%0 Journal Article
%T Youth for Sale: Using Critical Disability Perspectives to Examine the Embodiment of ¡®Youth¡¯
%A Jenny Slater
%J Societies
%D 2012
%I MDPI AG
%R 10.3390/soc2030195
%X ¡®Youth¡¯ is more complicated than an age-bound period of life; although implicitly paired with developmentalism, youth is surrounded by contradictory discourses. In other work [1], I have asserted that young people are demonized as risky and rebellious, whilst simultaneously criticized for being lazy and apathetic; two intertwining, yet conflicting discourses meaning that young people¡¯s here-and-now experiences take a backseat to a focus on reaching idealized, neoliberal adulthood [2]. Critical examination of adulthood ideals, however, shows us that ¡®youthfulness¡¯ is itself presented as a goal of adulthood [3¨C5], as there is a desire, as adults, to remain forever young [6]. As Blatterer puts it, the ideal is to be ¡°adult and youthful but not adolescent¡± ([3], p. 74). This paper attempts to untangle some of the youth/adult confusion by asking how the aspiration/expectation of a youthful body plays out in the embodied lives of young dis/abled people. To do this, I use a feminist-disability lens to consider youth in an abstracted form, not as a life-stage, but as the end goal of an aesthetic project of the self that we are all (to differing degrees) encouraged to set out upon.
%K youth
%K disability
%K feminist
%K feminist-disability
%K embodiment
%K time
%K crip time
%K sociology of childhood
%K commodification
%U http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/2/3/195