Ideology in Popular Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Children's and Young Adult Literature and Film" (2012)
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University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 12-2012 Ideology in Popular Late Twentieth and Twenty- First Century Children's and Young Adult Literature and Film Iris Grace Shepard University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons, and the Visual Studies Commons Recommended Citation Shepard, Iris Grace, "Ideology in Popular Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Children's and Young Adult Literature and Film" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 557. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/557 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. IDEOLOGY IN POPULAR LATE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE AND FILM IDEOLOGY IN POPULAR LATE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE AND FILM A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English By Iris G. Shepard Henderson State University Bachelor of Art in English, 2001 University of Arkansas Master of Art in English, 2007 December, 2012 University of Arkansas ABSTRACT Texts created for the consumption of children and young adults are not simple texts made for the sole purpose of entertaining young audiences. In fact, these texts are complicated, multi-faceted texts that function both in the creation and performance of childhood. Children’s and young adult literature and film disseminated mainstream ideology about young people’s place in society and attempt to enculturate young readers and viewers in regards to race, gender, age, and social class. However, by helping young people interact critically with these texts, critical thinking skills as well as a passion for reading can be fostered. In addition, by supporting young people’s creative potential, more texts can be produced for children by children instead of all texts being created by adults. This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. Dissertation Director: _______________________________________ Dr. M. Keith Booker Dissertation Committee: _______________________________________ Dr. Susan Marren _______________________________________ Dr. Sean Connors _______________________________________ Dr. Ian Wojcik-Andrews DISSERTATION DUPLICATION RELEASE I hereby authorize the University of Arkansas Libraries to duplicate this thesis when needed for research and/or scholarship. Agreed _____________________________________ Iris G. Shepard ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks are due to the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. M. Keith Booker, Dr. Susan Marren, Dr. Sean Connors, and Dr. Ian Wojcik-Andrews. In addition, I am grateful to all the professors whose classes have stimulated my intellectual growth. Also, special thanks go out to my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me throughout the process, especially my parents Paul and Stella Shepard, my boyfriend Corey Thomas, and my sons William and Robin. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction 1 II. Chapter 1 22 III. Chapter 2 60 IV. Chapter 3 94 V. Chapter 4 117 VI. Chapter 5 155 VII. Conclusion 187 VIII. Bibliography 195 1 Ideology in Popular Late Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Film Introduction Throughout my Master’s and doctoral classes and research, I became increasingly interested in children’s and young adult literature and film, especially in the ideology encoded in these texts. My scholarly interests were certainly driven by my personal life. As a single mother with two young boys, I spend a lot of time watching and reading contemporary texts with them. My concerns as a parent about how the ideology encoded in the books and films influenced how my children perceived themselves and the world around them spurred me to look critically at the texts they were interested in. I have never felt that I needed to censor texts that I allowed my children to view and read, but, instead, I’ve tried to help them look critically at the texts they consume. I have tried to foster creative meaning making and critical thinking. My dissertation is the result of several years of reading, watching, and analyzing texts. Since the field of children’s and young adult literature and film is so big, I’ve tried to focus my dissertation on contemporary, popular texts. Also, because I am especially interested in the ideologies encoded in recent texts created for children, my dissertation has focused primarily on widely popular texts, texts that reach a broad audience of readers and viewers. The most conservative ideas about gender, race, and class seem to manifest in highly marketed and extremely popular texts. Popular texts affect a wide audience and, thus, the ideas championed by the texts are disseminated widely and continue to reify the dominant ideologies. 2 Throughout my research and also through my experiences as a parent, I have become increasingly aware of ageism, the marginalization of children, both in the images of children in the texts and in the imagined child whom the texts are geared towards. Ageism as it relates to children is an under-investigated social phenomenon that is highly observable in children’s literature and film as well as in American culture at large, especially in interactions between authority figures—such as parents and teachers—and children. Penelope Leach in Children First states: “Children are the largest minority group in society and the minority that is most subject to discrimination and least recognized as being so” (172). Children are marginalized by the generic—often nostalgic—essentializing concepts of “the child” that are produced and circulated by texts directed at both children and adult audiences, in their actual lived experiences, control of their reading choices, and also by their exclusion from text production. Children hold a unique position as a marginalized group because unlike other marginalized populations like racial minorities and women, children literally grow out of their marginalized status into adulthood. Perhaps this explains why ageism as it applies to children has gone mostly overlooked, but the experience of having been marginalized continues to adversely affect people long after they have left childhood behind. The marginalization of children in their lived experiences is receiving more critical recognition. Lawrence Grossberg states: “American society seems to be attacking, or abandoning, its kids” (78). Alice Miller in For Your Own Good (1983) and Joseph Zornado in Inventing the Child (2001) also explore the marginalization that children experience. Miller, a psychologist, felt compelled to “sensitize the general public to the suffering of early childhood” (xv). Miller investigates and condemns mainstream parenting as a “poisonous pedagogy.” Miller asserts that the mainstream parenting pedagogy fills the needs of parents, not of children. She 3 states: “All advice that pertains to raising children betrays more or less clearly the numerous, variously clothed needs of the adult” (97). She continues: “Abused children—victims of poisonous pedagogy—are forced to suppress their feelings, tend to idolize their oppressors, and in turn abuse other people” (201). According to Miller, child abuse is much more widespread than we want to acknowledge. Miller asserts that adults need to look critically at the parenting practices they were subjected to as children. Only by evaluating their own childhoods will adults be free to make more humane choices with their children. Joseph Zornado’s Inventing the Child draws heavily from Miller’s work. Zornado writes: “The lived relationship between an adult and child is the story of hierarchy, buried rage, domination, subjugation, and violence…The adults’ physical and emotional domination of the child characterized the childhood experience of Western culture” (xiii- xiv). Zornado investigates American history through a lens of the prominent parenting practices. He states, “Adults invent history not so much from what really happened to them as children as from what they wished would have happened…The vast majority of children’s stories invite the child to identify with the adults’ idea of what a child should be” (vxiii, xv). He continues: “Contemporary culture tells itself a story about the child in order to defend its treatment of the child” (10). Childhood is often not the blissful, carefree period of life that adults mis-remember it as. Children are an easy population to marginalize. Every avenue of power in our culture is denied to children. Children have no political rights. Because children’s access to money comes directly from their adult caregivers, their powers of consumption are limited. Even executing the simple task of buying a snack or going to watch a movie necessitates the involvement and complicity of an adult. Children’s days are heavily regulated by adults. Rarely are they consulted about where they want to go to school; neither do they have any choice about their teachers, 4 classmates, subjects of study, and, in many cases, what they read. Additionally, except in cases of extreme abuse, children have no access to an outside authority to appeal to if their living situation is untenable. Children aren’t usually taught how