The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of HeterosexualityIn this study, Mary Louise Adams explores discourses about youth and their place in the production and reproduction of heterosexual norms. She examines debates over juvenile delinquency, indecent literature, and sex education to show not why heterosexuality became a peculiar obsession in English Canada after the Second World War, as much as how it came to hold such sway. Drawing on feminist theory, cultural studies, and lesbian/gay studies, The Trouble with Normal is the first Canadian study of 'youth' as a sexual and moral category. Adams looks not only at sexual material aimed at teenagers but also at sexual discourses generally, for what they had to say about young people and for the ways in which 'youth, ' as a concept, made those discourses work. She argues that postwar insecurities about young people narrowed the sexual possibilities for both young people and adults. |
Contents
Sexuality and the Postwar Domestic Revival | 18 |
Discursive | 39 |
The Sexual Meaning of Delinquency | 53 |
Sex Advice for Teens | 83 |
Debates over Sex Education in Toronto | 107 |
Corruptibility Youth and the Case | 136 |
Conclusion | 166 |
NOTES | 173 |
SOURCES | 197 |
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS | 215 |
Other editions - View all
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality Mary Louise Adams No preview available - 1997 |
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