Reading on Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies
by: Sarah Godfrey , October 30, 2024
by: Sarah Godfrey , October 30, 2024
Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies is a timely and original monograph, locating the ways in which concepts of consent and their representations in American cinema have evolved within the complex and often contradictory cultural context of post-millennial American teen film. Locating more recent films against their broader historical context, Meek’s book carefully examines the inevitably ‘slippery’ terrain of consent across various generic manifestations and contextual mobilisations. While her examples are drawn from films as early as The Dolorita Passion Dance (1897) through to Three Months (2022, dir. Jared Frieder), she makes productive connections between film texts and a range of socio-historical contexts, arguing that representations of teenage sexuality and consent are always inherently and intricately tied to gender politics and the attendant issues of misogyny, purity, abstinence, rape culture, and sex positivity within American culture.
Meek’s conceptualisation of consent culture is a key component of a broader dynamic and continually evolving cultural context, which is specifically inflected and negotiated via gender, race and generation. The author’s work offers a nuanced interrogation of the cinematic representations of adolescent sexuality as being multiple in range and visibility—noting that, somewhat inevitably, the varying levels of representation remain dominated by cis-gendered, heteronormative paradigms. Nonetheless, Meek’s intervention provides an opportunity to engage with and question the various tropes, genres, discourses and the attendant cinematic bodies of knowledge that have emerged around adolescent sexualities, which she rightly reminds the reader are inevitably ‘crafted by adults’ and promulgated by a capitalist, profit-driven industry. Examining the cultural politics of what is described as the ‘teen sex comedy,’ exemplified by the original American Pie (1999, dir. Paul Weitz), Meek interrogates the ways in which non-consent is mobilised as a central plot device or dismissed via comedy. She also analyses examples such as American Pie: Girls’ Rules (2020, dir. Mike Elliott) and Blockers (2018, dir. Kay Cannon), making the case that not only are questions of consent a highly gendered discourse, but one that is persistently bound up with ‘race-based stereotypes’ (2023: 15). Throughout the analysis, Meek’s examples draw attention to the limitations and hegemonic structuring of consent culture across American cinema. While the nuances around adolescent sexuality and discourses of consent are culturally and politically reflexive, they must always, as Meek consistently demonstrates, be understood as conjoined with and inextricable from the racial and gendered power dynamics of the American film industry. To this end, as a reader, I found the spectre of Weinstein loomed large as I contemplated a range of the readings and ideas that Meek presents.
The first chapter of the book provides a deftly constructed archaeological framework for the case studies, locating the interconnected histories of adolescent sexuality, teen films, the cultural discourses and moral panics around consent, in order to locate the ways in which this discursive process has come to take its contemporary shape within the representational systems of 21st century American cinema. Over the course of the chapter, Meek traverses impressive ground. She takes us from the 1890s and the earliest moral debates about the deleterious impact of moving images upon the emergent and supposedly ‘vulnerable’ teenage audience through to contemporary debates about affirmative consent and its complexities. She explores the limitations of representation of adolescent sexuality and consent, drawing attention to the ways in which depictions of adolescent sexuality can and cannot be codified on screen and the significance of this. Over the course of the chapter, Meek reminds us of many familiar cinematic touchstones including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967, dir. Stanley Kramer), Taxi Driver (1976, dir. Martin Scorsese), Dirty Dancing (1987, dir. Emile Ardolino) and American Pie alongside a number of lesser known examples such as Little Darlings (1980, dir. Ron Maxwell), Just Another Girl on the I.R.T (1992, dir. Leslie Harris) and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995, dir. Maria Magentti), to provide a fulsome history of the representation of teenage sexuality and consent in American cinema, which belies the frequent tabloid claims that we are living in an era of unprecedented adolescent sexualisation.
The second chapter illuminates the workings of what Angela McRobbie might term a form of ‘double-entanglement’ (2004: 255). The films under discussion present what appears to be, on the surface, a seemingly progressive accomplishment of the ‘gains’ of consent culture and sexual liberation as articulated via the figure of the sexually active/agentic (to the point of predacious) emancipated teenaged girl, who pushes back against the traditional heteronormative scripts of passivity via a narrative of sexual self-determination. Such narratives—in which adolescent girls are positioned as the sexually pursuant, dominant, even predatory—partake in what Meek describes as a reimagining or ‘flipping’ of the long-established heterosexual script. Through a considered reading of American Pie: Girls Rules and Blockers, Meek argues that comedy is deployed as a means through which problematic and highly gendered discourses of consent are in fact reinforced and reified in ways that serve to delimit and contain sexual agency for adolescent girls. As the author demonstrates by referencing a range of examples, these narrative script flips seem predominantly concentrated on adolescent girls of colour, which raises questions about the intersections of race and sexuality within these films and evinces the persistence with which comedy is used to neutralise, contain or otherwise demean any potential for empowerment.
