Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie Gender, Genre and Identity

Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie is the first academic monograph to consider the aesthetic and narrative potential of this highly popular, yet often overlooked, film genre. Reconsidering tropes such as the male juvenile delinquent figure, the makeover and the teen vampire, the book uses a series of detailed case studies of key films like Rebel Without a Cause, Grease, Heathers and Twilight to explore the genre's relation to key critical concepts of intersectionality, postfeminism and the posthuman, and provides an innovative overview of the Hollywood teen movie and its construction of teen identity.

Frances Smith is Teaching Fellow and Convenor of the Writing Lab at University College London. She has published widely in popular Hollywood cinema, and with Timothy Shary is the co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling, (EUP, 2016).

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Rethinking the Teen Movie

Acting Up: Performing Masculine Delinquency in the Teen Movie
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989)

Making Over: Gender and Class at the High-School Prom
Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986)
She's All That (Robert Iscove, 1999)
Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)

Looking Back: Nostalgia, Postfeminism and the Teen Movie
American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987)
Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)

Becoming Other: The Posthuman and the Teen Movie
Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002)
Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)
Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012)

Conclusion: Not Another Teen Movie?
Bibliography
Filmography