19) placed in psychiatric hospitals increased from 82,000 to 112,000—a significant 37 percent increase when compared to the 11 percent decrease in the youth population itself in the same time period. In the next decade, fueled both by school shootings, themselves, and by reports that many of the school shooters were on various antidepressants or other prescription “psychotropic drugs,” debates about teen mental illness and the acceptability of adolescent antidepressant use 178 Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 3 and 93. 179 Suzanne Fields, “Brain Sitters for teens; New psychiatric pitch,” The Washington Times, Final Edition, F1. 330 raged in the media. Slacker “Generation X” had been thoroughly recast as “Generation Rx.”180 Myriad accounts of Columbine and of school shootings in general mention that Eric Harris had been taking Luvox, an antidepressant often prescribed for obsessive- compulsive behavior, which had led to his rejection from enlistment in the Marines; accounts of Kip Kinkel often mention that he was undergoing psychiatric treatment and taking Prozac when he committed murder.181 Thus, the shootings sparked controversy about prescription drugs like Ritalin, Prozac, and Zoloft because it was feared that the drugs might have been contributing to the deluge of school shootings rather than stemming their flow. Amid the school shootings, the government also intervened by spotlighting teen mental health. In response to the Columbine tragedy, the need to “…reach out to troubled young people…[who]…suffer from some form of mental illness- -from mild depression to serious mental disease”--was highlighted by President Clinton during the first-ever White House Conference on Mental Health, held in July of 1999. Addressing the problem further, President and Hillary Clinton also hosted the first-ever 180 Amy Bloom, “The way we live now: Generation Rx,” The New York Times, March 12, 2000. 181 Marc Kaufman, “Are Psychiatric Drugs Safe for Children?” The Washington Post, May 04, 1999, Z07; John McKenzie and Antonio Mora, “Kids’ Antidepressants,” Good Morning America, first broadcast on April 30, 1999 on ABC. News, Lexis-Nexis Academic on Tuesday, May 2, 2000; the gathering spotlighted “new scientific research that the preteen years are as important as the first three years of life,” especially “in terms of wiring of the brain both intellectually and emotionally.”182 The one-day conference was comprised of parents and teens--educators, youth workers, foundation leaders, researchers and policymakers.183 Critics of the new neurobiological approach to criminal analysis and prevention critiqued the “quick fix” mentality of those that sought medical answers to social problems. Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a geneticist at Brown University and author of Sexing the Body, who joked that if “‘…an anti-testosterone drug that we could inject to make young boys nice” existed, it “…would be a lot easier and cheaper than transforming schools or society or whatever is at the heart of the problem.”184 Fausto- Sterling warned that such an approach to “criminal types” was not new, having earlier roots in 19th century phrenology and eugenics; still others warned that “society’s current fixation on genetics comes at a time of social retrenchment,” in which “‘genetic explanations are extremely convenient” for efforts “‘to dismantle the welfare state” and 182 The Office of the Press Secretary, The White House. Press Release. April 20, 2000. problems “with[in] the biology of the individual.’”185 This concomitant anxiety about an over-medicalization of teens and appropriate levels of medical-scientific intervention into the “symptoms” or temporary disability of adolescence itself was also voiced by adults and youths within burgeoning “anti- psychiatry” and “psychiatric survivor” movements, many of which included (and include) lively and vocal youth activism. The psychiatric survivor movement, dating back to 1970, united formerly-institutionalized and former-psychiatric patients in their criticism of psychiatry. Another similarly motivated organization, MindFreedom International (MFI), established in 1986, held a counter-conference protesting the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New York City.186 MindFreedom, whose interests are globally positioned, is accredited by the United Nations (UN) as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) with Consultative Roster Status, enabling its leaders to join in international negotiations regarding the human rights of people with disabilities.187 MFI directly encourages youth activism, as evidenced by the MindFreedom Youth Campaign, a sector dedicated, specifically, to youth issues relating to psychiatric treatment and drugs. In addition, MFI initiated MadPride, a movement 185 Ibid. 186 MFI’s website does not include archival information, but includes many, up-to-the-minute press releases regarding its current projects, activities, and events. MindFreedom International. “Frequently Asked Questions.” different by our society.”188 Part of this celebration of difference involves the gathering and online publishing of oral histories of psychiatric “survivors,” many of whom were medicated or institutionalized as teenagers.189 Anti-psychiatry publications, including Maia Szalavits’ Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (2006), have emerged to critique the institutionalization and psychiatric treatment of teens.190 Some youth activists have developed their own websites to offer anti-psychiatry critique. One such website is Fritz Flohr’s “Againstpsychiatry.com,” which features a scan of the brain with sardonic reference to the famous 1980s anti-drug commercial slogan, “This is your brain on drugs;” beneath the images of “well” and “schizophrenic” brains, the caption reads, “Look! Kids! This is your brain on psych meds!”191 Flohr’s 187 Ibid. “Global Campaign.” some of the major concerns of the youth anti-psychiatry movement.192 In the context of the True Spirit Conference, arranged by an organization seeking to empower progressive activists with mental health diagnoses, Flohr’s piece not only describes the persistent diagnosing of queer and transgendered youth with psychiatric disorders, but also critiques the way in which liberal progressives and radicals accept standard mental health treatment all too easily, even while espousing “feel good claims about how ‘special’ and ‘gifted’…bipolar folks are.” Thus, resistance against the medicalization of adolescence and against the mental health industry by adults and youths with disabilities and mental illness was present within the period. It existed within and alongside debates about the potential negative effects of psychiatric drugs on teenagers, which were fueled by the school shooting epidemic. In debates about psychiatric drugs, adolescent mental illness, and teen violence, the image of the programmed soldier-mind of D.A.R.Y.L. had not only engaged anxieties about teen minds and hopes for neuroscientifically- enlightened understanding, but it also stood as a specter of the overly-programmed, but ultimately safe and docile teenager. 192 Fritz Flohr, “Don’t Listen to Him, He’s Crazy.” In the wake of the school shooting epidemic, governments implemented neuroscientifically- and psychologically-produced preventative measures to protect teenagers from themselves and from each other. One year prior to the Columbine massacre, President Clinton appeared at Thurston High School, the location of Kip Kinkel’s infamous school raid, and announced that he had directed the Secretary of Education to produce a guidebook of “early warning signs for potential school violence” that would be given to every school in the nation.193 The guide, “Early Warning, Early Response” was the first of many lists of warning signs for dangerous youth.194 Meanwhile, the Secret Service established a “National Threat Assessment Center” with a specialized team of investigators focused on researching adult and youth “American assassins,” and The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its own report, “The School-Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective” (2000). However suggestive its title was, the document was not meant to profile students to identify potential school shooters, according to the FBI’s public statements.195 Typical warning signs from various 193 “‘Profiling School Shooters.” PBS Frontline Website. withdrawal or depression, fascination with or possession of weapons, alcohol or drug dependency, history of bullying behavior (or of being bullied), and lack of interest in school or poor school performance” while other lists included such subjective judgments as “dresses sloppily,” is “a geek or nerd,” or “characteristically resorts to name calling, cursing, or abusive language.”196 Harking back to developments in neuroinformatics that emerged during the Decade of the Brain, a partnership between the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau (ATF) and a private company, Gavin de Becker Incorporated, adapted “Mosaic 2000” (a software program originally used by government agencies to profile “potentially dangerous individuals”) for use in schools.197 President George W. Bush’s administration also established The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, whose mission is to study the United States mental health service delivery system” and “advise the President on methods to improve the system so that adults with serious mental illness and children with serious emotional disturbances can live, work, learn and participate fully in their communities.”198 The commission issued a 2003 report that emphasized the “crucial role” of “voluntary mental health screenings…in the early fbi.school.violence.02/>. Accessed 11 June 2008. See also “‘Profiling School Shooters.” PBS Frontline Website. University’s “TeenScreen Program” as “a model screening program for youth.”199 Offered through schools, clinics, doctors’ offices, juvenile justice facilities, and other youth-oriented organizations and settings, TeenScreen is a “national mental health and suicide risk screening program” that makes “voluntary mental health check-ups available to all American families”; it requires parental consent for teenagers’ participation, which involves a questionnaire, and, when necessary, a one-on-one appointment with a mental health professional to “determine if a teenager may be at risk for depression, suicide, or other mental health problems.” At the conclusion of the assessment, the parents of potentially-at-risk teens are notified.200 The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health was brought into existence to demonstrate his administration’s “commitment to eliminate inequality for Americans with disabilities”; however, the administration’s simultaneous association with TeenScreen underscores the extent to which disability civil rights discourse is mobilized, as these politics of surveillance increasingly target the 198 Columbia University TeenScreen Program, constituted through state surveillance and intervention as well as rehabilitation. In the words of disability historian Henri Jacques Stiker, rehabilitation had “moved out in front of the hospital” and “fuse[d] abnormality with the normality that [wa]s established and recognized by consensus.”202 This simultaneous projection of “normal” able-bodiedness and “abnormal” disability onto the figure of the teen via the brain manifested the tension and co-dependence of medical knowledge and its disciplinary power. Within this always-already-risk-prone population, the creation of at- risk “types,” a biopolitical process that united educational, juridical, psychological, parental, and medical systems of power, increasingly spotlighted white suburban teen boys throughout the 1990s as a population in need of governmental, psychiatric, and medical intervention in a variety of ways. In one sense, the story of the 1990s teen brain is the story of how the logics of rehabilitation have progressed to ensure, in Stiker’s words, that the designation “disabled will increasingly be synonymous with maladjusted.”203 Popular neuroscience discourses in the Decade of the Brain worked simultaneously to normalize and pathologize adolescence as “brain damage”--or “temporary insanity”—that was inextricably rooted in the brain and to produce and promote a “healthy brain” as a national project of 201 President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. wrought by the underdeveloped brain (thus maintaining a heteronormatively gendered symptomology of adolescence), popular representations of neuroscience research focused on “teenagers” as an age category and enabled strategic erasures of other critical valences such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, or ability. While all teens were at the mercy of their underdeveloped PFCs and overactive amygdalas, white teen girls were repeatedly described as having more impulse control than their male counterparts of all races; having benefitted from second-wave feminism’s focus on girls’ classroom performance and self-image, nineties girls allegedly became less threatened by their own brains than white teen boys, who were physiologically prone to angry outbursts. Within a celebratory neoliberal discourse of tolerance and appreciation of difference that developed in the 1990s with respect to multiculturalism, disability inclusion, queer and disabled civil rights movements, and second-wave feminism, the rebelliousness of adolescence became safely contained, tolerable, and intelligible within a popular neurological discourse that rooted it in the brain. This biologization not only made adolescent “craziness” inevitable, prediscursive, and inherent, but also promised that it could be rehabilitated through new, compassionate neuroparenting models that did not assign blame to teens for succumbing to the symptoms of adolescence. Now that adolescence was the brain’s fault, teens became a medically-managed and a mentally- ill/disabled group deserving of pity and intervention rather than frustration. 