Chronic Youth

The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure,the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brinkof success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site ofpop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youthtraces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normativeorder have been negotiated and contained. Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, newmedia, and public policy, Julie Passanante Elman shows how the teenager becamea cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness,heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven‘edutainment’ prominently featuring narratives of disability—from theimmunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC’s After SchoolSpecials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disabilityand adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much morethan a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about theincomplete and volatile “teen brain.” Undertaking a cultural history of youththat combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elmanoffers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers,policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disabilityto cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s unevenpassage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth showshow teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation andneoliberal governmentality.