Kid Stuff Research Articles

Book review: The digital is kid stuff: Making creative laborers for a precarious economy

Book review: The digital is kid stuff: Making creative laborers for a precarious economy

Home Is Where the Horror Is (2022)

Home Is Where the Horror Is (2022) Jason Zinoman (bio) Sometimes facing your fears isn't enough. You have to scrutinize them. In an attempt to understand my own nightmares—and the ones that shaped our culture—my first book, Shock Value, published a decade ago, examined one of the great eras of modern film: the revolutionary scary movies made between the late 1960s through the end of the following decade.1 I called them the New Horror. To tell the story of its artists—masters such as Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Dan O'Bannon among many others—I interviewed them about their work with an ear sensitive to what this group shared. One surprisingly common thing I discovered was an embarrassment about working in the genre itself. To the people who made Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) and Alien (Scott, 1979) horror, as they had understood it since they were young, was lowbrow, disreputable, the kind of thing you didn't want to tell your parents about. To hear these great artists tell it, the genre they worked in was kid's stuff. Sadly, most of the filmmakers I wrote about in the book have died, but part of their considerable legacy is to change the reputation of horror and consequently the atmosphere that their successors work in. The genre is not only bigger and more lucrative, a persistently popular part of the cultural diet, but also more respected. For young filmmakers, there is no shame in working in the genre of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). There are downsides to the growing stature of horror, to be sure, but also [End Page 289] advantages, a new sense of the possible that allows for growth. The recent expansion of the genre is what inspired the article below, which I wrote for the cover of the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times in 2018 about the artists at the forefront of an ambitious new direction in horror. Building on the work of their predecessors, their work appears unshackled from any status anxiety over genre and deals directly and expansively in mature themes. They are making movies that kids enjoy but are primarily aimed at adults. Since I wrote the article this trend has only intensified, and its impact is evident in recent movies such as Relic (James, 2020) and She Dies Tomorrow (Seimetz, 2020) that speak to the terror of isolation in the age of COVID-19 better than any new mainstream dramas. This new grown-up horror has produced movies that I believe will be studied and imitated just like those from the 1970s were. This essay, and the others in this journal, attempt to understand this new golden age. _____ What happens when your family is what frightens you? A new renaissance in scary movies skips jump scares in favor of dread based on adult fears. In Hereditary (Aster, 2018), bugs crawl from decapitated heads, ghosts lurk in the shadows, and an artist tries to communicate with the dead. But the most jarring moment of this terrifying new movie might be when Annie, a mother played by Toni Collette, tells her son she never wanted to have him and tried to induce a miscarriage. Then she wakes from this nightmare, unsettled by the thoughts rattling in her subconscious. Parental guilt is the real monster here. Moving into territory once the preserve of prestige dramas, horror has never been more bankable and celebrated than it is right now. And while evil clowns and serial killers at sorority houses still haunt young viewers (and make tons of money), we're in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror. Hushed and characterdriven, this mix of indie fare and blockbusters works ferociously on adult anxieties in an age of dislocation. These movies have confronted liberal racism, economic worries, and family dysfunction, and while horror has always reflected the social and political concerns of its day, if you had to pinpoint a unifying theme that distinguishes this renaissance, it's the ominous danger of overwhelming grief. A character coping with the death of a loved one is the new car of teenagers heading to a...

Built for Two

234 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Abigail G. H. Manzella Built for Two Abigail G. H. Manzella Arabesque, darling, arabesque. Then my grandmother would guffaw as my six-year-old leg lifted, pose unsteady Twisting, shifting in my first artistic throes still buoyant and raw. She could be brusque, Not grasping what could hurt a child’s heart, But her laughter was infectious Her eyes like mine—a smile. At a distance, she supported my adventures in art. What became of your poems, she pried when I’d reached my full height. That’s kid stuff, my flippant response. She’d nod and at my next visit ask again, More shrewd than polite. A day arrived when she could ask no more. I sang to her the songs of her childhood Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do... She’d mouth the words and swing her leg The one still good. Just like a kid. And there I stood feeling like one, too. ...