340 Adolescence became a temporary disability to be overcome, while the teenager became a species defined by its incomplete, plastic brain. Although the initial focus on teenaged gray matter emphasized a lack of information about the “normal” adolescent brain, the figure of the always-already-abnormal teen everlastingly preceded and constructed neuroscientific discoveries about the brain itself. Adolescent mental health, rather than images of the “normal brain,” became salient, especially in the wake of a surge in school shootings when the distinction between “true” mental illness and the temporary insanity inherent within adolescence became increasingly blurred. While a new, neoliberal voice of compassionate citizenship emerged in multiculturalist movements, disability rights, and gay and lesbian activism, a movement toward biologization and neurologization was already taking shape to remove “blame” for deviant bodies or behaviors. As with sexological and eugenic discourses of earlier periods, neuroscience both contained and enabled “pathologizing attacks” on teenagers, “imagined and real,” while also exhibiting “a naturalizing if not normalizing,” more permissive and compassionate discourse of adolescent turmoil and difference “right from the start.”204 In the case of teenagers, this version of compassionate neurologization ushered in a new approach to parenting, animated a lively debate about the place of prescription drugs in regulating teen moods and behaviors, and legitimated increased surveillance of teen behavior. Just as D.A.R.Y.L. could be rewired to remove unwanted 204 Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 163. Duggan makes this argument about the texts of Anglo-European sexology as they emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. 341 behaviors, neuroparenting aligned with neuroplasticity to construct the teen as a malleable figure akin to the cyborg, configuring adolescence as a narrative of “becoming.” Such a narrative of developmental “becoming” also began to appear contemporaneously in development narratives of globalization, “first world” politics, and “flexible” economies. This designation associated “maturity” with First World nations like the United States and Europe, and “immaturity” with Third World nations, a discursive construction that legitimated parental international intervention into discourses of foreign policy. In media, parenting books, policy, and popular culture, neuroscience’s image of the brain “overwhelm[ed], or at least challenge[d], the salience of other ‘bodily’ differences,” like neoliberal models of “compassionate citizenship” toward ethnic and racial others, people with HIV/AIDS and disabilities, and increasingly, gay men and lesbians, celebrated and “proved” our common humanity even while valuing difference, maintaining structural and social inequities, and legitimating intervention and discipline by parents, scientists, activists, and governmental institutions.205 The neurologization of adolescence medicalized the teen body and configured adolescence as temporary disability, whose overcoming was crucial to the nation’s safety and growth. The same discourses of neuroplasticity and rehabilitation of disability, so often mapped onto the teen body during the Decade of the Brain, were inextricably 205 Castañeda, Figurations, 78. My use of the term “compassionate citizenship” is taken from Cindy Patton’s work on the relationship of liberal “toleration” of people with AIDS—the notion that “some of my best friends” could have HIV/AIDS even while heterosexuals imagined themselves as not at risk because they engaged in “normal” sexual behavior. See Patton, Fatal Advice. 342 linked to neoliberal discourses of inclusion and rehabilitation of conditions like racism, homophobia, and sexism. These entangled discourses of inclusion were emblematized profoundly in one neurologist’s claim that, through “‘directed neuroplasticity,’” scientists might one day “untangle our circuits to relieve depression, cure learning disabilities, rehabilitate stroke victims, postpone the worst of Alzheimer's disease” and “even undo the brain wiring that supports racism.”206 Like adolescence, racism and other bodily and social ills might be neurobiologically inevitable and hard-wired, but, perhaps, capable of being rehabilitated, reprogrammed, or overcome into tolerance. 206 Sharon Begley, “Rewiring Your Gray Matter,” Newsweek, January 1, 2000. 343 Conclusion: On Feathers, Windows, and Queer/Disabled Alliances In 1990, epidemiologists acknowledged that HIV was extensively present among a wide cross section of American youth; 6,233 cases of AIDS were reported in persons aged 20-25, while an additional 19,568 cases were reported in people aged 25-29.1 Federal, state and local governments began publishing pamphlets and establishing informational hotlines that targeted teenagers with messages of safe sex and AIDS prevention.2 In 1987, an eight-page pamphlet on AIDS prevention, signed by then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was mailed to every household in the United States; Koop also suggested that education about AIDS should start as early as kindergarten, while the Public Health Service estimated that by 1991 at least 3,000 children would have the disease and that “‘virtually all will die.’”3 The Reagan Administration, when it finally acknowledged the AIDS epidemic on May 31, 1987, endorsed sex education only if it resonated with the moral values of abstinence and monogamy.4 Of the nearly 95,000 cases of AIDS reported between 1981 and 1987, reported the Washington Post, one in five was among people aged 19 to 29, and since the incubation period for AIDS could exceed 10 years, many 1 Patton, Fatal Advice, 37. 2 Sandra G. Boodman, “AIDS Prevention Pamphlet Targets Parents of Teen-Agers,” The Washington Post, May 26, 1989, A10. 3 See Lindsey Gruson, “Koop, at Workshop on Children and AIDS, Stresses Early Education,” The New York Times, April 7, 1987, A1; and Boodman, “AIDS Prevention Pamphlet.” 4 By the time President Reagan publicly acknowledged AIDS, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had already died from the disease (Allen White, “Reagan’s AIDS Legacy: Silence Equals Death,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2004 Hot Spot,” a designation that would gain traction within pervasive depictions of faulty brain wiring that culminated in bad decisions by adolescents.8 Chronicling the history of the AIDS epidemic and how it was mediated by cultural representations in the news and reactions by educators and activists, Cindy Patton writes about the emergence of the concept of “the new citizen” in response to AIDS. The initial social response to AIDS was one of panic toward deviant groups—gay men, drug injectors, homeless people, blacks, and sex workers—and their “characteristic” 5 Boodman, “AIDS Prevention Pamphlet.” 6 Sally Squires, “Adolescents: AIDS Epidemic’s Next Hot Spot.” The Washington Post, May 17, 1988, Z6. 7 Patton, Fatal Advice, 39. 8 Squires, “Adolescents.” 345 behaviors. News coverage of Rock Hudson, Ryan White, and Magic Johnson in the early 90s enabled “compassionate citizens” to form mediated relationships with “special friends” living with HIV, while not acknowledging “normal” heterosexuals to be at risk of infection. This “new paradigm for citizenship” constructed the ideal of a “compassionate, tolerant individual, who, while never viewing him-or herself as susceptible to contracting HIV, could nevertheless recognize that ‘some of my best friends have HIV.’”9 As long as the normal, presumed-healthy public engaged in “ordinary intercourse” with carefully selected partners, they didn’t have to worry about being at risk of infection; “their call to consciousness was simply to be nice to people with AIDS.”10 During the early days of the AIDS epidemic, storylines about HIV/AIDS were likely to appear only in disease-of-the-week episodes of television series for adults and teenagers, including soap operas and ABC’s After School Specials, discussed in Chapter 2.11 Paula A. Treichler’s How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS calls for historians to understand the “dual life” of AIDS as both “a material and linguistic entity.”12 In other words, Treichler posits that AIDS must be understood not only as a medical epidemic but as an “epidemic of signification,” in that AIDS elicited 9 Treichler, How to Have Theory, 8. 10 Patton, Fatal Advice, 28. 11 On AIDS, see “Just a Regular Kid: An AIDS Story,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. September 9, 1987; “In the Shadow of Love: A Teen AIDS Story,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. September 18, 1991; and “Positive: A Journey Into AIDS,” ABC’s After School Specials. ABC. December 7, 1995. 346 (and elicits) many compelling albeit non-scientific significations and representations. Originally planned as an afternoon CBS Schoolbreak Special, “An Enemy Among Us,” a drama about a popular teen who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, was instead moved to prime time to maximize viewership. It aired after the “Miss Teen U.S.A.” pageant as one panicked response to the release of Koop’s “alarming report” on AIDS in 1987.13 Judy Price, the vice president of children’s programming for CBS, argued that teens “tend[ed] to be more promiscuous…and…often are drug users as well” but lack “information” on how to best protect themselves, while health teachers craved more effective means of education than “boring” educational films.14 Evident in Price’s remarks were the then-typical attributions of AIDS as a penalty for deviant behavior, such as promiscuity and drug use, but also, as discussed in other chapters, adolescents again were seen as naturally (and neurologically) predisposed to making fatally bad decisions. However, in 1991, Life Goes On (1989-1993), a family drama, quietly introduced one of the first recurring HIV- positive characters into the sheltered suburban lives of the family next door—“the twist:” wrote USA Today reporter Peter Johnson, this character was “not gay or on drugs; he was exposed to the AIDS virus in a one-night stand with a woman.”15 The series was first television program in the history 12 Treichler, How to Have Theory, 40. 13 The report was The Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency. See Stephen Farber, “AIDS Drama Tries to Reach Young,” The New York Times, July 20, 1987, C18. 14 Farber, “AIDS Drama,” C18. 15 Peter Johnson, “HIV-positive Character Joins Life Goes On,” USA Today, August 12, 1991. 347 of television to introduce a recurring teenage character with HIV: Jesse McKenna (Chad Lowe).16 The series also boasted another landmark first: the casting of Chris Burke, an actor with Down Syndrome, to play the role of Charles “Corky” Thacher, a teenage boy who was mainstreamed into a local high school. Life Goes On mainstreamed Chris Burke into prime time television one year prior to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and introduced Jesse, an HIV positive teenager, as a regular character on the series amid reportage of the death of Ryan White, a white teenage boy who had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion he received as a treatment for hemophilia.17 16 The first-ever recurring HIV-positive character was St. Elsewhere’s (1982-1988) Dr. Bobby Caldwell in 1986. The first television movie about AIDS was NBC’s An Early Frost (1985), which starred Aidan Quinn as a gay man dying of the disease. However, in spite of disease-of-the-week and TV movies treating HIV and AIDS, Life Goes On’s inclusion of a regular character with HIV (especially as he was heterosexual, since many shows still only included white gay men with HIV, when they included them at all) was ahead of its time, especially when compared with another highly popular series running contemporaneously with Life Goes On, FOX’s Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000). 