Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 13:1 (2024) ► pp.1–23

Affective distress and heteronormative futurity in American puberty video discourse

ORCID logo | University of PittsburghPittsburghPA, USA
Since their inception in the years following World War II, American puberty videos have discursively manufactured affective distress in several generations of on-screen children. The patterns of talk found in eight films from 1947 to 2016 demonstrate that affect may de-link itself from specific talk and diffuse into a broader discourse through the recirculation of parallel structures in new semiotic spaces. I use queer critical discourse analysis (Jones & Collins 2020) and language socialization theory (Ochs & Schieffelin 2011) to argue that puberty videos first manufacture distress in the on-screen child before swiftly introducing a trusted adult to mitigate and recast distress as a normal part of growing up. Further, puberty videos reify cis- / heteronormativity and reproductive futurity in adulthood as the necessary outcomes of development. This paper explores the connection between affect and temporality in talk by critically attending to the historical stability of American puberty video discourse.
Keywords: childhood, puberty videos, affective distress, temporality, critical discourse analysis, language socialization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.American puberty videos
  • 3.Language, gender/sexuality and childhood
  • 4.Affect, temporality, and distress
  • 5.Methods
  • 6.Discursive patterns of affective distress in puberty videos
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 30 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.22005.non
References (65)
References
Primary sources
Human Growth (1947): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
Molly Grows Up (1953): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
As Boys Grow (1957): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
Am I Normal? (1979): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
Dear Diary: A Film About Female Puberty (1981): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
P&G’s Always Changing, Always Growing (1997): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
P&G’s Always Changing: About You (2007): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
P&G’s Always Changing and Growing Up (2016): [URL]. Accessed November 8, 2019.
Secondary sources
Agha, Asif. 2007. Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication 71: 320–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Second Edition). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bavin, Edith. 2009. The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language Acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bellafante, Gina. 2005. Facts of life, for their eyes only. New York Times. 〈[URL]〉 (October 12, 2023)
Bellinger, David C. & Gleason, Jean B. 1982. Sex differences in parental directives to young children. Journal of Sex Roles 81: 1123–1139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah & Kulick, Don. 2003. Language and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel & Dijkstra, Katinka. 2010. Motor action and emotional memory. Cognition 1151: 179–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castañeda, Claudia. 2002. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Chirrey, Deborah. 2011. Formulating dispositions in coming-out advice. Discourse Studies 13(3): 283–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coleman, Lester & Coleman, John. 2002. The measurement of puberty: A review. Journal of Adolescence 251: 535–550. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Condry, John & Condry, Sandra. 1976. Sex differences: A study in the eye of the beholder. Child Development 471: 812–819. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cushman, Nicole, Kantor, Leslie M., Schroeder, Elizabeth, Eicher, Leslie & Gambone, Gina. 2014. Sexuality education: Findings and recommendations from an analysis of 10 United States Programmes. Sex Education 14(5): 481–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W. & Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2012. Taking a stance on emotion: Affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction. Text & Talk 32(4): 433–451. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
. 2019. The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority. Language 95(4): 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2013. Language and Gender (Second Edition). New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan. 2012. Text trajectories, legal discourse and gendered inequalities. Applied Linguistics Review 3(1): 47–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan & Romaniuk, Tanya. 2016. Discourse analysis. In Research Methods in Linguistics, Robert Podesva & Devyani Sharma (eds), 460–493. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
ELAN (Version 5.2) [Computer software]. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 〈[URL]〉 (April 04, 2018)
Ely, Richard, Gleason, Jean B., Narasimhan, Bhuvaneswari & McCabe, Allyssa. 1995. Family talk about talk: Mothers lead the way. Discourse Processes 9(2): 201–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ericsson, Stina. 2018. The language of cisnormativity: Children and parents in interaction with a multimodal app. Gender and Language 12(2): 139–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Intertextuality in critical discourse analysis. Linguistics & Education 41: 269–293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis (Second Edition). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2018. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gleason, Jean B., Perlmann, Rivka Y., Ely, Richard & Evans, David. 1994. The baby talk register: Parents’ use of diminutives. In Handbook of Research in Language Development Using CHILDES, Jeffrey L. Sokolov & Catherine E. Snow (eds), 50–76. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Gowen, L. Kris & Winges-Yanez, Nichole. 2014. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youths’ perspectives of inclusive school-based sexuality education. The Journal of Sex Research 51(7): 788–800. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greslé-Favier, Claire. 2010. The legacy of abstinence-only discourses and the place of pleasure in US discourses on teenage sexuality. Sex Education 10(4): 413–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, G. Stanley. 1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (Vols. I & II). New York: D. Appleton & Co.Google Scholar
Hall, Kira, Levon, Eerez & Milani, Tommaso M. 2019. Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk. Language in Society 48(4): 481–489. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hill, Jane. 2005. Intertextuality as a source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 113–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoyle, Susan M. & Temple Adger, Carolyn. 1998. Kids Talk: Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, Gene H. Lerner (ed), 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara. 2017. Discourse Analysis (Second Edition). Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott. 2018. Masculine stances and the linguistics of affect: On masculine ease. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 13(3–4): 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott & Nonnenmacher, Sean. 2022. Reimagining affect in the linguistics of gender. In The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Todd W. Reeser (ed). New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leap, William. 2015. Queer linguistics as critical discourse analysis. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin (eds), 661–680. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, Philip. 1967. Intonation, Perception and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Maccoby, Eleanor. 2002. Gender and social exchange: A developmental perspective. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 951: 87–106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milani, Tommaso M. & Richardson, John E. 2021. Discourse and affect. Social Semiotics 31(5): 671–676. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moran, Jeffrey. 2000. Teaching Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2011. Taking Queer Linguistics further: Sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2121: 149–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Rethinking Context, Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds), 335–358. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor & Schieffelin, Bambi. 2011. The theory of language socialization. In The Handbook of Language Socialization, Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, & Bambi Schieffelin (eds), 1–21. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohala, John J. 1994. The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch. In Sound Symbolism, Leanna Hinton, Johanna Nichols & John J. Ohala (eds), 325–347. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Celia. 2015. Puberty in Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Jeffrey Z., Provenzano, Frank J. & Luria, Zella. 1974. The eye of the beholder: Parents’ view on sex of newborns. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 441: 512–519. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sauntson, Helen. 2013. Sexual diversity and illocutionary silencing in the English National Curriculum. Sex Education 13(4): 395–408. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael & Urban, Greg. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 1993. Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thorne, Barry. 1993. Gender Play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Whiting, Beatrice B. & Edwards, Carolyn P. 1988. Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar