Good Guys Don't Wear Hats

by Tobin, Joseph Jay

• ISBN13: 9780807738863
• ISBN10: 0807738867
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Teachers College Pr

Summary

Joseph Tobin offers a fresh perspective on how children make sense of media representations of race, sex, violence, and class. By weaving such cutting-edge approaches as poststructuralism, performance theory, and critical theory into his analysis, he demonstrates how the meanings children give to media messages depend on the local contexts in which they live. Tobin challenges the convention that children are easily fooled by the media and suggests instead that they are capable of resistant interpretations of the movies and television they watch. Laced with the voices and perspectives of young children, who are wise, funny, and creative in their grasp of the media, this book is a must read for anyone who cares about the modern kid.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(15)
Getting Beyond the Effects Paradigm	3	(3)
The Beginnings of the Study	6	(1)
The Research Design	7	(2)
The Local Setting	9	(1)
The Politics of Research	10	(1)
Looking Awry at Children's Media Watching	11	(5)
Imitative Violence	16	(15)
A Conversation About Imitative Violence	17	(2)
A Bakhtinian Approach	19	(3)
Answering Questions with Citations	22	(4)
Why the Relentless Citationality?	26	(2)
Children as Bricoleurs	28	(1)
The Emptiness of the Concept of Imitative Violence	28	(2)
Disturbing Images	30	(1)
Performing Gender	31	(23)
Girls with Each Other and with Boys	32	(2)
Gender Play	34	(2)
Gendered Reactions to Violence and Special Effects	36	(8)
Gender Wars	44	(6)
Boys' Vulnerability	50	(4)
Race	54	(26)
Racial Interpellation	55	(4)
Contextualizing ``Chinese Eyes''	59	(4)
Written on the Body	63	(1)
Theatricality	64	(3)
Resistance and Solidarity	67	(3)
Analyzing an Aporia	70	(1)
Racial Politics at Koa	71	(4)
Postscript	75	(5)
Colonialism	80	(34)
The Textual Insights of Young Children	84	(3)
What Children Do with Stereotypes	87	(2)
Normativity	89	(1)
A Taxonomy of Goodness and Badness	90	(1)
Colonialism's Core Binaries	91	(23)
The Embattled Middle-Class Family	114	(22)
Domesticity	115	(3)
Niceness	118	(2)
Industriousness and Ingenuity	120	(7)
Bad Guys and Good Women	127	(3)
The Dilemma of Middle-Class Masculinity	130	(3)
The Danger of Womanless, Childless Men	133	(3)
Conclusion	136	(17)
The Detective and the Psychoanalyst	136	(1)
Interpretation as an Obsessive Act	137	(1)
On Reading In	138	(2)
The Research Context	140	(3)
Literary and Poststructural Interpretation of Children's Talk	143	(4)
The Media Effects Debate Revisited	147	(1)
Local Kids, Global Culture	148	(5)
References	153	(6)
Index	159	(7)
About the Author	166