Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation

The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brink of success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site of pop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youth traces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normative order have been negotiated and contained.

Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, new media, and public policy...