Introduction: Transcultural and Intermedial Fairy Tales and Television

Tales move. Their portability has been so ubiquitous as to be occasionally imperceptible. Their motivations so apparently mundane as to be regularly overlooked. Like tales' protagonists, form's fortunes rise and fall and rise. For example, in his foreword to Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix's Fairy Tale Films, Jack Zipes observes that fairy tale is not referenced in 1996 Oxford History of World Cinema (ix). Greenhill and Matrix acknowledge that some may see study of fairy-tale film to be associated with diversionary kid stuff, or at worst, [the] utterly facile, predictable, disposable (Introduction, 22). Yet fall is never long or far because keep moving. Because people keep telling them. Because people keep wondering about them. And they rise once more, as with current vogue for fairy-tale film and TVFascination with these always-transforming traditional forms inspires questions and sparks scholarship. Such explorations have fostered methodologies and theories from field collecting and archiving to historic-geographic tracing and motif indexes to sociohistorical and ideological critique. Yet what remains at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and concept of transcultural is what Donald Haase refers to in his crucial essay Yours, Mine, or Ours as ownership of fairy tales (353). Do individuals or groups own tales? face-to-face communal groups? lower, middle, or upper classes? nationstates? globalized media conglomerates? YouTubers? tellers, authors, producers, listeners, readers, viewers, fans? Can anyone own such familiar shape-shifters? Or, as Arthur Frank asks, could stories own people-emplot their lives, capture their actions as well as their imaginations? These are questions explored implicitly and sometimes explicitly in this special issue.The powers and possibilities of communication also remain at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and concept of intermediality. Ten years ago a 2007 Marvels & Tales special issue focused on origins and transmission through theme of fairy tales, printed texts, and tellings (Bottigheimer). Its subject echoed first statement of editorial policy from inaugural issue in 1987, which promised articles on literary fairy and folktales and reprinted oral as well as written examples (Statement, 1). However, in 1997, when journal transferred from Jacques Barchilon and University of Colorado to Haase's editorship at Wayne State University, purview extended to the fairy tale in any of its diverse manifestations and contexts (Editorial Policy, 7). For twenty years this policy has encouraged a widely inclusive scholarly approach to fairy-tale forms and transformations.The move signaled by Greenhill and Matrix's Fairy Tale Films and Zipes's Enchanted Screen, to consider fairy-tale films historically, ethnographically, and beyond their Euro-North American manifestations, also highlights that there is more to portability of than a binary and written exchange. Retellings in each new communicative technology confirm popularity and import of tales, while scholarship attends to, contextualizes, and inquires about such transformations. Greenhill and Matrix's essay collection encouraged one of us (Rudy) to ask other (Greenhill) about fairy on television during a presentation at American Folklore Society in October 2011, just as ABCs Once Upon a Time and NBC's Grimm were premiering.Very soon after, we were working together on edited collection that became Channeling Wonder (Greenhill and Rudy). By initiating a group of thematic studies of fairy on television, that book admittedly was an exploratory endeavor: as wide-ranging as possible in terms of audience, television genre, and teleography yet limited somewhat in geographic scope and focused on specific media more than relations through and across media. …

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

“You Just Don’t Report That Kind of Stuff”: Investigating Teens’ Ambivalence Toward Peer-Perpetrated, Unwanted Sexual Incidents

An investigation of narratives from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) finds that one in three teenagers--12-18 years old--who experience an unwanted sexual incident perpetrated by another teen trivialize their incidents as minor, unimportant, or normal kid stuff. This study contextualizes these responses within a framework of ambivalence that highlights separately teens' ambiguity of definitions, or uncertainty that incidents perpetrated by other teens (especially dating partners and schoolmates) are "real" crimes or offenses worth reporting, and adaptive indifference, a more tactical response to conflicting norms and allegiances that discourage teens from reporting their peers' sexual misconduct to authorities. The context and consequences of teens' ambivalence are discussed.

