Events archive
Teenage Dreams in the 21st Century
Join us for a research talk on the recent history of reproductive rights, adolescent sexuality, and culture wars in the United States.
Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Teenage Dreams examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this period hesitated to advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, revealing a new culture war altogether - one between adults of various political stripes in the cultural mainstream who prioritised the desire to delay girlhood sexual experience at all costs, and adults who remained culturally underground in their support for teenagers’ access to frank sexual information, and who would dare to advocate for this in public. The book tells the story of how the latter group of adults fought alongside teenagers themselves, who constituted a large and increasingly visible part of this activism. The history of the debates over teenage sexual behaviour reveals unexpected alliances in American political battles, and sheds new light on the resurgence of the right in the US in recent years.
In this seminar, Charlie will think through the implications of this history for the contemporary moment, particularly the way in which our collective historical memory of sexuality in 1990s popular and political cultures in the US has shifted in recent years.
Hosted by the Sussex Centre for American Studies, Department of Media, and Sussex Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.
This event is a hybrid event. For the Zoom link, please email Natalia Cecire: N.Cecire@sussex.ac.uk