90210 introduced an AIDS storyline in 1996—after six full seasons on the air. Television critic Matthew Roush wrote, in his March 1992 article “Life Goes On shows guts while 90210 gets the glory,” that “as life cruises on for those slick dudes and shopaholic babes of Beverly Hills, 90210, sitting pretty with a 60-episode order from Fox over two years, ABC’s gnarlier but equally entertaining Life Goes On struggles onward, perhaps facing its ultimate battle as it hopes for a fourth year.” For an analysis and listing of movies and television shows featuring characters with AIDS or HIV, see Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television (New York: The Haworth Press, 2000). Strangely, although Hart’s text is extremely comprehensive in its listing of hundreds of shows and movies, throughout the entirety of his book, Hart fails to mention Life Goes On, though it was among the first shows on network primetime to tackle an AIDS storyline by including a regular character with HIV rather than through the popular “disease-of-the-week” approach. 17 In 1993, the year Life Goes On ended, MTV’s The Real World introduced Pedro Zamora, a Cuban immigrant and an openly gay, HIV-positive AIDS activist and educator, to its third season of the series. Zamora sought to use the publicity and airtime afforded him as a member of the cast in order to educate young people about AIDS and HIV. 348 Much of the series’ early years were devoted to Corky’s encounters during his mainstreaming into a “normal” high school. Based in a Chicago suburb, Life Goes On chronicled the life of the middle-class Thacher family, Drew (Bill Smitrovich) and Libby Thacher (Patti Lupone), and their children, Paige (Monique Lanier [1989-1990], Tracey Needham [1990-1993]), Corky, Becca (Kellie Martin), and baby Nicky Thacher (Christopher Graves).18 Drew owned and operated his own restaurant, and Libby was a career woman turned stay-at-home Mom. Although the show devoted storylines to each character, the series most often focused on Corky and Becca. Corky faces much prejudice at the hands of unsympathetic teachers and students and constantly struggles to maintain decent grades in his “normal” high school. Although his family is very supportive, Corky often struggles for independence from his parents. In contrast to Corky, Becca, donning her signature “geeky” red glasses, never struggled academically, though she often had difficulty navigating the high school social sphere, as her studiousness and at times, her protectiveness for Corky, conflicted with her desire for popularity. While dating Tyler Benchfield (Tommy Puett), the handsome high school 18 Television critic Matt Roush also highlighted the importance of the socioeconomic class position of the Thacher family and how it might have impacted the show’s ratings. Beverly Hills 90210 took place in the glamorous Emerald City of Beverly Hills while Life took place in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. Moreover, in addition to its highly-idealized landscape, 90210 featured glistening, well-toned, virtually impossibly proportioned teenage sex symbols to work through the various problems of the week, which were mostly related to love triangles and relationship difficulties. Unlike the teenaged sex-symbols of 90210, Life Goes On’s actors failed to become posters, t-shirts, and Barbie Doll lines; Roush quipped in the same article, “If everyone had Fox’s marketing savvy, we might have Becca-and-Jesse T-shirts competing with Dylan-and-Brenda beachwear.” The palm-treed perfection of 90210 was critiqued for treating serious issues with escapism; according to Roush, “…[W]hile 90210 flirts with its issues of the week, having already made Dylan’s teen alcoholism look like some glamorous James Dean angst trip, Life pushes harder and deeper.” See Matt Roush, “Life Goes On shows guts while 90210 gets the glory,” USA Today, March 26, 1992. 349 quarterback, the bookish Becca begins falling for the mysterious and aloof Jesse McKenna, a new student. Jesse later reveals to Becca that he is HIV-positive, and the news causes mass hysteria among the sheltered citizens of Glen Brook, who ferociously demand that he be barred from attending the local high school. Becca and Jesse’s relationship is cautiously physically intimate, but never sexual. The show chronicled the turmoil and sexual frustration in Becca and Jesse’s romantic relationship and Jesse’s struggle to define his life and himself before he dies. As his HIV progressed to AIDS, Life Goes On graphically depicted Jesse’s physical suffering, showing him collapsing, vomiting, and sweating amid the excruciating pain of the shingles. Unlike other televisual and filmic narratives of AIDS of the period, Jesse did not die onscreen, but rather he lived, traveled through Europe without Becca, and eventually returned, to her surprise, to marry her in the series finale. Thus, the series was one cultural response to both the AIDS epidemic and disability rights activism that spotlighted the role of teenagers in the nation’s future. As medicalized edutainment, the show endeavored to teach its audience about the day-to- day lives of people with cognitive disability or HIV/AIDS, while it also advertised hotlines and volunteer opportunities following certain episodes in order to incorporate teens into extra-diegetic solutions to onscreen dilemmas. However, Life Goes On differed from other forms of medicalized edutainment in a few crucial ways. First, it presented the histories of disability and AIDS activism and 350 the marginalization of disabled people and people with HIV/AIDS (PWA’s) as necessarily intertwined, even while some disability activists actively resisted associations with AIDS activists.19 Rather than presenting only the personal “human face” of disease and disability, which was often the presentation style of televisual and literary medicalized edutainment I have surveyed in this dissertation, Life Goes On engaged questions of disability rights, accessibility, and the limits of inclusion. Second, the series asserted and insisted upon the sexuality of adolescents with disabilities and people with AIDS. It advocated safe sex for all sexually-active teenagers, rather than pathologizing or ignoring entirely the sexuality of disabled people. Life Goes On presented Corky’s and Jesse’s sexualities as fraught in different, albeit complementary ways. While neuroscientists sought cures in the brain for diseases and disabilities, Life Goes On emphasized the complex individuality and perception of its intellectually-disabled characters, while it problematized the notion that people with Down syndrome should be infantilized or regarded as non-sexual.20 Likewise, in the 19 Although AIDS activists were active parts of lobbying efforts for the passage of the ADA, HIV and AIDS were not covered under the ADA until 1998 in the Bragdon v. Abbott decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled that HIV/AIDS, even when asymptomatic, constitutes an impairment under the ADA. The court also ruled that reproduction was an activity that was substantially limited by HIV/AIDS. For a discussion of the Bragdon v. Abbott case and the problematic status of HIV/AIDS with respect to the ADA, see Scott Thompson, “Abbott, AIDS, and the ADA: Why a Per Se Disability Rule for HIV/AIDS is Both Just and a Must,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 15 (January 2008): 1-19. 20 Issues of ability and consent constantly overshadow the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities, who are often associated with excessive, inappropriate, unrestrained sexuality (i.e. public masturbation), restricted from sexual expression altogether, or become victims of sexual abuse. On cognitive disability and sexuality, see Leslie Walker-Hirsch, The Facts of Life…and More: Sexuality and Intimacy for People with Intellectual Disabilities (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 2007); Paul Cambridge, and Bryan Mellan, “Reconstructing the Sexuality of Men with Learning Disabilities: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Interpretations of Need,” Disability and Society 15, no. 2 (2000): 293-311; Lydia Fegan, Anne Rauch, and Wendy McCarthy, Sexuality and People with Intellectual Disability, 2nd edition 351 1980s and 1990s, while HIV/AIDS was associated with excessive, negative or deviant sexuality, promiscuity, and irresponsibility, Life Goes On presented an image of living with rather than dying from AIDS. By portraying fulfilling sexual relationships for its disabled protagonists, Life Goes On actively resisted dominant notions of disability that associated it with deviant sexuality or non-sexuality, while it challenged heteronormative and ableist conventions undergirding marriage and reproduction. Finally, and most importantly, it defied the linkage of heterosexuality, ability, and maturity through its establishment of a “queer/disabled alliance” of Corky and Jesse.21 Unlike other medicalized edutainment texts surveyed in this dissertation, it did not link aspiring for normality with achieving maturity, nor did it link overcoming disability to coming-of-age. Although the show’s work was always partial and compromised, it participated in constructing discourses of disability and rehabilitative citizenship while resisting the reproduction of heteronormative and ableist norms. It also addressed a teen audience composed of able-bodied and disabled viewers, rather than presuming only able-bodied ones. Thus Life Goes On represents, in this dissertation, the (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1993); Michelle McCarthy, “Sexual Experiences of Women with Learning Difficulties in Long-Stay Hospitals,” Sexuality and Disability 11, no. 4 (1993): 277; Michelle McCarthy, "The Sexual Support Needs of People with Learning Disabilities: A Profile of Those Referred for Sex Education," Sexuality and Disability 14, no. 4 (1996): 265-281; Michelle, McCarthy and David Thompson, “Sexual Abuse by Design: An Examination of the Issues in Learning Disability Services,” Disability and Society 11, no. 2 (1996): 205-18. 21 In suggesting the importance of a queer/disabled alliance, I am building from Robert McRuer’s work in his “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” Journal of Medical Humanities 23, no. 3-4 (2002): 225. 352 potential for medicalized edutainment’s alternative, resistive visions—its possibilities, however incomplete and fraught, for imagining a different world. Through the character of Jesse McKenna, an intelligent, middle-class, heterosexual teenager, Life Goes On troubled the instinctive pairing of homosexuality and AIDS that appeared predominantly in news media and cultural representations in the 1980s and 1990s. However, Life Goes On’s narrative also softened the blow of such a radically heterosexual portrayal by queering Jesse, a process accomplished in part constantly juxtaposing him with the more traditionally masculine Tyler Benchfield. The show configures Jesse immediately as a rebel in contrast to the other wholesome kids in the town. Donning a bad-boy black leather jacket and a dangling earring, Jesse is portrayed as a loner, in contrast to the clean-cut, popular Tyler. Tyler, in spite of being the most handsome boy in school, is revealed to be a virgin, while Jesse carries a sexually-transmitted disease. Tyler is a rugged school athlete, while Jesse’s interests lay in drama and art. While Tyler constantly struggles to maintain good grades, Jesse, the quintessential underachiever, skips out on school, explaining snidely to Becca, “I don’t ‘have’ to do anything. It’s the beauty of a fatal disease.”22 Tyler is extremely loyal to his family, especially to his brother Donny, who, like Corky, has Down Syndrome, while Jesse is often shown storming from his mother’s house without telling her where he’s going. When Becca asks Jesse if his mother minds this behavior, Jesse says smugly, “She’s 353 used to it. Besides, what’s she gonna do? Punish me?”23 All of these details serve to cast Jesse as a rebellious teenager who is fundamentally different from wholesome teens like Tyler, Becca, and their friends.24 Moreover, in comparison to Tyler, the high school quarterback, Jesse’s masculinity is often called into question. In “Life After Death,” after overhearing Jesse invite Becca to eat lunch with him, a jealous Tyler accompanies Becca on her lunch date with Jesse. Becca sits at the lunch table between Tyler and Jesse, attempting awkwardly to make conversation with the two of them. When Becca asks whether or not either boy has seen any good movies, Jesse mentions seeing a French Film in Chicago, which sparks Becca’s interest, as she laments that “Tyler won’t see anything with subtitles” and is “much more interested in sports.” Jesse says he also likes sports and asks Tyler conversationally what he plays; Tyler replies smugly that he plays football, baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, and wrestling and asks Jesse skeptically what he plays. Jesse 22 “Life After Death,” Life Goes On. ABC. 3 November 1991. Only the first season of Life Goes On has been released on DVD to date. The other episodes cited in this dissertation are from my personal collection and are not commercially available. 