Jeunesse - Young People, Texts, Cultures (E-Journal)
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Girls Playing at Soldiers: Destabilizing the Masculinity of War Play in Georgian Britain
No full textThis article destabilizes previous assumptions of the inherent masculinity of war play by examining the many forms of Georgian girls’ participation. Girls may not have used professionally manufactured guns, but they did similar things with more makeshift weapons. Veterans’ accounts played a key role in inspiring both boys’ and girls’ re-enactments. Girls’ interest in war play was fuelled by complex social messaging admiring female soldiers and praising the value of martial training for both sexes. These findings highlight the need to historicize play and to recognize the pervasive influence of war in eighteenth-century girls’ lives.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.000
Good, Mad, or “Incurably Bad:” The Borders of Normalcy and Deviance in Film Representations of Sociopathic White Schoolgirls
No full textThrough the lens of feminist cultural geography, the authors seek to understand how film and television depictions of the violent white schoolgirl across the idealized space of white suburbia temporarily disrupt but ultimately sustain the borders that define gender, youth, normalcy, and deviance. The authors analyze contemporary cinematic and televised dramas, including Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, the 2018 HBO series Sharp Objects, and Cory Finley’s 2017 film Thoroughbreds to demonstrate how spatial dimensions of “deviant” white adolescent femininity enforce the boundaries of “normal” girlhood.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2019.002
Kid President: The Aesthetics of Childhood in Political Cartoons
No full textSince the 2016 US presidential election, a number of political cartoons have been produced that depict Donald Trump as an infant or toddler. He is drawn in diapers and with any number of objects we associate with young children, as well as engaging in behaviours such as crying, whining, and melting down. As a genre, the political cartoon offers complex readings, yet this particular phenomenon, in its repeated renderings, seems to signal just as much, if not more, animosity toward children than toward Trump. The question is, who is the real object of critique in these visual displays? What are the assumptions that cartoonists have about children, and how is the child deployed in and through these images? In this work, we examined thirty political cartoons depicting Trump as an infant or toddler, along with related artifacts, dating from 2015 to 2018. We discuss the ways that the cartoonists rely on stereotyped affects and behaviours of childhood to express purportedly progressive notions of equity. The effect of this growing archive of images, however, may betray those objectives, instead enacting power over the figure of the child.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2019.001
Case Studies of the Child’s Perspective
Full text linkReview of:
Moruzi, Kristine, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy, editors. Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Palgrave, 2019.
 
Palestinian Children’s Literature: An Overview
Full text linkThis resource offers a general historical overview of Palestinian children’s literature since 1948, the year when the whole Palestinian people ceased living in Palestine. After the establishment of the State of Israel, many Palestinians were either evacuated and driven from their homeland or chose to leave. Critics have divided Palestinian literature since that time into three categories: Palestinian literature in the diaspora, Palestinian literature in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinian literature inside Israel. Children’s literature is a part of each of these Palestinian literatures, and I discuss its development in what follows.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.000
“You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth”: Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s
No full textIn several Finnish films of the 2000s, Finland is portrayed as divided geographically into two parts: the small urban area around Finland’s capital, Helsinki, in the south and the rural areas in the country’s north. This polarization frames conceptualizations of social class, particularly in films that depict young people leaving their homes. Forbidden Fruit (Kielletty hedelmä) and August (Elokuu) are examples of Finnish cinema in the 2000s that negotiate ideas about class and circulate this polarized imagination through geography. Both films depict the young leaving their homes and then clashing with a geographically marked border. The films are analyzed in the context of the neo-liberal success story which defines the ideal subject of contemporary society. The article argues that the cinematic journeys of the young show the power of geography in reproducing class structures
Representing Childhood and Forced Migration: Narratives of Borders and Belonging in European Screen Content for Children
No full textThis article explores representations of childhood and forced migration within a selection of European screen content for and about children. Based on the findings of a research project that examined the intersections of children’s media, diversity, and forced migration in Europe (www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the article highlights different ways in which ideas of borders and belonging are constructed and deconstructed in a selection of films and television programs that feature children with an immigration background. Drawing on ideas around the “politics of pity” (Boltanski; Chouliaraki), the analysis explores conditions under which narratives of otherness arise when it comes to representing forcibly displaced children within European-produced children’s screen media. It also examines screen media that destabilize borders of “us” and “the other” by emphasizing the agency of children from migration backgrounds and revealing both the similarities and the differences between European children with immigration backgrounds and White European-born children. It is argued here that these representations destabilize narratives of borders and otherness, suggesting that children with a family history of immigration “belong” to European societies in the same ways as White European-born children.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2019.002