The Hunt of the Unicorn (review)

Reviewed by: The Hunt of the Unicorn Kate Quealy-Gainer Humphreys, C. C. . The Hunt of the Unicorn. Knopf, 2011. [352p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-95872-4 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-85872-7 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-375-89624-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9. Fifteen-year-old Elayne has no problems with the vampires and werewolves that populate the books on her bedroom shelf, but unicorns? That’s kid stuff. Or so Elayne thinks until her ailing father presents her with a shabby, fraying book that he claims to tell the true story of Elayne’s female ancestors—a story that involves not only a unicorn, but also a place called Goloth (aka the Land of the Fabulous Beast), a tyrant king, and a prophetic tapestry. Understandably, Elayne remains a bit skeptical, but when she recognizes one of the tapestries described in the book on a class trip, she begins to believe there might be some to truth to her father’s tale—a suspicion that is confirmed when she falls through the tapestry into a forest of some kind. Greeted by a man-eating manticore and saved by a unicorn, Elayne quickly deducts that she has indeed landed in the Land of the Fabulous Beast, but before she can make her way home, she must fulfill her ancestor’s promise to help the unicorn and release Goloth’s inhabitants from the wrath of a despotic ruler. This is wish fulfillment at its finest, with Elayne playing the everyday gal turned spunky heroine, battling not one but two treacherously handsome guys, saving both an entire land and her dying father, and successfully navigating the streets of New York City astride a unicorn. The Land of the Fabulous Beast is, in a word, fabulous, a place where the creatures dreamed up by various cultures are portrayed in all their glory. With references to our world’s overpopulation and pollution, there is a heady dose of environmentalism here, but it is nicely tempered with a fair amount of humor and adventure. Hand this to readers who like their heroines sassy and their settings vividly imagined. [End Page 280] Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Kid's stuff.

The RCN children's leadership and management forum is offering financial support for nurses who want to undertake, or are currently undertaking, projects that focus on leadership in children's nursing. Projects can include for example investigations in succession planning in paediatric nursing or children's nurses as mentors or coaches.

Kid's stuff: The nature and impact of peer and sibling violence on younger and older children

Objective It is widely presumed that when children are hit by peers or siblings, it is not as serious as similar acts between adults or older youth, which would be termed, “assaults” and “violent crimes”. The goal of this study was to compare the violent peer and sibling episodes of younger children to those of older youth in terms of their seriousness and association with symptoms that might indicate traumatic effects. Method The study collected reports of past year's violent victimizations and childhood symptoms in a national probability telephone sample of 2030 children and youth ages 2–17. The experiences of 10–17-year olds were obtained via self-reports and those of the 2–9-year olds from caregivers. Results The younger children's peer and sibling victimizations were not less serious than the older youth on the dimensions of injury, being hit with an object that could cause injury or being victimized on multiple occasions. Younger children and older youth also had similar trauma symptom levels associated with both peer and sibling victimization. Conclusion There was no basis in this study for presuming peer and sibling victimizations to be more benign when they involve younger children. The findings provide justification for being concerned about such peer and sibling violence in schools and families and for counting such victimizations in victimization inventories and clinical assessments.

Video Game Internal Turfs and Turfs of Play

Video Game Internal Turfs and Turfs of Play

Kid stuff: marketing sex and violence to America's children

Contents: List of Contributors Acknowledgments1...Toxic Lessons: Children and Popular Culture Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti2... Teaching amid the Torrent of Popular Culture Todd Gitlin3... Socializing Children in a Culture of Obscenity Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn4... The Problem of Exposure: Violence, Sex, Drugs, and Alcohol Stacy L. Sith and Ed Donnerstein5... Equipment for Living: How Popular Music Fits in the Lives of Youth Peter G. Christenson6... Music at the Edge: The Attraction and Effects of Controversial Music on Young People Jeffrey Jensen Arnett7... Video Games and Aggressive Behavior Craig A. Anderson8... Violent Video Games: Who's at Risk? Jeanne B. Funk9... The Effects of Cutting Back on Media Exposure Thomas N. Robinson10... The Contradictions of Parenting in a Media Age Kay S. Hymowitz11... The Role of Government in a Free Society Newton Minow and Nell Minow Index