23 Ibid. 24 When Tyler does engage in deviant behavior, Life Goes On is quick to exonerate him, as in the case of his excessive drinking. As Tyler is pledging for a fraternity, he begins binge drinking while he pines for his ex-girlfriend, Becca. In “More Than Friends,” Becca’s parents are out of town, and Jesse and Becca decide to throw a small party for their friends. A drunken Tyler barges through the front door with his obnoxious, inebriated frat brothers, and after an argument with Becca, Tyler grabs a beer and stomps out of the house. Despite the Corky’s many protestations, Tyler gets in the car and starts the engine; Corky goes with him so he won’t be alone. Tyler crashes into a tree, falls into a coma and dies, while Corky is severely injured and in shock. After overcoming the silence brought on by the shock of the accident, Corky relates to Mr. Benchfield that Tyler saw a little boy on a bike directly in his path (strangely, the little boy happened to be out on a bike in the middle of the night), and when he swerved to save the boy’s life, he smashed into the tree. In this moment, Tyler is conveniently valorized and lauded as a hero, in spite of his poor judgment in driving while drunk. See “More Than Friends,” Life Goes On. ABC. 26 April 1992. 354 replies, “Tennis mostly. Some golf,” to which Tyler replies, “Oh,” with a triumphant smirk. So Jesse plays tennis and golf—perhaps he also indulges in some figure skating? As discussed in Chapter 2, a narrative convention of medicalized edutainment was to explore and reaffirm heteronormativity and traditional gender roles through gendered activities. Just like Tuck, Jesse is not only queered by his disability but also by his association with feminized, individual sports. At this point, neither Tyler nor Becca knows that Jesse is HIV-positive, yet Tyler is already figured as more masculine, through his association with sports that are culturally emblematic of virile heterosexuality, than the feminized Jesse, who plays less traditionally masculine sports. While the audience can tell that Becca and Jesse are more intellectually compatible than she and Tyler, Life Goes On establishes Tyler, who can out-“Bench” any man and demonstrate his athletic prowess on any “field,” as the true man in this, and every interaction. Jesse and Tyler are always constructed as polar opposites—Tyler as a virginal, wholesome, athletic teenager, and Jesse as a sexually-active, rebellious, underachieving threat to the integrity of Glen Brook. Moreover, the apparent queering of Jesse in the face of Tyler’s unquestioned heterosexuality always imagines Tyler to be untouchable, insulated from AIDS by his heteronormative masculinity.25 25 In fact, the only moment in which Tyler is imperiled by the disease is when Jesse sucker punches him in the face. Thus, it is Jesse’s irresponsibility and inability to “fight fair,” rather than Tyler’s immature jealousy and misplaced rage, which places Tyler at risk of infection. Moreover, HIV and AIDS still had a relatively innocent, white face on Life Goes On in general, thus reinforcing notions of innocence and guilt with respect to HIV/AIDS transmission and infection. HIV-positive African-American and 355 The association of Jesse’s disease with homosexuality also works to queer him within the narrative. This queering, especially when the series has Jesse volunteer at the AIDS hospice, also enables the show to confront homophobia—both in the hearts of savage neo-Nazi skinheads and in supposedly liberal, tolerant individuals like Becca. As a result of his work in an AIDS hospice, Jesse is repeatedly mistaken for a gay man, often with devastating consequences as in the episode, “Incident on Main.”26 The episode was Life’s most explicit attack on homophobia and the trauma of Becca’s accidental exposure to Jesse’s blood. Jesse and Becca find themselves surrounded by Neo-Nazi skinheads while on their way home from the AIDS hospice where Jesse works as a volunteer. The town newspaper reports the beating, reflecting the prejudices of the time, as “the third attack on a gay man in the last month,” which prompts Corky to ask, “Is Jesse gay…if it’s in the newspaper?” Life Goes On takes this opportunity to educate its viewers, as Becca comes into the kitchen and says flatly, “[The newspaper] is wrong. You don’t have to be gay to have HIV.” Moreover, it subtly suggests that newspapers perpetuate rather than critique stereotypes within the epidemic of signification, implicating the newspaper within the same misrecognition as the skinheads. Latino men and women were represented, but they never spoke and always resided in the blurred background of the interactions taking place between white HIV-positive men in the foreground. Additionally, IV drug users were completely absent from the picture, as most of the characters, except the promiscuous Allison, were represented as relatively innocent in their modes of infection. Kylo-Patrick Hart expounds upon the notion of the “victim continuum” for categorizing people with AIDS, “which distinguishes innocent victims from guilty ones and acknowledges differential degrees of innocence/guilt.” McKinney and Pepper in Hart, AIDS Movie, 39. 26 “Incident on Main.” Life Goes On. ABC. 10 January 1993. 356 Likewise, Ed, an openly gay, HIV-positive man who runs the AIDS hospice, also initially thought Jesse was gay, a misrecognition he reports in an attempt to lighten the somber mood. His ribs aching from the attack, Jesse laughs through the pain, when Ed suggests, “Well, when [the skinheads] find out he’s straight, I’ll bet they’ll be as disappointed as I was.” Although Life Goes On attempts to deny the pairing of homosexuality and AIDS through Becca’s overtly didactic remark to Corky, it reconsolidates the association through Ed’s remark to Jesse. However, after the skinheads also trash the Thacher business as retribution for Drew’s posting a drawing, done by Jesse, of one of the attackers, Becca, who is fearful of having contracted HIV from holding Jesse’s blood-soaked head in her hands while awaiting the paramedics after the attack, must come to terms with her own homophobia. She initially takes out her anger and violation from the skinheads out on Ed, who patiently tells her that gay men are not responsible for AIDS, because “it doesn’t care who you’ve slept with.” He encourages Becca to gain control of her rage and fear, because it is a shade of the same ignorance that creates skinheads. Although the most extreme forms of prejudice is safely located within the extremely pathologized skinheads, liberal, tolerant Becca’s prejudice is also highlighted and taken to task. However, the end of the episode reinscribes the notion of AIDS as a punishment for deviant or criminal behavior, as when Jesse confronts one of his attackers prior to his arrest, he notifies his shocked attacker that he should be tested for HIV because he was 357 exposed to Jesse’s blood during the attack. As the attacker feebly protests that AIDS is a gay disease, the audience sees his dawning recognition of his own imperilment, and AIDS, problematically, becomes poetic justice for the attack. In addition to confronting homophobia, arguably among the show’s most subversive contributions to the “epidemic of signification” surrounding AIDS was its portrayal of sexual desire between Jesse and his uninfected girlfriend, Becca. Life Goes On was traversing dangerous ground in exploring the possibility of a physical relationship between Becca and Jesse, violating the most basic belief underlying the ‘know your partner’ ethos of the era: that “people living with HIV should not have sex.”27 Life Goes On chronicles Jesse and Becca’s relationship as it becomes more serious, addressing the notion that desire does not disappear when disease is introduced into a body, or a relationship. However, the show constantly and problematically reaffirms Jesse’s initial warning to the lovestruck Becca that he “ha[s] nothing to offer” Becca if he cannot have sex with her. Jesse expresses fear that Becca will grow “tired of taking walks…tired of holding hands…[or]…playing checkers” and will not want a relationship that cannot progress sexually.28 As I discussed with respect to Chapter 1’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Life Goes On also ended up reinscribing the notion that protected sex or sexual contact that did not culminate in intercourse was always trivial and insufficient. Patton argues that safe sex in the 1990s “could be mentioned but not explained;” although the 27 Patton, Fatal Advice, 28. 358 “bad sex that was the occasion for transmission could be described (“unprotected sex”), the good sex that might end the epidemic had to remain obscure…lest it put ideas into [teens’] heads about having sex at all.”29 However, as I have shown in the After School Specials and The Bubble Boy, such a tradition of obfuscation extends back further than the AIDS epidemic, although it worked by addressing teenagers proactively rather than protectively. That said, the show often complicated traditional heteronormative desire in its portrayal of Jesse’s and Corky’s relationships, both with disabled and able-bodied women. Jesse continuously resists Becca’s sexual advances, and unlike the female protagonists in sick-lit, “kissing the normal boy” is something she actively resists rather that seeks. Although there is a sexual undercurrent in many of the episodes featuring Becca and Jesse, the episode “Lost Weekend” was the show’s most aggressive exploration of sexual intimacy after HIV.30 Becca and Jesse go on a double date with Becca’s best friend, 28 “Triangles.” Life Goes On. ABC. 1 December 1991. 29 Patton, Fatal Advice, 95 and 62. 30 The title of this episode likely derives from The Lost Weekend (1945), which portrayed Don Birnam (Ray Milland) an alcoholic in denial and unable to stop himself from drinking in spite of its effects on his friends, family, and his personal life. The Lost Weekend won Oscars for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay, and it pioneered never-before-seen subject material in its stark, graphic portrayal of an alcoholic, similar to Life Goes On’s landmark presentation of AIDS. Characters like Jesse and Don Birnam were not yet “common currency” in their respective time periods. Both Jesse and Birnam are deviant characters, who finally go too far and have to learn a lesson about curbing their respective desires. While Birnam’s friends and family might be capable of social drinking, he cannot even have a drop without bingeing and becoming completely out of control. Similarly, Life Goes On asserts that Jesse cannot have “a little” without giving in to his desire to “go all the way.” In a way, since Becca is always figured as the one pressuring Jesse for sex, rather than the other way around, the show creates sympathy for Jesse’s plight, but only insofar as he conforms to the primary rule of citizenship: people living with HIV should not have sex. Jesse’s nobility derives from his meeting society’s expectations. 359 Goodman, who is already involved in a heavy make-out session with her date when they arrive at the club. Becca is aggravated at her friend’s insensitivity in making out in front of them, because it only exacerbates the fact that physical intimacy is impossible with Jesse. Goodman reminds Becca that there are “ways to have safe sex, they say,” and Becca replies, “Yeah, well ‘they’ don’t have boyfriends with HIV…each [hotline] says something different, but they all say it’s a risk.”31 Asserting that “any guy” could be a risk, Goodman encourages Becca to have “safe sex,” but the show does not define the term for its teenage audience and shuts down other possibilities for physical intimacy instead of sex. When Becca and Jesse return to Jesse’s apartment, Becca convinces him to let her stay the night and lie about her whereabouts to her parents, as long as she sleeps on the couch. Throughout the night, the temptation becomes too great to bear, and Becca goes up to Jesse’s bed to stroke the outline of his body. She returns to the couch, but Jesse, awoken by her touch, saunters down to sit beside her. He pulls Becca to his chest and begins passionately kissing her neck. She returns the gesture, but when they begin kissing on the lips, Jesse pulls away suddenly and says painfully, “No. We can’t.” Becca storms away from the couch, saying, “This is insane. We can’t keep doing this. I feel like I’m going to explode.” Jesse agrees and suggests that they stop all physical contact, saying they should not kiss or hug, because once they get started they will be unable to stop. 31 “Lost Weekend.” Life Goes On. ABC. 24 January 1993. 