‘I don’t wanna be anything other than me’: A case study on gender representations of teenagers in American teen drama series One Tree Hill

Abstract

Keywordsgender stereotypes representations sexuality teenagers teen series elKe Van damme and sofie Van Bauwel Ghent University 'i don't wanna be anything other than me': a case study on gender representations of teenagers in american teen drama series One Tree Hill aBstract Economic and demographic trends have turned young people into a target audience, and media producers and the marketing industry have realized that the contemporary teenage market has substantial potential. Television is still the most popular medium among teenagers; along with web surfing and social networking, television is part of teens' daily media use. Media content is essential in teenagers' self-representation: fictional media programmes produce commodified meanings, and models of behaviour and information about norms and values are repetitively delivered by attractive characters in the form of entertainment. This article gives an overview of the gender representations of teenagers in the American teen series by Schwahn One Tree Hill (2003-2012) by using a qualitative thematic textual analysis. We can say that the series revolves around a male-oriented world in which basketball is the main topic. Teen subcultures are often portrayed in a prototypical manner and traditional discourses of masculinity and femininity are often reinforced. A more liberal stance was noted regarding (female) sexuality.

‘I’m just not gay-gay’: Exploring same-sex desire and sexual minority identity formation in SKAM and its Western European remakes

“…At the same time, they represented the teens’ sexual identity formation as an individualized struggle, disconnected from broader sociocultural processes that sustain gender and sexual inequalities. Similarly, Elke Van Damme and Sofie Van Bauwel (2012) and Wendy Peters (2016) argued that many teen series were rooted in heteronormativity, informing the representation of heterosexuality and nonheterosexuality. For instance, Elizabeth Crowley Webber (2019) found that LGBTQ teens were encouraged to identify as nonheterosexual in the series’ narratives but were never represented as having sex or expressing same-sex intimacy.…”