Introduction

youth living in paranoiac times

pp. 1-13

in: Jan Jagodzinski, Television and youth culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

This is the third book in a trilogy that began with Youth Fantasies (2004), which was followed by Music in Youth Culture (2005). In those first two books, a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework was put to use to theorize the complexity of youth, interrogated to some extent by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (sometimes cited as D+G, but I am not consistent) challenge to Jacques Lacan's dominant position. I took popular media culture seriously, exploring films, the Internet, video games, and a particular selection of music (gangsta rap, Nü metal, grunge, grrrl culture, techno) to identify what I took to be post-Oedipal developments in youth where postadolescence has been culturally extended to blur clearcut distinctions of adulthood brought about by the global sociohistorical changes wrought by capitalism and its accompanying teletechnologies.