360 Startled by this suggestion, Becca turns to him and says they should not resist feelings that are “natural” and “right,” because “there are so many…beautiful ways that [they] can be together, ways that are safe” instead of “closing the door on everything.” Jesse remains unconvinced, so Becca begins kissing his body, working her way from his hand to his neck, pausing at each part to ask, “Can I get sick from kissing your hand?...How about your arm?...[W]hy don’t we just deal with that and see what happens?” After necking for a bit—cautiously avoiding each others lips—Becca reminds him that she is “still alive,” but Jesse politely excuses himself to splash cold water on his face in the bathroom, guiltily looking at himself in the mirror as the show goes to commercial. In showing a person with HIV kissing his uninfected love interest, the show was progressive for its time period. Recognizing that people with HIV and AIDS still grapple with sexual desire and have fulfilling rather than only tragic relationships, the series also acknowledged that sexual intimacy was not limited to heterosexual intercourse. However, while the show previously addressed condoms only to assert their undependability, Life Goes On never directly provided any alternatives and only vaguely defined safe sex. For instance, when Becca confesses to her parents that she spent the night at Jesse’s, she says, she slept with Jesse, but “not in the way that [her parents] think.” She maintains that there are “a lot of ways” of sleeping with someone, and maintains that she and Jesse, “went as far as it was safe to go, and then...stopped…and 361 slept in each other’s arms.” Her description leaves vague the question of exactly how far was “as safe as it was…to go.” In addition to its vague precautionary advice, Life Goes On suggests that any intimate behavior always carries with it the danger of sex, and thus, the danger of infection. After Becca’s confession, Drew pays Jesse a visit to beg him to stop engaging in sexual activity with his daughter, saying he would “give anything” if Jesse could become magically uninfected. Jesse assures him that they did not engage in behavior that would put her in danger, and although Drew believes him, he says forebodingly, “But that was this time.” Jesse quickly protests, but Drew cuts him off, saying, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep… you’re seventeen years old, and you’re not superhuman. What you and Becca are doing is racing full speed toward the edge of a cliff, and sliding to a halt. And one of these times, you’re gonna go over.”32 After Drew begs him not to “take her over that cliff,” Jesse takes his request to heart, because when Becca suggests that this slumber party become a more regular occurrence, Jesse regretfully tells her that she can no longer stay over because having “a little” intimacy is worse than having “nothing at all.” Responsible moderation is configured as impossible and undesirable by the show, and although Becca still desires a relationship, even under these terms, her disappointment makes her desire unconvincing. The final melodramatic scene of the 32 Ibid. 362 episode shows them staring at each other through a plate-glass window, separated and unhappy. Like The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Life Goes On demonstrates that protected sex, or even foreplay, is always insuffient. According to Patton, this evasion represents “the national pedagogy’s refusal to designate any nonintercourse…sex activities as safe.”33 In doing so, safe sex discourses dissuaded youth from imagining any other sexual activity apart from intercourse that, from the standpoint of HIV transmission, was the most dangerous activity. Life Goes On, following in the footsteps of 90s safe sex education, reduced such vaguely defined sexual activities to “poor substitutes [or] foreplay,” although they still could (and can) be pleasurable and run a low risk of infection with sexually-transmitted diseases. In the end, Jesse’s relationship with Becca was only acceptable if it was one based on com-passion rather than passion. Although the show resisted dominant images of HIV and AIDS by asserting Jesse’s sexual desire and attractiveness, Becca’s good citizenship was assiduously maintained by Jesse’s initially being forced safely into isolation—sexually-desirable but not sexually-active—as Becca’s “special friend” with AIDS. After introducing the character of Jesse in its third season, Life Goes On was immediately threatened with cancellation. While no one can know for certain whether or not the AIDS storyline had anything to do with the show’s imperiled status, it seems 33 Patton, Fatal Advice, 82. 363 odd that it survived for three years, even though it was initially “…written off by cynical pundits and ad community experts before it ever aired [because] [f]ew believe[d] the audience still yearned for a Family-style show, especially one with a handicapped child in the mix.”34 Some predicted a quick cancellation of the show in the beginning, according to Roush, and yet its demise was never actively feared until the introduction of a regular HIV-positive character. The series also faced constant pressure from the network regarding physical and sexual contact between Jesse, Becca, and other characters. Throughout the series, Jesse and Becca’s lips barely ever meet, and when they do, Jesse is quick to push her away. Chad Lowe commented in a 1992 article in Entertainment Weekly, “I mean, if Jesse wants to just kiss Becca, [the ABC network executives] have to have a meeting about it.”35 Executive producer Michael Braverman also expressed his frustration with the network’s desire for addressing trivial rather than real teenage problems, saying “They want us to do ‘Becca Gets a Zit’ every week. The little hair I have left is turning gray...”36 Michael Nankin, co-executive producer added that the series’ designated time slot, designed for “so-called kids’ programming” limited the show’s available frankness with respect to issues of sexuality. Nankin complained, “We’re on during this time slot designed for so-called kids’ programming. But we’re not a kids’ show. The meeting over 34 Roush, “Life Goes On shows guts.” 35 “Face to Watch,” Entertainment Weekly, September 11, 1992. 36 Alan Carter, “Life Support,” Entertainment Weekly, February 12, 1993. 364 the script was three hours of network hell. I mean, because of our time period, the people who review our show also review standards for The Smurfs.”37 Chapters 1 and 2 discussed the potential and limitations of media regulation with respect to the production of teens-specific content, and with respect to Life Goes On, it is apparent that such contestation was ongoing. Disability dramas about Corky’s experiences in the mainstream were palatable for a child and teen audience, but an anxiety over frank discussions and depictions of AIDS and sex penetrated Life Goes On in the form of cautious, vague delineations of “safe” and “not safe” with respect to sexual activity. Throughout the series, Becca and Jesse’s relationship is often juxtaposed with Corky’s romances, and each derives meaning from the other. One episode, appropriately named “Triangles,” relates the numerous love triangles in the lives of Becca, Corky, and Jesse as sharing common threads. The episode finds Corky and Jesse grappling with their amorous feelings toward “normal” women. In spite of the obvious affections of Lisa, a classmate of Corky’s who also has Down Syndrome, Corky becomes attracted to an able-bodied, older woman named Michelle. Meanwhile Jesse struggles with the intense feelings he is developing for the recently-single Becca as he attempts to find and confront Allison, the college girl who unknowingly infected him with HIV during a drunken one night stand. Having broken up with Tyler, Becca finds herself torn between her newfound feelings for Jesse and the love she once felt for 37 Ibid. 365 Tyler.38 While on an evening stroll, Jesse accidentally witnesses Becca kissing her ex- boyfriend, Tyler, on the front steps of her house, in spite of her telling Jesse that things were over between them. In the morning, Becca comes upstairs and knocks on the bathroom door to see what is taking Corky so long. Surprisingly, Jesse answers the door to tell her to “relax.” A startled Becca says, “What are you guys doing in there?” to which Jesse replies evasively, “Guy talk.” The camera ventures into the bathroom and shows Jesse putting gel into Corky’s hair to make it “cool.” He also gives Corky love advice, saying, “If you think she’s beautiful, you gotta tell her…But you can’t just be all talk. You have to show her how you feel. Bring her flowers. Roses. But don’t give her white or yellow. Give her red. Red means passion.” Corky nods in assent, and smilingly repeats, “Passion.” As they stand side by side, looking in the mirror, Corky asks Jesse how he looks, and Jesse replies, “Just like James Dean. Now all you need is a leather jacket.”39 Jesse allows Corky to borrow his black leather jacket, which previously functioned within the narrative to establish Jesse as a deviant and a rebel. This gesture becomes laden with symbolism in 38 Jesse initially reveals his condition to Becca after she surprises him with a kiss; panicked, he tries to avoid telling her why he cannot be with her. She pursues him, growling that he is not being fair, and he turns and yells, “Fair? You want fair? I’m HIV positive. How’s that for fair?”38 When Becca interrogates him, she and the audience learn that Jesse became infected after he lost his virginity in a one night stand with a girl at a fraternity party while he was visiting his sister at college. According to Patton, experts knew early on in the epidemic that female-to-male transmission was a difficult and relatively minor route of infection, and yet it continued to be asserted as a significant source of danger to men during heterosexual intercourse (Patton, Fatal Advice, 152). Life Goes On never makes explicit how rare such cases are, relative to male-to-female transmission of the virus. 39 “Triangles.” Life Goes On. ABC. December 1, 1991. 366 that both Jesse and Corky are transgressing normative sexual boundaries. Instead of allowing his sexuality to die completely with Allison, Jesse reclaims it through his relationship with Becca, and instead of meeting society’s expectations and dating Lisa, someone more like him, Corky courts the able-bodied Michelle. Interestingly, both Corky and Jesse take their respective dates to the carnival. Becca and Jesse look at their reflections, warped and distorted by funhouse mirrors, while Michelle and Corky ride the bumper cars, amusements that involve being out of control and unsteady. In the Bakhtinian sense, “carnival” is a time of excess just before Lent, when prohibited carnal desires are exercised amid normal hierarchies’ suspension and inversion.40 The carnival’s location underscores the transgressiveness of Jesse and Becca’s and Corky and Michelle’s courtships. Moreover, as two disabled characters enter the carnival space, the location invokes memories of the freak show, which operated and entertained by placing freaks on display to highlight their differences from “normal” onlookers.41 Corky and Jesse, both disabled people, often reduced to being the sum-total of their respective disabilities and characterized by epithets such as “retard” and “the 40 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Interestingly, Bakhtin argues that the carnival is a space and time governed by “the grotesque body,” by which he means the body that embodies the unrepressed excesses of corporeal pleasures such as eating, drinking, and sex. 41 Eli Clare argues that when the cultural meaning of disability “transition[ed] from freak show to doctor’s office, from curiosity to pity, from entertainment to pathology,” disabled people “merely traded one kind of freakdom for another.” This “new kind of freakdom,” either the medical pathologization of disability or the charity-invoking impulse of telethons, also objectify disabled people “all the time” without compensating disabled people financially as freaks were compensated for their performances. Clare, Exile and Pride, 87. 