| Description |
249 pages |
| Summary |
There is, at the end of the twentieth century a radical questioning of the dominant late nineteenth century idea that adulthood and childhood are two distinctly opposite states. Since the nineteen sixties, particularly in the U.S., the boundaries between adulthood and childhood in law, public policy, marketing and popular culture are increasingly blurred and fluid. This work investigates the contours of and reasons for this transformation by looking at representations of childhood in popular Hollywood films made"for" children, in the public debate on children and television, and in marketing strategies aimed at children in the last decades of the twentieth century. The films analyzed are Pocahontas (1996), Indian in the Cupboard (1996), The Little Princess (1939 & 1995), Jack (1996), Jumanji (1997), Toy Story (1996), and Matilda (1996) |
|
This work is an intervention in the contemporary debates on postmodernity, late capitalism and the time-space compression that characterize the last decades of the twentieth century. Grounded in socialist-feminist concerns it attempts to redirect the above discussion to the family and the "personal," to understanding how the family which is historically produced at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy is changing in late capitalism |
|
The argument is that late twentieth century capitalist construction of children as consumers is a major leveler of adults and children. Combined with new technologies, the entry of middle class children into the market as consumers fundamentally challenges the continuation of the family as a private sphere capable of "protecting" children from the market. Childhood is no longer embodied by children but commodified as a selling strategy for adults. Without structural transformations in the inequities of class, nation, gender, race and sexuality, defining children as autonomous individuals, is within capitalist patriarchy a means to withhold social responsibility towards children-making them ever more vulnerable to the family and the market |
| Analysis |
Cinema. - Mass Communications. - American Studies. - Business Administration, Marketing |
| Notes |
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-12, Section: A, page: 4308 |
|
Adviser: Chuck Klein Hans |
|
Ph. D. Northwestern University 1998 |
| In |
Dissertation Abstracts International 59-12A |
| Genre/Form |
Academic theses.
|
|
Academic theses.
|
|
Thèses et écrits académiques.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
0599124865 |
|
9780599124868 |
|
