Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults

Book excerpt: This book presents an innovative comparative view of how the issue of adolescent sexuality and consent is differently treated in various media. Analyzing teenage sexual encounters with adults across a variety of media, including films, television, novels, and podcasts, the volume takes a positive stance on the expression of teenage sexuality, while remaining sensitive to the power of adults to abuse and manipulate. The anthology treats these representations as negotiations between conflicting forces: desire, sexual self-knowledge, unequal power, and the law, the latter both actual legal statutes and internalized law in the philosophical and psychoanalytic sense. Questions of unequal power inherent in such relations are theorized. The authors examine variations of this configuration of sexual relations between teenagers and adults from different perspectives, to consider how various forms of expression rework it formally. These essays are attuned to both nuances of presentation and contexts of reception, and they consider how aesthetics play a role. Contributing to the general debate about the ways that societies construct and regulate adolescent sexuality, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, sociology, and gender studies