367 HIV-kid” within their community, venture into the carnival space as sexual subjects, pursuing blossoming romance with able-bodied women. Both Jesse and Corky also experience some measure of disappointment when they confess their feelings to the objects of their affection. After a failed kiss which leaves them both feeling awkward, Michelle finds Corky at the stark, empty carnival, and Corky growls, “I don’t want to talk to you!... you’re not my girlfriend!” When Michelle says that “all [they] can be” is friends, Corky replies, “I don’t want a friend. I have lots of friends…It’s not enough…You made me think you cared about me…[b]ut you could never love me, because I’m not normal. I’m not perfect.” Much like Jesse could only be regarded by Becca with compassion rather than passion, Corky reveals the way in which compassionate citizenship is predicated on a reification of normality rather than on an embrace of difference. This conversation mirrors a conversation in the same episode, between Becca and Jesse, who, at the same juncture in the narrative, are discussing the future of their relationship in a graveyard. Jesse feels as though Becca has led him on as well. Since he “just stood there like some idiot” while Tyler was able to kiss Becca, he believes Becca would never consent to or desire a relationship with Jesse, much like Corky asserts that Michelle “could never love him” because both disabled teens are “not normal…not perfect.”42 “Triangles” does not end neatly for Jesse or Corky. Michelle 42 The show conveniently evades addressing the possibility of a relationship between Corky and Michelle, as she explains that she “did love someone like [Corky] once,” her son, who was born with Down Syndrome and given up for adoption at the behest of her parents and doctors. Her affection for Corky was maternal compassion, not passion, so it’s acceptable. 368 reveals that her compassion for Corky has made her feel intensely guilty for having given up her son, who also had Down syndrome, and thus her love for Corky becomes maternal rather than romantic. Meanwhile, although having affirmed their love and commitment in a graveyard, Becca smothers Jesse with kisses on the way home, amid an exultant electric guitar crescendo. Later in the series, when Corky becomes involved in a serious relationship with Amanda, who also has Down syndrome, their relationship and the hardships they encounter are often presented as analogous to those of Jesse and Becca. For example, the beginning of “Bec to the Future” finds Amanda moving into her own apartment, while Jesse, having stayed in Arizona over the summer with his family, moves into his own apartment. Both of these spaces are now unsupervised, and eventually cause problems for both couples, as parents still attempt to assert their authority over them. As already discussed, in “Lost Weekend,” Jesse and Becca’s slumber party causes her parents intense anxiety, and while Amanda is moving into her new apartment, Amanda and Corky discuss their mutual desire to sleep with each other before they get married. In the middle of their discussion, their parents burst through the door, saying, “How did you kids beat us up here?”43 In the one of many heart-to-heart talks between the two characters that occurs throughout the series, Corky pursues advice from Jesse about his desire to consummate 43 “Bec to the Future.” Life Goes On. ABC. 20 September 1992 369 his relationship with Amanda. However, Corky’s knowledge, rather than his innocence, is foregrounded in such encounters with Jesse. Uncomfortable giving sexual advice, Jesse suggests that Corky talk to his father about it, but Corky says he wants to “make up [his] own mind.” Corky says that although everyone believes Corky and Amanda “have too many problems,” he “do[es]n’t care how hard it is” to be with Amanda, because he loves her and wants to spend the rest of his life with her.44 When Corky characterizes his own relationship this way, Jesse realizes that his anger at Becca for failing to reveal his disability to her friends while he was away for the summer and decides to reconcile with Becca rather than breaking up with her.45 “Everyone” thinks both couples have too many problems, and Life Goes On intentionally pairs their difficulties in order to demonstrate how ableism often negatively affects their relationships. The episode concludes with Corky’s “sleeping with” Amanda. Lying, fully clothed, on a bed with her, Corky confirms that she set the alarm, because he has to be home in two hours. Then Corky puts his arm around Amanda and says, “Well, goodnight.” This slumber party is not unlike that of Jesse and Becca in “Lost Weekend,” and it seems that Corky and Amanda do not truly understand what “sleeping together” means. Initially this complicates the subversive portrayal of sexuality among people with 44 Ibid. 45 In the season finale of the third season, Jesse’s mother wants him to move to Arizona with his stepfather and stepbrothers. However, he decides to stay in Glen Brook alone, to be with Becca. While he was away for the summer, Becca failed to inform her friends that Jesse was HIV-positive, because she “needed a break from it” and just wanted to talk about their relationship to her friends “like it was normal.’ This hurt Jesse, who viewed her omission as evidence that she was ashamed to be with him. 370 intellectual disabilities, because it demonstrates that they are too innocent to have sexual knowledge, even though Corky has clearly flirted with various women throughout the series. However, within the safe confines of marriage, Corky and Amanda are freer, within the series’ logic, to engage in sexual behavior later in the series. Furthermore, Corky is often presented as the only one who can truly understand Jesse’s feelings. In another episode entitled “Windows,” Jesse sits, depressed, after his disastrous art show, feeling that no one has been moved at all by his paintings.46 He says that his painting is the only way he truly communicates with the world and that at this point, he would settle for just one person who understood them. Simultaneously in the narrative, Corky, having eloped with Amanda in the previous episode, faces the wrath of Amanda’s parents, the Swanson’s, as they seek to annul the marriage by proving that, in spite of their daughter’s adult status, she did not possess sufficient mental competence to have made the decision on her own. Paige takes a devastated Corky to see Jesse’s paintings in an attempt to cheer him up. Corky approaches one of Jesse’s paintings that no one, including Becca, has been able to decipher and that some have labeled derisively “paint by numbers” or “macaroni and cheese.” He asks Jesse excitedly, “Did you paint that? It’s beautiful.” Jesse thanks him, but says, “If you ask me what it is, I’m going to pick it up and throw it at you.” Corky says matter-of-factly, “It’s a window. And a feather…holding the window open. It must have come from this bird. And there’s 46 “Windows.” Life Goes On. ABC. 22 November 1992. 371 another bird too.” A stunned Jesse sidles up to Corky, and asks, “Even though a feather can’t hold a window open?” “Not for long,” Corky replies. Jesse offers Corky a heartfelt thanks, feeling validated by Corky’s impressions of his work. His faith renewed by his experience with Jesse and his artwork, Corky dramatically interrupts the courtroom proceedings to testify his love for Amanda, and the Swansons’ efforts at annulling their marriage are foiled. Amanda and Corky return to their new home in the Thacher loft above the garage to find Jesse’s painting waiting for them. Corky tells Amanda it is a wedding present; Amanda remarks that the painting is beautiful and asks what it is. Corky replies simply, “Us.” As the camera pans back from the loft, we see Corky’s hand drawing the shades for privacy, a gesture that is suggestive of sexual activity, and if the series presented an image of Corky and Amanda’s sexual innocence, here, it shows a couple asserting their right to privacy and sex. As I have argued in other chapters, medicalized edutainment often presented the emotional drama of the “human face of disease” and disability rather than its “political face.”47 Although medical dramas are “…judged by the realism of its images of patients and healers, [their] medical accuracy, [th]eir authenticity…” they often elide realistic portrayals of the social and political difficulties faced by disabled people.48 While Life Goes On chronicled individual personal and emotional experiences of AIDS, it did not remain staunchly apolitical in its content or its production choices. 47 Treichler, 182. 372 The community’s prejudicial rejection of Jesse because of his HIV-positive status is paralleled directly to its initial fearful reactions toward Corky and Down Syndrome. The entire school discovers that Jesse is HIV positive after Tyler and Jesse get into a fist fight; when Becca sees Tyler’s bloody fist next to Jesse’s bleeding nose, she blurts out, “Tyler! Get off him! He has AIDS!”49 Glen Brook becomes irrational with fear, calling a meeting to “Kick AIDS Out of Our School.” Recently-elected head of the school’s Parent Council, Libby invites a doctor from the Department of Health and Human Services to answer questions about methods of transmission. However, when the doctor fails to allay the fears of the angry mob, Jesse’s mother attempts to explain that Jesse is harmless to his classmates. Invoking the language of compassionate citizenship, Libby Thacher says, “By sending Jesse away, what kind of example are we setting? Are we telling our children it’s wrong to have compassion?” An irate woman in the crowd responds loudly, “Her kid has no future! Mine does, and I don’t want it put in danger!” to which Libby retorts, “What if it was your kid? What would you do? Hide him from the world? My son has Down’s Syndrome. Where would he be today if my husband and I hadn’t fought every misconception or barrier he encountered while he was growing up?” The woman resists Libby’s comparison, saying that Corky isn’t “dangerous” like Jesse. When the Council votes to kick Jesse out of school, Libby resigns in protest. Jesse is eventually allowed to return to school, but certain students and teachers continue to 48 Ibid. 373 make him feel unwelcome. This storyline was a common one in youth AIDS stories, as they often invoked the story of Ryan White, whose well-publicized fight against a close- minded community that tried to expel him from school because of his condition made national headlines.50 Life Goes On pairs the experiences of Jesse and Corky to suggest that the same ableist prejudices are at work in both situations. In defusing the anger and fear behind the campaign to expel Jesse from school, Life Goes On relies upon and reifies medical authority. However, other episodes actively critique the medical establishment and health care industry. “Five to Midnight” attacks the health insurance industry, critiquing the callous treatment of Jesse when he abruptly loses his health insurance. He is transferred from a luxurious private hospital to a county hospital, in which he is rushed through a chaotic gunshot wound, shielded from the germs of others only by a thin mask. Amid screaming patients with gunshot wounds and ill people crying, the show reveals the private hospital as a privileged space that not all can afford. Moreover, the journey nearly kills Jesse, as he goes into cardiac arrest and a brief coma. Meanwhile, Jesse’s mother is faced with the decision of losing everything to put Jesse back into the private hospital, where he will receive better care, and she indicts the inhumanity of an insurance industry that “would force a family to make a decision like that.”51 During his recovery, Jesse rejects her plan to remortgage the house 49 “Life After Death.” Life Goes On. ABC. 3 November 1991. 50 White became a cultural figure of the ravaging costs of prejudice against people with AIDS, and his death in 1990 preceded Life Goes On’s decision to write in an HIV-positive character. 51 “Five to Midnight.” Life Goes On. ABC. 21 February 1993. 374 and take out loans to subsidize his care, and he then stops taking his medicine, in order to hasten his own death to prevent others’ sacrificing for his treatment. The show’s characters are forced to such desperate measures by a callous and incompetent health care system, and in depicting the story in this manner, Life Goes On becomes political, criticizing the disciplinary power of an unfeeling health care automaton that has the power to give life or death by denying coverage to those who need it. Additionally, the show continually resisted medical authority, asserting the validity of holistic treatments and activist solutions in the face of the monolithic authority of modern medicine. Drew and Libby often recount the story of their doctors’ advice, minutes after Corky was born, to institutionalize him. Moreover, two consecutive episodes, entitled “Bedfellows” and “Last Wish” highlight the way in which treatments could be as painful as the disease itself. 