Abstract
Popular culture plays a key role in the shaping of contemporary childhoods. Through the transnational mobilization and circulation of popular game apps, cartoons, movies, toys, children’s literature and magazines, and famous international idols, the different forms of popular culture have become a significant symbolic power in (re)producing multiple and complex layers of meanings to construct new ways of being, belonging, and becoming for children of all cultures. In particular, the productions of desirable way(s) of being and becoming through texts, images, visuals, and music (audios) as represented in the popular culture are circulating across different sociocultural and geopolitical boundaries.
The collection of articles in this themed issue of Children and Popular Culture seeks to offer a wide range of critical discussions on the intersections of popular culture and contemporary childhoods. In the first article, Sands-O’Connor discusses how children and young people embraced the reggae and punk music culture that worked to fight against racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United Kingdom. In the next article, Sørenssen offers a critical discussion on the making of “tweens” as aspiring teenagers through Disney’s production of High School Musical. Both authors, while focusing on different eras, have highlighted the unique and contested popular culture in shaping children’s be(com)ing and the politics of identity for young(er) people.
In Henward’s article, she unpacks how different intellectual traditions and discourses have shaped the debates on the study of popular culture and children with references to Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge. Dong’s article, focusing on Korean parents’ positions on young children’s digital play, offers a critical analysis on how digital play can become a signifier for class differences as middle-class parenting and social pressures are inter-related to children’s engagement in digital play. Shifting to Western cultures, Theobald, Danby, and Busch highlight the common annual practice of a visit to Santa Claus to further unpack children’s popular culture and the interplay between the child, adult, and societal agendas.
In Hofmann’s article, she takes a critical look at how animated films are dangerously mobilized in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to perpetuate hidden cultural meanings, symbolism, and stereotypes. In Rea’s article, she zooms into unpacking one of the popular children’s weeklies, Billiken magazine, in Argentina, to uncover how historical understandings of the construction of children and Argentine popular culture are challenged and transformed. In Mazey-Richardson’s article, she problematizes how another example of a popular teen magazine, Seventeen magazine, has produced and prescribed desirable feminine behaviors and appearance. In Lykissas’ article, older and classic fairy tales such as the Lunar Chronicles are unpacked to illustrate how young adult literature is political in that authoritarian and oppressive rulers are challenged.
The collection of articles on children and popular culture in this themed issue comes together to offer multiple examples from different cultures to illustrate the profound effects of popular culture in shaping children’s understandings and the politics of identity. While not being trapped in a binary construction of good versus bad influences of popular culture on children, we should not ignore the power and effects of the shaping of childhoods through multiple forms of popular culture. In addition, we should be critical of how new norms are being produced to (re)configure and prescribe narrowed ways of be(come)ing for children.