TASK 6

Introduction
In all American teen dramas ideologies of teenagers and youth are constructed in a way that their teenage target audience can identify themselves with. Most American teen dramas acknowledge their teenage target audience my constructing ideologies that can offer them escapism, sexual gratifications or educational purposes that the audiences are attracted to, since they yearn for these things. And the audience receive this with the all important entertainment value- that’s why American teen dramas are successful. American teen dramas can be responsible for constructing negative and positive ideologies of youth, which can shape the overall ideology of youth in society as a whole.


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American teen dramas all possess ideologies that either shape or construct the overall ideologies of youth in the present society. American teen dramas seem to consist of the same ideological ingredients such as sex before marriage, anti-racism and superficiality. These common ideologies present in American teen dramas are what seem to make them successful and appealing to the target audience. Anti-racism and multi-culturalism are somewhat a new popular ideology that appears in American teen dramas. For example 90210’s Dixon, who is an adopted black child that lives with his white, perfect nuclear family. The fact that this perfect family have an adopted black child makes the matter seem as if it is normal and acceptable, shown through his school mates accepting his situation as well. So essentially this perfect, nuclear family is promoting an anti-racist ideology and therefore in terms of the hypodermic needle, is injecting this ideology into the audience and shaping new ideologies into youth culture. Sex before marriage is another popular ideology present in most American teen dramas because sex and love are very popular themes in teen media texts and also in youth culture on a whole, so American teen dramas try to incorporate this to appeal to the teen target audience. The fact that American teen dramas present the ideology of sex before marriage can affect the youth culture and even construct it because ‘’Teen sex is a ‘major public health problem’ according to the American Academy of Paediatrics. The physical, emotional, and social consequences of teen sexual activity include high rates of teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. Each year 25% of sexually active teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease’’.

Frontier Mythology in American Teen Film
Rowena Harper
December 2008