Queer Post-Politics

When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture Future is Kid Stuff, I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclu sions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence?its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the subject and the signifier, jouissance and the death drive. The horizon of my commentary will be to question whether psychoanalytic concepts can provide the building blocks of political theory, whether they can sustain a viable theory or analysis of the body politic. My view is that they cannot. The view that they can is central to Edelman and other queer theorists, especially Judith Butler, as it is to the quite different projects of Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau. First, though, I want to acknowledge the unassailable insight and compelling protest at the heart of Edelman's lecture, published since in Narrative and titled Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive. As cultural criticism, Edelman's commentary deconstructs a ubiquitous icon in contemporary American politics and culture: the figure of the child, innocence incar nate, full of promise, and destined to fulfillment through whatever norms the prevail ing order cherishes and enforces: heterosexuality, homogeneity, affluence. Edelman tracks down this figure through everything from public service announcements of the liberal Coalition for America's Children to anti-abortion billboards announcing, It's not a choice; it's a child; from Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign Save Our Children to the Army of God, a group that claimed responsibility for attacks on an abortion

Post-Partum

In "Queer Post-Politics," his generous and appealingly reasonable response to my essay, "The Future is Kid Stuff," John Brenkman repeats symptomatically the logic of futurism against which I wrote. In doing so, I'd like to suggest, he makes my point by missing it—and missing it not by reason of ignorance, hostility, or haste, but rather by virtue, in large part, of his essay's own virtue: its commitment to reason. Consider how he sets out to make his case by setting up mine from the start: "The horizon of my commentary," he declares, "will be to question whether psychoanalytic concepts can provide the building blocks of political theory, whether they can sustain a viable theory or analysis of the body politic" (174). And then, in order to define his difference from my position, he asserts: "The view that they can is central to Edelman" (174). But what could be further from the point of my essay than the hope of providing such "building blocks"? What except for an interest in sustaining, of all things, "viability," whether of theories and analyses or of "the body politic" itself? Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim, instead, to the space that "politics" makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which "politics" appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the "body politic" must survive. My turn to psychoanalysis, far from seeking to afford us building blocks for a viable political future, aims rather to show how the queer comes to figure resistance to such viability and why, instead of rejecting, as does liberal discourse, the negativity of such a figural determination, we might consider the alternative possibility of accepting and even embracing it.

Politics, Mortal and Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder

Is there a that 'politics' makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the 'body politic' must survive (Post-Partum 181)? What is that space? What would it mean to embrace or assume or embody the prevailing figuration of that space in order to disturb or refuse the political realm as such? Having reflected on Lee Edelman's carefully argued response to my criticism of Future Is Kid Stuff, I think that the salient issues of contention between us lie in our respective responses to these questions. There are indeed spaces outside the political realm. The form they take varies according to the nature of the political order. In Eastern Europe under communist rule, for example, there emerged a signifi cant refusal of politics. The Hungarian writer George Konrad called it anti-politics. Communist states, particularly after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, denied all avenues for citizens to organize or express themselves within the political sphere. Moreover, the mechanisms of one-party rule made every facet of life political by ex erting control over intellectual and artistic life, public opinion, even individuals' choice of occupation and housing and their freedom of movement. The repression of conflict within the political realm went hand-in-hand with the omnipresent reach of politics into the nonpolitical realm. Citizens could counteract the omnipresence of the state, Konrad argued, only by refusing politics and devoting their minds and ac tivities to whatever remaining spaces eluded the reach of the state (see Konrad's Anti-Politics). This withdrawal from politics was painful, precarious, and risky, but had unexpected political effects; the anti-political citizens contributed to the eventual

Dear Verity, Now I'm Getting into Shape!

April 1, 2002 Ms. Verity Keane Local University USA Hi Verity, Sorry haven't been in touch for a while, but school is very hectic. In addition to my class in elementary mathematics methods, am taking a course on teaching elementary physical education. am really getting into shape now. Whew! But would believe it's geometry again in math? We always hated geometry, didn't we? For me, it was just gymnastics in the mind. Talk about pain, no gain. should be a geometrical Olympian by now, it hurts so much. Now we have a term paper to do on Geometry Begins, so after this letter it may be a while before write again. know what these professors are like. problem arose for me almost as soon as we started geometry. Don't forget, had spent the whole of my mathematical life trying to remember things didn't understand -- the sort of neurological equivalent of defying gravity. First off, the professor shook a colorful box spilled out the contents onto the floor. That led to a bit of excitement. would we be doing? Out came various blocks -- know, sort of like the ones preschool children play with. (See Figure 1.) Kid's stuff. We nearly died. Then he said to a student named Kyra, Pick up a shape, tell me about it. It's blue, she said. I think it's a cylinder. Good, he said. Now, to another student, you pick one up, tell us how it's similar to or different from hers. Mine's red, Paul said, and it's more square than hers. What would call it? A box? cube? When it was my turn, picked up one that was green. It sort of looked like a tent. (See Figure 2.) had a feeling this wasn't about the colors, so said, Well, mine is 'pointier' than Paul's Kyra's. But don't know what it's hated saying that, but it was true. Then get this: he didn't say what it was called. He didn't say! Instead, he displayed an overhead showing a lesson from a reform- based textbook. about that? It was from a section on shape, here is what it said: Give each student an attribute-block triangle, rectangle, square, hexagon (or geometric shapes from plasterboard). Ask the students to examine each shape, touching the sides corners. Have the students tell how many sides corners each shape has. For the rectangle, square, hexagon, have the students point out pairs of opposite sides. Taking an attribute out of his pocket, he said, This is part of a geometry kit used in elementary school classes, he handed it to Juan. (See Figure 3.) How many corners does it have? he asked. Juan looked it over. Three, he responded rather confidently. I see, our professor said. Tell me, Catherine, how many corners does yours have? Verity, was a bit unsettled by this whole scenario because wasn't at all confident that would get the answer right. took quite a bit of time looking my shape over touching each vertex. Six, answered somewhat hesitantly with a bit of fear trepidation. Isn't that silly? But math gets me like that. It just wasn't clear where all this was going. Anyway, he turns back to Juan says, Look at yours again. Why did say 'three'? Juan examined his block then took mine as well. Then the most amazing thing happened. Juan got this quizzical look on his face. You know, now that I've got both of them in my hands, they feel the same, he said. have the same number of edges, faces, corners. And know Catherine's shape is not a triangle because it's too long. But, in my mind, saw this thinner one as a triangle -- even though it is nearly half an inch thick. These two shapes are the same! They really were the same. believe it hit all of us at once that the attribute could not really be a triangle because the two shapes had identical properties. …

Kid's stuff

Kid's stuff

Kid's Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood

Kid's Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood

Professional Help and Crime Victims

This study uses a two-wave panel design to examine the role professional help played in the recovery of crime victims from psychological distress. A disproportionate statewide random sample of 664 respondents was selected for an analysis of crime experience(s), use of professional services, and recovery from psychological distress. Respondents participated in two telephone interviews conducted 6 months apart. The results show that victims of nontrivial crimes had more stressful life events and experienced more distress symptoms than both victims of trivial crime (kid stuff) and nonvictims. Nontrivial crime victims used police services most often, followed by health-related services and legal services. Victims who used legal services tended to have fewer symptoms 6-12 months later, and victims who reported using health-related services on a continued basis reported fewer symptoms. Implications for programs and future study are also discussed.

Our greasy kid stuff could take years off the cost of your product

Our greasy kid stuff could take years off the cost of your product

Our greasy kid stuff could take years off the cost of your product

Our greasy kid stuff could take years off the cost of your product