Delinquent Daughters: Hollywood's war effort and the 'juvenile delinquency picture' cycle

Snelson, Tim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8282-2432 (2013) Delinquent Daughters: Hollywood's war effort and the 'juvenile delinquency picture' cycle. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11 (1). pp. 56-72. ISSN 1740-0309

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Abstract

This paper examines a short-lived cycle of ‘juvenile delinquency pictures’ that have been almost entirely ignored in scholarship on the teen film, perhaps in part because they focus on female rather than male youth. Whilst individually unremarkable, collectively these films were central to political debates about the role of Hollywood in wartime. This paper maps the widespread discursive struggles between Hollywood, the middlebrow press, industry regulators, and various government agencies over the production of this cycle. It moves on to analyse the New York reception of these films, highlighting how this ‘cycle of sensation’ was debated in relation to the very local contexts of New York's ‘bobby soxers’ and ‘victory girls’ and the strategies to police them in and around Times Square. It demonstrates that focusing on the localized and contested terrain of discourses surrounding historically situated media cycles reveals the complexity and local specificity required of micro-historical enquiry.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	second world war,juvenile delinquency,teen film,cycles,new york,bobby soxer
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > East Anglian Film Archive
Depositing User:	Katherine Humphries
Date Deposited:	05 Dec 2012 10:00
Last Modified:	16 Dec 2024 01:15
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/40373
DOI:	10.1080/17400309.2012.738318

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