Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media

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Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media is a collection of essays generated by a conference of the same title held at the University of the District of Columbia. The works gathered examine a variety of children's media, including texts produced for children (e.g., children's books, cartoons, animated films) as well as texts about children(e.g., feature-length films, literature, playground architecture, parenting guides). The primary goal of Kidding Around is to analyze and contextualize contested representations of childhood and children in various twentieth- and twenty-first-century media while accounting for the politics of these narratives. Each of the essays gathered offers a critical history of the very notion of childhood, at the same time as it analyzes exemplary children's texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These chapters depart from various methodological approaches (including psychoanalytic, sociological, ecological, and historical perspectives), offering the reader numerous productive approaches for analyzing the moments of cultural conflict and impasse found within the primary works studied. Despite the fact that today children are one of the most coveted demographics in marketing and viewership, academic work on children's media, and children in media, is just beginning. Kidding Around assembles experts from this inchoate field, opening discussion to traditional and non-traditional children's texts.

Reviews

A must for students and researchers in child studies, education, film studies, childrens media and childrens literature, Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media features work by scholars representing a range of critical perspectives. Drawing on such diverse fields as education, cultural studies, film theory, literary theory, history and disability studies, this interdisciplinary collection offers new readings of the various ways that childrens bodies and identities are represented and constructed in contemporary mediums such as films, novels, public play spaces, news stories, advice manuals and cartoons. This collection is an important, thought-provoking and long overdue contribution to the scholarly study of children in the media. -- Annette Wannamaker , Associate Professor of English, Eastern Michigan University, USA, and North American Editor-in-Chief of Childrens Literature in Education: An International Quarterly
The provocative essays in Howe and Yarbroughs engaging, wide-ranging collection are both readable and theoretically rich, and situate the child in mediating environments as diverse as Hollywood films and the physical space of the playground. Kidding Around provides stimulating approaches to mainstream representations of children and childhood (the child as abjected other; the fetishized spectacle of innocence; princess culture as arbiter of girlhood, among others) and sheds crucial scholarly light on under-studied ways in which mass culture creates children and their worlds (from self-help books aimed at young people to Disneys animated natural environments). This timely volume demonstrates critical awareness of the media networks that have shaped childrens culture and popular images of childhood in recent years, bringing together film, television, literature, and advertising in ways that can serve as a model for multimodal studies in the future. -- Maria Sachiko Cecire, Assistant Professor of Literature, Bard College, USA

Author Bio

Alexander N. Howe is Associate Professor of English at the University of the District of Columbia, USA. He is the co-editor of Marcia Muller and the Female Private Eye: Essays on the Novels that Defined a Subgenre (2009) and author of It Didn't Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction (2008). Wynn Yarbrough is Associate Professor and chair of the English Department at the University of the District of Columbia, USA. He is the author of Masculinity in Children's Animal Stories, 1888-1928: A Critical Study of Anthropomorphic Tales by Wilde, Kipling, Potter, Grahame and Milne (2011) and A Boy's Dream (2011).