Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and the US Media Cultures of Rehabilitation by Julie Passanante Elman (review)

Julie Passanante Elman has written a fine cross-disciplinary study that pulls from the fields of disability studies, popular culture, adolescent literature, queer theory, sociology, and history. The book focuses on the intersections of adolescence, media culture, neoliberal capitalism, and ableist ideology; chapter 3, “Cryin’ and Dyin’ in the Age of Aliteracy: Romancing Teen Sick-Lit,” centers particularly on adolescent literature.

The author’s trenchant analysis explores how contemporary corporate media has coopted disability as a saleable commodity to reinforce norm ideology. The unfortunate irony is that this commodification has occurred in conjunction with the rise of the 1960s disability rights movement and, culminating with the 1991 Americans with Disabilities Act, with the greater legal and cultural recognition of disabled people as autonomous agents and full citizens.

Looking at US media culture from the 1970s to the present, Elman claims that adolescence has not been seen as a “normal” stage of psychological, social, and physical development through which an individual passes on the way to adulthood. Instead, adolescence has been constructed as a disability in need of rehabilitation, a condition that must be managed if the adolescent is to become a “normal” (able-bodied, heterosexual) adult: “On the broadest scale, Chronic Youth uncovers how representations of adolescence, sexuality, and disability, as sites of development, management, and investment, helped to naturalize a culture of rehabilitation as coterminous with good citizenship not just for those deemed disabled—but for all of us” (9).

Disability studies scholars regularly analyze how mainstream society metaphorizes disability within a naturalized ableist ideology—what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder dub “the materiality of metaphor” (qtd. in Elman 5)—remaking the disabled Other to other uses besides autonomous human agency. Elman follows this line of thinking, adding to it an economic component: at odds with the advances made in disability rights, US media culture and its corporate sponsors disseminate an ableist, medicalized version of disability (as something to be fixed, normalized), connect it to adolescence, and from that connection sell new products (movies, books, drugs, therapies) to enhance profits. The metaphor of disabled adolescence—of “chronic youth”—is captured in the title of the book.

In a milieu that prizes stability, rehabilitation, and the self-policing of the individual to achieve normality, Elman’s analysis demonstrates the deleterious effects on disability and the disabled instrumentalized by capitalism’s ability to adapt and extract profits successfully from a changing sociocultural landscape. The book looks closely at four examples of the media’s exploitation of disability, finding in each the linkage of adolescence and disability (chronic youth), the inevitable trope of overcoming (as narrative engine), and the resultant triumph of ableist ideology and neoliberalism.

In two of the chapters, Elman focuses on television, the made-for-TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976) and ABC’s Afterschool Special series (1972–95). Both are landmark examples of mainstream media’s response to the rising profile of disability in US culture; both ran disabled-adolescent characters through a narrative arc of rehabilitation toward an able-bodied, heterosexual adulthood. For example, the author explores how The Boy in the Plastic Bubble significantly modified the stories of the two boys with immune disorders (David Veeter III, Ted De-Vita) on which the movie was based in order to express an inexorable faith in science to cure all ills. The movie succeeded because its teenage audience identified with the main character, Todd Lubitch (played by John Travolta), and recognized themselves in his disability (limitations, restrictions, the inability to enter the real world) and in his desire to become an able-bodied, heterosexual man: a path that could be suicidal and tragic but also, more importantly, heroic. For the author, the risk of death is symbolic of both the cost and the value of ableist ideology.

Elman identifies the rise of the adolescent genre of teen sick-lit in the 1980s and ’90s with Lurlene McDaniel and...