Mediated Boyhoods

Annette Wannamaker is the author of Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2008). She is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University, where she also serves as the coordinator of children’s literature studies.

Contents: Annette Wannamaker: Introduction. Media about Boys, for Boys and by Boys – Michelle Ann Abate: When Girls Will Be Bois: Female Masculinity, Genderqueer Identity and Millennial LGBTQ Culture – Matthew B. Prickett: Who is the Victim Again?: Female Abuse of Adolescent Boys in Contemporary Culture – Suzanne M. Enck-Wanzer/Scott A. Murray: How to Hook a Hottie’: Teenage Boys, Hegemonic Masculinity, and CosmoGirl! Magazine – Phillip Serrato: From ‘Booger Breath’ to ‘The Guy’: Juni Cortez Grows Up in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids Trilogy – Kent Baxter: Adolescence Vérité: Shocking Glimpses of the Teen in Contemporary American Film – Bayard E. Lyons: Beyond the Gloss of Youth: Turkish Cypriot Television’s Mediation of Young Men in the Public Sphere – Jes Battis: Almost Paradise: Queer Utopias in Abeyance in David Levithan’s Wide Awake and Boy Meets Boy – Judy L. Isaksen: ‘Word Up’: Hip Hoppers’ Smart Pose Outwits Masculine Scripts – Rebecca B. Watts: The Lost Boys of Sudan: Race, Ethnicity, and Perpetual Boyhood in Documentary Film and Television News – Sandra Grady: Consuming the WWE: Professional Wrestling as a Surrogate Initiation Ritual among Somali Bantu Teenagers – Stacey J. T. Hust: The Shrines to What They Love: Exploring Boys’ Uses and Gratifications of Media in their Personal Spaces – Keith Dorwick: Love Song: Queer Video Use of One Pop Tune by Homosocial Boys and Young Men – Margaret Mackey: Growing Up Multimodal: Young Men Talk Media.

«Taking up an impressive range of topics – among them gender queer ‘bois,’ young adult fiction, teenage Somali Bantu wrestling fans, and multimedia about, for, and by male youth – this smart and lively collection further troubles the myth of a universal, self-evident boyhood. ‘Mediated Boyhoods’ is a delight to read and a major scholarly achievement.» (Kenneth Kidd, Associate Director of the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture at the University of Florida) «This collection provides a much-needed addition to gender studies of media, questioning how masculinity and boyhood are expressed in popular media, and how those media texts are used and interpreted by boys themselves. Covering a wide range of media forms including television, films, video games and the Internet, ‘Mediated Boyhood makes an essential contribution to the field of media studies and masculinity.» (Mia Consalvo, Associate Professor, School of Telecommunications, Ohio University)