AustLit

'Like many scholars of young people's texts and cultures, I expect, I have watched with great interest the protest movements collectively known as Occupy and media coverage of these movements over the past year. From the beginning, whichever event is cited as the beginning, the activists collectively have been represented and addressed as young people. Adbusters, the Vancouver culture-jamming magazine that first posted the call to "#OCCUPYWALLSTREET" on its website in July 2011, implies an audience of young people in its style and content. The playful register of the September-October 2011 issue, with its now-famous centrefold of a ballerina gracefully posed on the rampaging bull used by Wall Street as a metonym for the markets, is one example, as are the pictures of young people used to illustrate the spreads that end the issue: two prepubescent boys with slogans painted on their chests clown for the camera while another boy who has discarded his shirt faces down a line of police in full riot gear in the piece on "World War IV," and a swarm of youthful demonstrators fill the background of the page headlined "Dreaming of Democracy." The mainstream media reports followed the lead of Adbusters. Articles about Occupy are almost invariably accompanied either by high-angle shots of a crowd of mostly young protesters in an urban space or by a series of head-and-shoulder shots of individual occupiers. The 31 October 2011 issue of Maclean's: Canada's National Magazine, for example, uses both of these visual cues: the crowd shot appears on the front cover behind the provocative title, "The Occupy Wall Street Movement Has It All Wrong," while four youthful activists, posed with their placards in front of them, appear at the head of the article.'  (Introduction)

'An apparent resurgence in gender-specific marketing of products for children has been linked to post-millennial anxieties about the destabilizing of categories such as gender and nationality. Although links can be traced to past patterns of gender segregation in print culture for children, in this paper we are interested in tracking incongruities in texts in the present context. In this paper we analyze critically the franchise anchored around Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz's The Daring Book for Girls, which was a publishing sensation in the USA and which led to an Australian edition as well as several follow-up texts. The inspiration for these books came from The Dangerous Book for Boys, originally published in the UK in 2006 by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, one of whom had been a teacher, and the Daring books for girls were a direct response to the success of the book for boys. Buchanan and Peskowitz, two American authors of mothering books, approached Iggulden and Iggulden seeking permission to use their design and concept to write a version for girls.'  (Introduction)