Abstract
American "teen films" and TV series can be regarded as mass consumerculture's version of literature's "bildungsroman". Their main trope isthe adolescent individual's search for identity and independence,narrated via the personal and social initiation associated with acoming-of-age experience, often ignited and/or epitomized by a sexualinitiation, most commonly in the form of virginity loss. Thus, manyteen films are negotiations of purity, chastity, and virginity—withquite mixed messages.With recourses to Jean Paul Sartre, Barrington Moore Jr., MichelFoucault, Sigmund Freud, Laura M. Carpenter and others, this paperaddresses how the transitional in-between state of adolescence isevaluated in American (popular) culture, the sexual politics of manyof these narratives, and their agency in reflecting as well as shapingadolescent sexual identities.
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