The discursive shift during the twenty-first century from “no means no” to “yes means yes” clearly had an impact on contemporary American teen films. While teen films of the 1970s and 1980s often epitomized rape culture, teen films of the 2010s and later adopted consent culture actively. Such films now routinely highlight how obtaining a girl’s “yes” is equally important to respecting her “no.” However, the framework of affirmative consent is not without its flaws. In this article, I highlight how recent teen movies expose some of these shortcomings, in particular how affirmative consent remains a highly gendered discourse that prioritizes verbal consent over desire.
“Loving and Cruel, All at the Same Time”
Girlhood Identity in The Craft
Emily Chandler
its target audience so poorly, why has it continued to be influential and successful? I argue that The Craft ’s subversion of teen film tropes allows it to explore girls’ desire for understanding and companionship rather than what is known as
Back in Time Yet of His Time
Marty McFly as a 1980s Teenage Boy Role Model
Daniel Smith-Rowsey
hear the phrase 1980s teen film, we tend to think of John Hughes productions like Sixteen Candles (1984) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and images like Tom Cruise lip-synching “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” in his underwear (in Risky Business
Claudia Mitchell
“ The Craft ’s relevance to girls arises from its subversion of teen film tropes” in its exploration of “girls’ fear of isolation.” Bernice Loh, in “Beyond the Discourse of Sexualization: An Inquiry into the Adultification of Tween Girls’ Dressing in
The Rumble of Nostalgia
Francis Ford Coppola’s Vision of Boyhood
Molly Lewis
troubling; Jon Lewis views Rumble Fish as evidence of the teen film’s increasing “penchant for nostalgia” (1992: 151) in a broader critique of postmodernism. Indeed, Rumble Fish ’s black-and-white photography, its sometimes excessive use of smoke and
Introduction
Cinemas of Boyhood Part II
Timothy Shary
cinema. Molly Lewis takes a somewhat auteuristic approach in her examination of Francis Ford Coppola’s two teen films of 1983, both based on novels by S.E. Hinton— The Outsiders and Rumble Fish —finding significance in the director’s own boyhood
Consuming Katniss
Spectacle and Spectatorship in The Hunger Games
Samantha Poulos
film series in a wider tradition of female protagonists in teen films and in speculative genres. By specifically locating Katniss in the growing pantheon of speculative girl heroes, such as Buffy Summers from the television series Buffy the Vampire
Marie Puysségur
that go beyond the collectivity that Handyside sees celebrated in Girlhood : together, they celebrate a form of private, singular and untethered selfhood. In her analysis of music video aesthetics in “girl teen films,” Samantha Colling draws on Lauren