Blog Post #3

Blog Post #3: Quotes

Raby’s article “A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence” happened to serendipitously coincide with both the current subject matter of one of my other classes, as well as of the subject matter of a class I took several years ago.

In regard to the first, the connection is in a pseudo-inconsequential way. At this stage in the semester, my Senior Seminar in Sociology happens to be discussing interviewing as a form of qualitative analysis. As this study also happened to incorporate that technique, the Methodology was reasonably engaging.

As to the latter connection, that is to the course Adolescent Literature (consisting of studying young adult fiction), which I attended many, many moons ago.  Funnier is that after class on Thursday I ran into my professor from that course (the wonderful Dr. Cook). Ultimately, though, several aspects of Raby’s piece reminded me of themes we discussed in that course. 

 

The major overarching theme of the class (when I took Adolescent Literature) was “power,” and the various dynamics involved. This plays well with what Raby discusses on page 443 of her article in her section on Agency. Raby explains that of the five discourses she discusses (storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumer), “the storm creates an understanding of teenagers as powerless in the face of the inevitable tempest of hormones and uncertainties that they must cope with,” (Raby 443). Although much of my previous course is blurry, I find the pattern of the relation between “power” and “adolescence” intriguing.

This also connects to her discussion of rebellion versus resistance. She explains that rebellion is associated with teenagehood and given negative connotations, whereas resistance (less infantilized) is not. Instead, she insists that “teenage rebellion should often actually be understood as resistance” (Raby 446). This would help reduce the stereotyping of teenagers as an alien life form (as we discuss in class) and more greatly legitimize them as people in their own right.

As a side, I should note that the results her interviewing yielded somewhat surprised me, in that my experience with “adolescence” was far less dramatic. Even when I was a teenager myself, I didn’t quite think in the same terms as the girls Raby spoke with. I believed as a whole that, like people in general, the majority of us were decent people. Occasionally there was a kid or a group of kids that did something dumb, but (usually) that was just a stupid decision on their part and rarely out of malice. Or perhaps my view of teenagehood was skewed by the group of kids I usually hung around with; we were often too busy stressing over term papers to care about the goings-on of our fellow classmates. It was pretty drama-less (with the exception of stress from homework, and flailing about whatever was happening in the shows I was watching and the books I was reading, because Fandom). Also, my mom is really liberal, so I never had a reason to resist (or “rebel”), and figured that most of the kids who did probably had a reason to (like, that their parents weren’t giving them enough freedom to make decisions, or something). But… yeah. I digress.

In class, I’d like to further discuss the breaking down of teenage stereotypes. Indeed, I’d also like to discuss the ways in which the media portrays the five facets Raby describes (storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumer), and how it feeds in or negates these stereotypes. Perhaps we can also discuss whether we think these portrayals are ultimately positive or negative.

Works Cited

Raby, Rebecca C. "A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence." Journal of Youth Studies 5.4 (2002): 425-48