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Girls These Days
Author:Molly Sublett,University of Wyoming. Department of American Studies
Published on 2014 by

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Book Description :

This thesis examines perceptions of adolescent girlhood contained in two distinct types of texts: recently published cultural studies explaining the supposed crisis of contemporary youth culture, and apocalyptic young adult literature. The cultural critics I examine (Mark Bauerlein, Jean Twenge, and Rosalind Wiseman, primarily) tend to describe young women alarmingly. They are portrayed as entitled, unintelligent, apathetic, emotionally unstable, and cruel; as such, these authors construct girls as troubling figures who are either threatening to culture or threatened by culture. On the other hand, I examine Suzanne Collins' description of Katniss Everdeen in the phenomenally popular Hunger Games series. Katniss is a young female protagonist who, despite her extraordinary strength, integrity, and self-sacrificing character is still portrayed as being constantly at risk of cultural manipulation and exploitation. I argue that both of these depictions of girlhood are manifestations of nostalgia, a sentiment which, for our purposes, is characterized not simply by a longing for the past, but also by a deep disillusionment with the progressive narrative of history.