52 Unable to afford the private hospital without insurance, Jesse is introduced to the his new environment at a public AIDS clinic by his doctor, when a flamboyant “veteran patient,” named Chester (Richard Frank), begins to dispute the doctor’s euphemistic characterizations of the symptoms that will accompany the treatments for shingles and HIV.53 Chester protests the doctor’s medical jargon and avoidance of direct answers to Jesse’s questions, and when the doctor attempts to silence Chester by forcing him from the room, Chester yells over him, 52 “Bedfellows.” Life Goes On. ABC. February 28, 1993; “Last Wish.” Life Goes On. ABC. March 7, 1993. 53 Chester was played by actor Richard Frank, who died of complications associated with AIDS in 1995, two years after his performance on Life Goes On. 375 “Don’t bother to sugarcoat it, Doc…Oh come on now tell him about the urinary infection and the sores inside his mouth!” Chester treats the medical staff and their advice with irreverence at every turn—smoking despite his compromised lung capacity and spoofing the doctors and nurses to other patients. He is also instrumental in helping Jesse to continue living with HIV rather than succumbing passively to death, by forcing him to accompany him on a rebellious romp through the hospital as an affirmation of life. Camping it up like a Broadway musical, a singing Chester and Jesse don top hats and gloves atop their hospital gowns, eat food that will “make [them] sick,” and race with IV stands on the roof in one night of revelry. Although Tod’s resistance of medical authority in The Bubble Boy was predicated on his heteronormative relationship with Gina, Jesse’s life lessons not only come from a nontraditionally masculine gay man but also involve Jesse’s making a self-actualizing decision for himself rather than for the sake of a love interest. After witnessing Chester’s death, the final scene of the episode shows Jesse ripping his IV from his arm, as he descends in the elevator to leave the hospital, while singing Chester’s song. As Jesse leaves the hospital, Dr. Blaine tries to reassert medical authority, yelling forcefully at Jesse and Becca, “He’s gonna die. He’s sick, he’s not thinking with a clear head…It’s not about respect; it’s about common sense.” The audience is quick to sympathize with Jesse’s decision to return home, as previous episodes of the series established the insensitivity of the medical establishment to individual suffering. 376 Although Jesse’s condition worsens before it gets any better, the show endorses holistic, alternative treatments for AIDS; when Jesse visits a doctor, he is “frankly…a little baffled” by Jesse’s relatively clean bill of health a few months later. The show still relies on the stamp of approval of a doctor in order to validate its decision to advocate for natural remedies in AIDS treatment, but overall, its critique and resistance of medical authority and health care was subversive when compared with its disease-of-the-week contemporaries. Thus, in contrast to ABC’s After School Specials, disease-of-the-week made-for-TV movies, and teen sick-lit, Life Goes On attempted, in addition to its “human face” rendering of its AIDS narrative, to convey the social implications of the disease. Like many television dramas, Life Goes On often “render[ed] the rage and political mobilization of activist groups invisible, indeed, incomprehensible” onscreen.54 Within the series, Jesse’s participation in the AIDS hospice at least gives a sense that he is connected and active within a disability community, while Drew and Libby are active in groups for parents of children with Down syndrome, including one that involves visiting new parents of babies born with intellectual disabilities to offer emotional support and provide a supplemental, and oftimes, contrary opinion to doctors regarding institutionalization and adoption. However, the show only registers awareness of structural inequities for people with disabilities as they are experienced on local rather than national levels. 54 Treichler, How to Have Theory, 181. 377 However, Life Goes On also innovatively and actively engaged activist groups and people with disabilities offscreen.55 From its inception, Life Goes On incorporated disabled actors and activists into its very production—and not just its storylines—when few, if any, other shows were doing so. For example, to ensure a realistic portrayal of Corky, the producers consulted with organizations for people with cognitive impairments, such as the Los Angeles Down Syndrome Parent Group, and screened the pilot to a group of 10 students with Down Syndrome, who had been mainstreamed into LA high schools. The show often featured other supporting actors with Down Syndrome, including Andrea F. Friedman (“Amanda Swanson”) and Ryan Davis (“Donny Benchfield”). Moreover, Friedman was recruited to the show from this group to play Amanda after her suggestion that Corky should have a girlfriend.56 Various advocacy groups credited Life Goes On with helping promote a positive image of young adults with Down syndrome and applauded the series for its use of disabled actors. 57 In 2005, The Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles united with The National Down Syndrom Society (NDSS) to petition to Warner Brothers Home Video for the show’s release on DVD; its packaging features a seal denoting its NDSS approval. 55 Treichler, How to Have Theory, 181. Although the AIDS hospice is a community-oriented place for AIDS-infected people, it is largely depicted as a place of refuge, mourning, and emotional support rather than a place for mobilizing political change. 56 “They’ll Take Romance: For Andrea Friedman Life Goes On as Corky’s Girl.” People. April 6, 1992 hospice, the producers sought exclusively HIV-positive actors to fill the roles of minor characters. In doing so, they resisted “what [wa]s widely perceived as an unspoken taboo,” that actors who go public as HIV-positive are blacklisted.58 The feeble response they received to the call (only six actors responded) affirmed this notion. The lackluster response forced the producers to open the role to anyone, and they received three times as many applicants but still cast one of the minor roles with actor Michael Kearns, who identified himself as HIV-positive.59 In addition to the series’ attempt to employ actors with disabilities, the show also hired a consultant, 27-year old Rod Garcia, to ensure the accuracy of its AIDS storyline.60 As I have demonstrated throughout this dissertation, few of the producers of medicalized edutainment generally ended up casting actors with disabilities or involving activist groups to critique portrayals of people with disabilities. A mere two years before ABC’s premiere of Life Goes On, ABC’s After School Specials still cast able-bodied actors to portray real-life disabled actor Brad Silverman in its “The Kid Who Wouldn’t Quit: The Brad Silverman Story.” Thus, Life Goes On was different 58 Caryn James, “TV View: ‘Life Goes On’ Lives Up to its Name.” The New York Times, March 15, 1992 embedded in the concerns not just of able-bodied viewers, but disabled ones as well. In his article, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” Robert McRuer suggests that “critical insights from disability studies and the disability rights movement could be productively incorporated into queer activism and cultural theory about AIDS and vice versa.”61 The alliance between Corky and Jesse can be seen as a very powerful one, in that it sought to bridge gaps within the disability community that many activists were unable to bridge at the time. McRuer notes that in spite of the crucial role of AIDS activists in the passage of the ADA, many HIV-negative disabled people distanced themselves from the concerns of people with AIDS during the epidemic.62 Life Goes On attempts to overcome such distancing by uniting Corky and Jesse in their oppression by dominant culture. An “unruly disability/queerness” exists both for Jesse and Corky, as it “disrupts the family” and unsettles heteronormative, ableist presumptions about sex, marriage, and reproduction.63 In Corky’s case, this unruliness is embodied in his marriage to Amanda, 61 McRuer, “Critical Investments,” 225. 62 Ibid. While disability is constructed as an embodied aberrancy from which all able-bodied people, regardless of divisions created by gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, can distance themselves, David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder assert that “methodological distancing,” the process by which members of marginalized communities identify an even more marginalized group in order to be regarded as “more normal” by comparison, takes place within disability communities as well (Mitchell and Snyder in McRuer, “Critical Investments,” 225.) 63 McRuer notes that as AIDS is figured as a crisis for the family within AIDS narratives, “two kinds of queerness/disability are inscribed in [AIDS narratives] and onto the body of the person living with AIDS.”One is “an unrulydisability/queerness” that works to “disrupt the family and unsettle the identities of others.” McRuer notes that this disability is usually exorcised, “primarily through a discourse of domestication.” The second, McRuer names “an exoticized queerness/disability,” which bolsters the 380 his elopement with her, his lack of consideration for his parents’ wishes, and the possibility that two disabled people, considered by some to be innocent, pre-adult, and nonsexual, could be sexual. Although this keeps the heterosexual ideal of marriage intact, it also troubles the mutually-constitutive ableist and heteronormative underpinnings of marriage. Jesse’s unruly queerness/disability exists in his relationship with Becca; the compassion which has unwittingly developed into passion; and the unsupervised, intimate non-physical relationship that is always pregnant with sexual tension and teeming with the possibility of sex. However, this unruly disability/queerness is also embodied in the self-actualizing decisions that Jesse makes on his own behalf. Rather than staying in Glen Brook to be with Becca, Jesse tells Becca that he plans to travel through Europe and paint, although Becca wanted him to accompany her to college and eventually marry her. He does not break up with her in a self-sacrificial way—to spare her the pain of his disease at the expense of his personal happiness. Rather, he decides to seek personal growth outside of the fulfillment of heteronormative ideals. Although the breakup is amicable, Becca is devastated, and both Becca and Jesse worry that they will never see each other again. family and solidifies the identities of others. This disability/queerness is also “eliminated, but only after it secures a heterosexual and able-bodied epiphany for the other characters (and for the audience—which is clearly not imagined as actually using wheelchairs or living with AIDS)” (McRuer, “Critical Investments,” 235-236). 