The focus on queer adolescence in the third chapter is similarly thoughtful. Here, Meek begins with an exploration of queerness within the context of representations of adolescent sexuality and cinema, noting the emergence of queer adolescence in US movies as a relatively recent occurrence. Against this observation, it is probably no surprise that the case study texts within the chapter are dominated by white characters and narratives. The author notes, a notable trope of ‘heterosexuality first’ (by which central characters’ attempt to engage with heterosexuality before coming to recognise their authentic queer selves) is recurrent (2023: 98). She explores how this specific trope provides a productive, if fraught, opportunity to explore the heteronormative imperative of consent politics within contemporary American cinema culture. Meek argues that this imperative demonstrates the performative and contingent nature of consent and the ways in which this is brought into sharp relief for queer characters, particularly when they are located within a predominantly heteronormative environment. Meek’s conclusion that there still exists a ‘dearth of open and communicative explicit queer sexual encounters’ (2023: 113) across teen films that speak against the heteronormative frameworks of consent.
The fourth chapter takes a different tone, focusing instead on what feels to be a particularly pressing and timely question within the American film industry: the difficult topic of child sexual abuse. The chapter explores the topic in a way that is frank but sensitive, offering a consideration of films that deliberately refuse to accommodate what Meek characterises as simplistic or binary ideas around consent. The author engages with films such as Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015, dir. Marielle Heller) and An Education (2009, dir. Lone Scherfig) as examples of films that are ‘discomfiting’ for their complex and contradictory portrayals of younger and adolescent girls who occupy and ‘embody numerous contradictions as they navigate through a minefield of coercive relationships, cultural beliefs, family situations, gender stereotypes, and their own desires as they seek to harness their own sexual subjectivity’ (2023: 146). Meek’s readings of the various films in this chapter does not shy away from providing difficult analysis. This chapter is one of the strongest in the book, as it tackles a particularly complex and difficult issue with dexterity, rigour and nuance.
The final chapter returns to the ground set up by the third, focusing on representations of transgender adolescence. As Meek notes, the films in this section remain the least represented within mainstream US film, as they are usually independent features. Through her analysis, she argues for a fluidity of history of the teen film. This is to say, not only does Meek retrospectively recognise texts with trans characters in them, but also more broadly explores and captures films from earlier periods that defy, refuse or somehow speak back to the established gender binaries. The chapter opens with a useful exploration of the current context in which there is, seemingly, a political rhetoric of acceptance of trans people, but one in which the reality of living as a trans person—particularly a trans person of colour—is often shaped by violence, poverty, precarity and the ever-present threat of transphobia. Against this context, Meek draws on Cáel M. Keegan (2022) to delineate between what she terms examples of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ trans representations. Citing Tootsie (1982, dir. Sydney Pollack,) and The Assignment (2016, dir. Walter Hill) as exemplars of ‘bad’ trans representation, the question of ‘good’ representation remains a more complex discussion. The author suggests that while all the films in their purview are directed by cis-gendered people, ‘good’ representation is somewhat of a paradox. ‘Good’ representation looks like assimilation, but as a direct result of this, binary notions of sex and gender remain upheld and unquestioned. Here, Meek intervenes with a reading of 3 Generations (2015, dir. Gaby Dellal) which, she ascertains, requires a ‘conceptual leap’ (2023: 170) to be considered within a corpus of trans cinema. Nevertheless, Meek approaches the film to offer an insightful understanding of the limits of consent culture by examining how its very conceptualisation is premised on an impossibly cis-gendered framework. In addition, the author observes that despite the shortcomings of the films discussed in the chapter, the project of opening up spaces of contradiction, ambivalence and possibilities to move beyond binary constructs of the sex/gender dichotomies are there, offering theorists and filmmakers alike opportunities for play, challenge and performative opportunities.
Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies is a timely and insightful book that urges the reader to rethink the ways in which consent is configured across inherently cis-het norms, and how this is inextricable from the broader cultural matrix within which discourse and cinematic representation circulate. By pointing to the vicissitudes and tensions across contemporary culture and the heightened anxieties around adolescent sexualities, this book offers a thoughtful and much needed look at the ways in which contemporary cinema navigates this matter.
REFERENCES
Keegan, Cáel M. (2022), ‘On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, pp. 26-37.
Meek, Michele, (2023), Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McRobbie, Angela (2004), ‘Post-Feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 255-264.
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