Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin Rhonda Brock-Servais (bio) Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States, by Sara Austin. The Ohio State UP, 2022. In a mere 150 pages of text, Sara Austin's book demonstrates how "the role of monster in children's culture, as objects of both fear and identification," has changed since the 1950s in the United States (1). The text includes an introduction, four chapters that proceed chronologically, and a conclusion. The author grounds her ideas in three texts: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Jack Halberstam, and "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Much of the Introduction is spent introducing the ideas of these thinkers: "Monstrous Youth takes Halberstam's, Cohen's, and Thomas's claims about monstrous bodies and the cultural connections between monsters and children as a foundation for the role of monsters in children's culture, specifically the cultural role that monsters assume when standing for certain types of child or adolescent bodies" (4). Austin moves on to differentiating her own thinking by explaining how this book extends the thinking of others "by exploring how the monster as a figure in gothic and horror texts becomes a metaphor for identity and difference within children's culture" (11–12). She then lays out three points that will be shown in variations throughout the chapters that follow: "Monster texts are used to frighten children by policing borders of identity, to instruct children on the preferred embodiment of their historical moment, and to present opportunities for child autonomy by excluding adults from the marketing and consumption of certain texts" (4). The introduction further details the author's choices with regard to structure, as well as the primary argument for each chapter and the cultural products that will be under examination; these include books (both chapter and picture) as well as comics, games, films, and toys. Moving into the body of the text, the reader knows exactly what to expect. Each chapter has [End Page 233] a number of subheadings, usually focused on a close examination of a cultural artifact. Chapter 1 centers on teen experience in the 1950s, using the concept of Enfreakment, a process detailed by disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: "Enfreakment works to separate the viewer from the exhibited, and to construct the viewer as a normal body through comparison [and] … is a necessary step in creating cultural as well as textual monsters" (19). The author expands the use of this term to include teen and child bodies that are othered or made threatening. The chapter uses EC Comics and American International Pictures (AIP) to demonstrate how fears of social change "led to adult attempts to suppress these materials in hope of preserving the status quo" (21). Ironically, this caused teens (and teen-centric narratives) to align themselves with the monster and created "one of the most potent symbols within youth culture" (21). The discussion of EC Comics foregrounds much that has already been said about the social panic of the 1950s and Fredric Wertham's The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and just how much of the appeal of horror comics came from how completely adults reviled them. This section puts together the comics and Enfreakment as follows: "using enfreakment as a means to draw in teen readers may have worked because this group felt largely out of place in early 1950s society, and the comics assured them that, even if they were a distinct class from children and adults, they were not, in fact, monsters" (28). Austin then focuses on juvenile delinquency and argues that the adult fear that young readers would align themselves with the monster of the comics resulted in "the adoption of the monster as a symbol of agency and defiance in children's and young adult culture" (30). The great irony here is that by positioning adolescents "as either vulnerable or grotesque," adults helped to create circumstances where the monster came to be a symbol of adolescent...