As the postwar mass media in France imagined her, the teenage
girl was no longer a demure and daughterly "jeune fille. "Instead,
she was an "enfant terrible, " a "bad girl"--implying that she was
unapologetically and unsentimentally no longer a virgin. Focusing
on the role of gender in representations of youth in post-World War
II France, Susan Weiner traces how, after 1945, young men and women
came to symbolize different aspects of social order and disorder in
a country traumatized by the Nazi Occupation and Cold War paranoia,
seduced by consumerism and Americanization, and engaged in an
undeclared war in Algeria. While overtly political discourses about
"youth" generally referred to middle-class young men, Weiner argues
that it was in media representations of "bad girls" that anxieties
over the loss of a morally and socially coherent national identity
found their expression.
"Enfants Terribles" looks at French culture from the Liberation
to 1968 through images of the teenage girl which appeared in a
broad range of texts and institutions: magazines such as "Elle" and
"Mademoiselle, " newspapers, novels, popular essays, popular music,
surveys, and film. Weiner highlights the new importance of youth as
a social category of identity in the context of the postwar
explosion of the mass media and explores the ways in which girls
both defined and disrupted this category.
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