381 The series finale, which takes place four years after Becca and Jesse graduated high school, describes Jesse’s and Becca’s married life also troubles the heteronormativity and ableism of marriage. Near the end of the episode, Becca is shown lying in bed with a shirtless Jesse, and she startles him by saying that she wants to have his baby. This implies that Becca and Jesse have consummated their relationship (and renders it permissible, if not preferable, in part because they are married adults), in spite of the show’s consistent assertions that abstinence was the only option for PWA’s. Jesse protests that she is a medical student and knows the risks. Her request to voluntarily have a disabled child, in spite of the risks to her and the baby, was a fairly radical upheaval of the health and able-bodiedness presumed within a system of reproductive futurism. Moreover, the finale shows that Becca has had a son, Jesse, whose parentage is left ambiguous. Though it is clear that Jesse has died and that Becca has remarried, it is equally possible that Jesse Jr. could be Jesse’s biological son or the stepson of her second husband. Interestingly, after viewers questioned the identity of Becca’s son and demonstrated anxiety over the notion that Becca could have gotten pregnant by a man with AIDS, the show’s producers commented publicly that young Jesse was not fathered by Jesse McKenna. In its portrayal of HIV/AIDS and cognitive disability in teen life, Life Goes On deviated substantially from some of its contemporaneous adult-film counterparts. The year after Life Goes On left the air, Forrest Gump (1994), a classic supercrip narrative, 382 premiered and chronicled Forrest Gump’s (Tom Hanks) many stellar achievements “in spite of” his disability. This film relied on the juxtaposition of Forrest’s innocence with the guilt of his love interest, Jenny (Robin Wright Penn), a common convention in AIDS narratives. Within the narrative, Jenny is stigmatized, because AIDS is constructed as a penalty for deviant behavior, linked to her promiscuity a drug abuse. In contrast, Life Goes On resisted, although not always successfully, the continuum of “guilt and innocence,” with respect to AIDS, as it resisted moralizing discourses that linked AIDS with deviant bodies and activities. This continuum of guilt and innocence with respect to disability is certainly not foregrounded in Jesse and Corky’s relationship. Corky’s knowledge, rather than his innocence, is foregrounded, and the solidarity of Jesse and Corky’s queer/disabled alliance stems from a mutual understanding, rather than Corky’s moral rescue of the deviant Jesse. This “unruly queerness/disability” is at least partially domesticated by Life Goes On in order to reconsolidate heteronormativity and ableism. In one way, the narrative “domesticates” Corky’s and Jesse’s sexuality by implanting it in marriage. Yet, in another way, these marriages themselves challenge the ableist and heteronormative institution of marriage which associates health, able-bodiedness, and “normal” heterosexuality as the promise and reward of marriage. Moreover, in the end, the “solution” to the competence problem in Amanda and Corky’s marriage is to have them occupy the loft above the garage at the Thacher house. Although Amanda successfully 383 took care of herself in her own apartment, the couple still lives at the Thacher home, under the partial supervision of Corky’s parents.64 However, in this instance, Life Goes On does not universalize the experience of Down syndrome; although Amanda might have been comfortable living in an apartment by herself, the series accommodates Corky’s reluctance to do so by insisting that marriage too can participate in reasonable accommodation. In comparison, throughout the series, Jesse can have his relationship with Becca, as long as it is policed by Becca’s parents and Jesse himself, until they reach adulthood and marry. Although its work sometimes ended up reproducing heteronormative and ableist norms, Life Goes On represented a significant deviation from the visions of medicalized edutainment that I have presented in this project. Cultural theorist Michael Bérubé argues that Life Goes On was culturally important because it “made it possible for nondisabled folks to imagine, understand, and sympathize with people who have Down syndrome.” I certainly agree with Bérubé, though I would add that the show was also culturally important because it engaged the disability community as audience members, actors, and activists with investments in cultural representation. Bérubé argues further that challenging representations like Life Goes On fulfill the primary directive, or “burden,” of representation, which is “precisely to demonstrate that ‘dehumanized’ people do in fact have feelings and dreams” just like 64 Corky breaks down while on his honeymoon (the couple snuck away from the Thacher household in an attempt to flee Amanda’s domineering parents), because he had never been away from home overnight before. Amanda comforts him, but Corky returns to his own bed in the middle of the night, unable to spend the night away from home. 384 people categorized as “normal.”65 Life Goes On’s cultural work in depicting the life of a family with disabled children was unprecedented in its cultural moment. Moreover, the series also performed important cultural work in its promotion of a “queer-disabled alliance” between Jesse and Corky as an alternative investment to heterosexual relationships. Rather than desiring to “kiss the normal boy,” Corky’s and Jesse’s respective girlfriends desire disability, and rather than desiring solely to kiss the “normal” girl, Corky and Jesse are both shown to have other investments, individually and collectively. Unlike other forms of medicalized edutainment surveyed in previous chapters, Life Goes On does not associate heteronormativity with adulthood or health and construes disabled subjects as sexually desirable, both to able-bodied and disabled women. This dissertation has argued that discourses of disability have increasingly been a way of representing adolescence and mapping its “problems” onto the teen body, configuring the body as both problem and cure. In historicizing the partnership of able- bodiedness and heteronormativity and its specific workings within the category of adolescence, this project has imagined how teenagers have become medicalized as 65 Bérubé argues that “For some reason we don’t yet understand, we seem incapable of empathizing with other humans in the abstract, and we need to have them represented to us before we can imagine what it might be like to share their feelings and their dreams.” Michael Bérubé, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 255. Likewise, Treichler writes that the revealing of Rock Hudson’s infection, ironically, was the point at which the world at large stopped viewing the epidemic as a “gay disease,” a transition which “suggests a powerful lesson about identification.” Asserting the importance of television in promoting shared identification, Treichler argues that when we have “laughed with them, talked with them, walked in their shoes” television characters’ problems seem more real to us. She declares that “the narrative structures of film and television can 385 subjects of rehabilitation and how rehabilitation has become mapped onto coming of age. Likewise, I have also articulated the history of teen rehabilitative citizenship to the history of media regulation, literary production, and literary criticism, arguing that a rehabilitative mode has invested teen popular culture’s method of legitimating itself and rehabilitating its image as a positive influence on developing teenagers. In historicizing medicalized edutainment, a representational trend that involved presenting stories of overcoming disability as a metaphor for coming of age, from its beginnings in the 1970s through the end of the 20th century, I have shown how disability has been a central representational category in shifting definitions of adolescence. In doing so, I have endeavored to trouble the presumed “natural” qualities of adolescence, such as angst, generational conflict, or poor decision-making, by showing how such attributes have been implicated within and culturally constructed through legal, medical, scientific, pop cultural, and parental discourses and how they have changed over time. In the wake of a cultural redefinition of youth and its political investments after the Vietnam War, cultural conceptions of adolescence (which are often inextricable from the “problem” of adolescence) shifted from one of “external force” to one of rehabilitative citizenship, rooted within and enacted on the plastic bodies and brains of teenagers. Rather than treating teens protectively, this new rehabilitative approach to adolescence attempted to involve teens in their own self-making and provide this sense of shared experience and knowledge; indeed, in the case of major film stars like Hudson, we may feel that we know them, have even ‘been’ them” (Treichler, How to Have Theory, 202). 386 decision-making, even while it often disciplined teen expression, circumscribed cultural meanings of adolescence, and shored up marginalizing discourses like heteronormativity, ableism, sexism, and racism. Specifically, Chapter 1 demonstrated how the image of masculine disabled martyrdom functioned in both shoring up and critiquing American technological triumphalism in the 1970s. The cultural figure of the bubble boy, one forged through fictional renderings and real life stories, revealed linkages between sexual and space exploration and between masculinity and self-sacrifice. Moreover, in my analysis of the made-for-TV “disease-of-the-week” movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, I argued that narratives of overcoming disability figured centrally in images of coming of age, masculinity, and sexual liberation. In Chapter 2, I showed the deployment of rehabilitative citizenship in ABC’s After School Specials, which was among the first television shows to target an exclusively teenaged audience and is a series currently unexamined in a scholarly context. By situating the Specials within regulatory debates about educational and age-appropriate television programming and cultural contestations over sex education contemporaneous with the series’ airing, I demonstrated that ableist narratives of overcoming disability and their linkage to coming of age fostered a new openness toward teen sexuality and autonomy that operated proactively rather than protectively. 387 Chapter 3 chronicled the 1980s proliferation of teen sick-lit and the role of the affective labor of sadness in defining coming of age for teen girl readers. These coming of age narratives were also linked to national citizenship as reading was perceived in the grips of an aliteracy crisis that indicated not only an unwillingness to read but an apathy toward participatory democratic citizenship. While the nation focused on combating aliteracy among youth populations, teen sick-lit’s apparent value was that it would instantiate coming of age by exposing young readers to emotionally difficult situations like death and illness while combating the emotional numbness or ennui of aliteracy. However, as opposed to the more liberal problem novel of the 1970s, which provided teen sick lit’s literary ancestry, teen sick-lit often espoused conservative views of gender, sexuality, and disability, reflecting conservative trends that were prevalent in other political realms in this cultural moment. I argued in Chapter 4 that the figure of the teen brain emerged in discourses of neuroscience, science journalism, and neuroparenting to construct teen behaviors such as risk-taking, laziness, or poor decision-making as inextricably and neurologically rooted within the teen body. While previous generations considered teens to be fully developed in body and brain but in need of more experience to develop the mind, neuroscience recast adolescent turmoil as something caused by faulty or incomplete brain wiring, a discovery that resulted in depictions of adolescence not only as a stage but as a temporary disability or form of mental illness. Such a depiction of teens gained traction 388 amid the school shooting and superpredator epidemics of the 1990s. Moreover, I have argued that this biologization of adolescence in the Decade of the Brain occurred concomitantly with and invested other discourses of biologization in which scientists, journalists, and activists contested the stakes of finding neurophysiological roots for attributes such as race, homosexuality, gender, and criminality. Finally, in the conclusion, I have discussed the television series Life Goes On in order to spotlight the contributions of queer/disabled alliances in contesting and resisting discourses of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness. Although I have elucidated the ways in which medicalized edutainment has projected both disability and able-bodiedness simultaneously onto the teen body and worked to collapse distinctions among different disabilities, Life Goes On explicitly addressed and involved disabled subjects in its imagining of a better future. Although ABC’s After School Specials participated in cultivating sexual openness for able-bodied heterosexual adolescents, Life Goes On imagined disabled sexual bodies and pleasures. Thus, amid the social retrenchment in the neoliberal project of the Decade of the Brain, Life Goes On insisted, if only partially, that another world was possible. Ultimately, this dissertation has insisted on the centrality of discourses of disability in defining the category of adolescence in the late-20th century. In my focus on discursive constructions of disability and adolescence, I have suggested that the attributes of adolescence are far from inevitable but rather historically contingent, spotlighting the 389 way in which the teen body—rather than only the child’s—became invested with a national struggle to define the legacies of sexual liberation, multiculturalism, and youth activism. 390 Bibliography American Experience, “Bioethics Opinions” Judd, Lewis L. “Statement Concerning Fiscal Year 1995 Appropriates for the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Eye Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.” Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies. 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