This seminar course examines how mass media reflect and resist norms of adulthood and aging. Frequently defined as an endpoint – a biological inevitability, a completion of development, an achievement of maturity – adulthood is neither simple nor static. Media for children and adolescents, for example, often depict adulthood as a paradox: both exciting and boring; free of oversight and burdened by responsibility; the beginning of real life and a kind of death. Students will learn interdisciplinary and multimodal humanistic methods for understanding the mediated history of adulthood. Topics include the emergence of young adulthood as a life stage, a key demographic in consumer culture, and a popular genre; fantasies of nonlinear aging like intergenerational body-swaps, aging backward, and agelessness; quarter-life, midlife, and end-of-life crises; infantilization and other discriminatory exclusions from adulthood; gender and rhetorics of proper aging; and failures and refusals to age appropriately, from the man-child to the Golden Girls.
Selected Materials
“Am I Out of Touch?” meme from The Simpsons Season 5 Episode 20, May 5, 1994
From Week 4: Parental Advisory: (Young) Adult Media and (Young) Adult Content
Ellen Forney, Monkey Food: The Complete “I Was Seven in ‘75” Collection (1999)
From Week 6: Nostalgia: Looking Back at Young Adulthood
Teruyoshi Hayashida, Take Ivy (1965)
As “Take Ivy” shows, Japanese magazines and brands have done more than anyone to document, promote, and reproduce Ivy and other American styles over the last five decades. The Japanese enjoyed a major structural advantage in this area: a constant need for reference materials and photographic evidence to replicate imported fashion as an essentially alien culture. Americans in 1965 would never have thought to package up photos of campus clothing into a style book like “Take Ivy,” any more than they would have produced books of hamburgers, highways, or oak trees. Yet today Japan is losing its monopoly on archiving American style. Many American men have found inspiration from “Take Ivy” and similar projects, and have rediscovered and celebrated their own heritage of dress. As Toshiyuki Kurosu told me, “The Americans have become like the Japanese.”
W. David Marx, “Stalking the Wild Madras Wearers of the Ivy League,” New Yorker, December 1, 2015
David Mirkin, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
From Week 9: Arrested Development and the Inner Child
- Fergie, “Big Girls Don’t Cry (Personal)” (2007)
- Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott” (2001), reprinted in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa González et al. (2014)
- Marilyn Ivy, “Have You Seen Me? Recovering the Inner Child in Late Twentieth-Century America” Social Text 37 (1993)