Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 7-5-2012 12:00 AM Watching High School: Representing Disempowerment on Teen Drama Television Sarah M. Baxter The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Paulette Rothbauer The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Media Studies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Sarah M. Baxter 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Recommended Citation Baxter, Sarah M., "Watching High School: Representing Disempowerment on Teen Drama Television" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 644. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/644 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WATCHING HIGH SCHOOL: REPRESENTING DISEMPOWERMENT ON TEEN DRAMA TELEVISION (Spine title: Watching High School) (Thesis format: Monograph) by Sarah Mae Baxter Graduate Program in Media Studies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Sarah Mae Baxter 2012 i THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners ______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Paulette Rothbauer Dr. Wendy Gay Pearson Supervisory Committee ______________________________ Dr. Carole Farber ______________________________ Dr. Alison Hearn ______________________________ Dr. Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie The thesis by Sarah Mae Baxter entitled: Watching High School: Representing Disempowerment on Teen Drama Television is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts ______________________ _______________________________ Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii Abstract This study investigated the representation of teenage characters on teen drama television. Content from a sample of six television series aired between 1989 and 2006 were analyzed, with the intent of describing the underlying discourse of “teenageness” that shapes the portrayal of young people in popular media. Qualitative content analysis found significant, ongoing trends in youth representation that reflect common cultural conceptions of teens. Teen drama narratives were found to suggest that the experiences represented in television story lines are universally shared amongst young people. Teenagers were also represented in the process of discovering or choosing an identity, while socially preoccupied with peer relationships. These representations position teenagers as irresponsible, unreliable, and ultimately in need of adult protection and control. Narrative contradictions occasionally suggested that young people deserve greater responsibility and respect, but overall, representations of teenagers on teen drama television reflect a discourse that promotes youth disempowerment. Keywords Discourse, Disempowerment, Representation, Teenagers, Teen drama, Television, Youth iii Table of Contents Certificate ii Abstract iii List of Appendices v List of Figures v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Introduction to the Sample 10 Literature Review 20 Research Methods 30 Outline and Argument 36 Chapter 2: The Teen Condition 38 Adult Authority 38 Rites of Passage 51 Conclusion: Struggling for Autonomy 63 Chapter 3: Individualized Identity 65 Passionate Self-Discovery 65 School Pressures 71 Teen Sexuality 81 Conclusion: Choosing an Acceptable Self 97 Chapter 4: Social Identities 100 Identity as Social Construct 100 Teen Romance 108 Navigating the Friendship Line 118 Conclusion: Socializing the Pre-Individual 126 Chapter 5: Conclusion 128 Bibliography 141 VITA 167 iv List of Appendices Appendix A: Episodes analyzed by topic section 146 Appendix B: Character glossary 159 List of Figures Figure 1: The sample in brief 16 v 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Common sense discourses about youth are often thought to be informed by simply that: common sense. But, as Christine Griffin contends in her critical analysis of youth research written in the 1980s Representations of Youth, it is crucial to turn “the spotlight onto youth research itself, especially those texts produced during the 1980s, to examine the causal stories and conceptual categories through which ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ have been constructed, represented and understood” (2). Modern adolescence, far from common sensical, has been discursively constructed, in particular by this body of social research conducted to explain the lives and conditions of young people. Further articulating these “common sense” notions of youth, Nancy Lesko outlines “four ‘confident characterizations’ of adolescents: they ‘come of age’ into adulthood; they are controlled by raging hormones; they are peer-oriented; and they are represented by age” (2). These frames for thinking about young people shape the lives of teenagers by informing educational practices and social policy, and more generally, expectations of “normal” teen behaviour. As Lesko continues, “Youth were defined as always ‘becoming,’ a situation that provoked endless watching, monitoring, and evaluating” (111). Presumed to be in the process of becoming adult individuals, teens are excluded from the privileges of full personhood. Young people occupy a unique position of powerlessness, considering that every “mature” adult must necessarily “pass through” a stage of adolescence. Unlike race, gender, or class divisions, which structure systems of power and control in society, youth is, in a certain sense, universal. Thus, while all people experience “adolescence,” young people are all characterized and affected by universal expectations. As Lesko writes, “the ‘discourse of adolescence’—affects 2 and influences all adolescents’ lives. All youths become adolescents and are subject to its ideas and expectations” (11-12). These assumptions in turn manifest throughout our culture influencing popular fictional representations of teenaged individuals and populations. While researchers have shaped the discursive landscape for understanding youth in the late twentieth century, people most likely have access to common characterizations of teens through television and other popular media. As Ross and Stein describe in the introduction to their edited collection Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, “Popular discourse also links perceptions of ‘teen’ with perceptions of consumerism and commercial teen culture” (7). In this sense, to be a teenager is to consume cultural artifacts that are designed to be expressions of youthful identity and are seen to carry some essence of perceived teenage-ness. Conceptualizing young people thus necessarily involves investigating teen cultural products, for the ways in which these objects purport to contain “truths” about the nature of adolescence, and, by extension, impact social beliefs. Davis and Dickinson, editors of Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity, also emphasize this connection, demonstrating how the study of television in particular is of central concern to any attempt at understanding youth culture: “The ‘teenager’ is a relatively new phenomenon, coming to prominence in the Western world (mainly in affluent North America) in the 1950s...[I]n this period of both economic and baby boom, ‘the teenager’ developed as a recognized cultural identity in close synchronization with the rise of television as a widely consumed domestic medium. Whether or not this was a chance occurrence or part of a greater and inextricably linked socio-economic chain of circumstances, it is still vital that any history of culture aimed at, produced for and consumed by adolescents should pay particular critical attention to television.” (Davis and Dickinson 2) Teen television specifically is an area of study that offers potential insight into how we culturally conceive of young people. By providing cultural products with which teens and their 3 families interact, as well as modeling teen identities and behaviours through onscreen (often fictional) characters, “television plays a pivotal role in the way teenagers are managed: what they are allowed to do, what is forbidden and what they are encouraged to become” (Davis and Dickinson 10). Describing the domestic conditions that characterize television consumption, generally structured by parents and the hardware of the TV set within the family home, Davis and Dickinson continue: “Teen TV is obliged to be liable for the shaping of both young adults’ burgeoning senses of freedom and the prescribed limitations which are still (and perhaps always will be) thrust upon them within their social positions, both present and future” (10). It can be argued that teen television offers televisual texts that attempt to both liberate and contain teenaged subjects. Although historically teen television programming has largely been dominated by music television and family sitcoms, the end of the twentieth century saw the introduction of the teen drama sub-genre, which “appeared, developed and flourished in the 1990s” (Moseley 53). Describing the content of teen drama, Moseley turns to the experience of being a teenager: “Teenageness is a significant ‘in-between’ period, and teen drama deals with