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Supernatural Youth in Media

by Ilana Nash (Volume editor) Rebecca C. Hains (Volume editor)
©2025 Textbook XII, 252 Pages
Series: Mediated Youth, Volume 36

Summary

Since the turn of the millennium, stories about young people with mystical abilities have enjoyed tremendous popularity. This volume is the first collection of essays to posit that such stories form a distinct teen- and young-adult-oriented genre, characterized by tales in which young people use ancient magic—not modern science—to solve problems and save the world.
Scholars explore the cultural implications of this phenomenon, considering how media’s discourses about youthful gods, witches, fairies, and other magical beings address social change, youth, and modern identities. By examining stories whose protagonists stand at a crossroads between identities and states of being—human and not-quite-human, child and adult, mundane world and mythic world, old millennium and new—the volume invites readers to contemplate the cultural significance of the persistent mediated fantasy of magical youth.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the editors
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • 1 Supernatural Youth in Media: The History and Meaning of a Fantastic Genre (Ilana Nash and Rebecca C. Hains)
  • Part I Adaptation and Interpretation
  • 2 Growing Up in A Winx: Reworking a Children’s Text for a Teen Audience (Kyra Hunting)
  • 3 Sex Magic: Orgasm, Embodiment, and the Erotic Navigation of “the Circumstances” in The Magicians (Cory Geraths)
  • 4 Rewriting the Past and Present: Ragnarok, Norse Myth, and Teen Heroes (Ilana Nash and Jana K. Schulman)
  • 5 Mystical and the Mundane in Netflix’s The Irregulars: Exploring Supernatural Narrative Engagement and Reception (Gwendelyn S. Nisbett and Newly Paul)
  • Part II Intersecting Magic and Femininity
  • 6 Supernatural Savior or Sacrificial Lamb? The Contradictions and Cost of Young Supernatural Femininity: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in a Post-Buffy Context (Lori Bindig Yousman)
  • 7 Youth at the Border: Finding the Monstrous-Feminine in Marvel Comics (Eric M. Kennedy Jr.)
  • 8 Saving Herself and Turning Rhetorical Tropes in Disney Films: Subverting the Monstrous-Feminine in Supernatural Genre Conventions (Erika M. Thomas)
  • 9 A Zambian Fairytale: Shula and the Magic of Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not A Witch (Hope L. Russell)
  • Part III Confronting Exclusions in Supernatural Identities
  • 10 Where Are All of the Black Kids?: A Contemporary Search for Black Youth in the Fantastic World (Asha Winfield, Meghan Sanders, Rockia Harris, Hope Hickerson, and Tiffany R. Smith)
  • 11 Queering Teen Supernatural TV Dramas: Fandom’s Impact on LGBTQ Youth (Victor Evans)
  • 12 Welcome to the Witching Hour: The Craft as a Neuroqueer Allegory of Legibility (Desirée Rowe)
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Series index

Supernatural Youth in Media

Edited by

Ilana Nash and Rebecca C. Hains

About the editors

Ilana Nash is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University. She is the author of American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (2006) and several articles on girls’ representations in media. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture.

Rebecca C. Hains, Ph.D. is a professor of media and communication at Salem State University. She has authored and edited many books and articles on children’s media culture from a critical/cultural studies perspective. A 2024 Fulbright Scholar, Hains serves on The Journal of Children & Media editorial board.

About the book

Since the turn of the millennium, stories about young people with mystical abilities have enjoyed tremendous popularity. This volume is the first collection of essays to posit that such stories form a distinct teen- and young-adult-oriented genre, characterized by tales in which young people use ancient magic—not modern science—to solve problems and save the world.

Scholars explore the cultural implications of this phenomenon, considering how media’s discourses about youthful gods, witches, fairies, and other magical beings address social change, youth, and modern identities. By examining stories whose protagonists stand at a crossroads between identities and states of being—human and not-quite-human, child and adult, mundane world and mythic world, old millennium and new—the volume invites readers to contemplate the cultural significance of the persistent mediated fantasy of magical youth.

“This is an engrossing collection of studies about supernatural youth media (SYM), each of which explores collective fears and fantasies of young people: power, magic, death, sex, technology, the occult. The essays illuminate how recent generations, particularly around the turn of the millennium, have been represented by movies and television shows as both victims and masters of unknown mystical forces. With a particular emphasis on gender and racial identity, the book offers a revelatory and distinctive assessment of this broadly appealing genre.”

—Prof. Timothy Shary, Eastern Florida State College

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

This book is dedicated to the tweens and teens who bring magic to our lives each day: May, Theo, Alex, and Xavier.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Sharon Mazzarella, editor of the Mediated Youth series, for her support of this volume and for her vision in providing a home for scholarship on youth and media. Special thanks also to Elizabeth Howard and Sweetlin Ajitha at Peter Lang press, and to our authors, whose excellent work and enthusiasm for the topic brought such joy to this project.

1 Supernatural Youth in Media: The History and Meaning of a Fantastic Genre

Ilana Nash and Rebecca C. Hains

In today’s media landscape, supernatural tales featuring young people with magical powers abound. From the enduring fame of the blockbuster Harry Potter books and films to more contemporary TV series like Netflix’s Wednesday (2022), stories about tweens, teens and young adults with mystical abilities are everywhere—and many of them have enjoyed critical, popular, and economic success. Whether using magical powers to pursue adventure or to save the world from evil, supernatural youth are popular protagonists whose stories resonate with diverse audiences, especially young people.

Prior to the turn of the millennium, stories of this type were less common. But in the 1990s, supernatural youth media exploded in such texts as the popular film The Craft (1996), the first Harry Potter novel (1997 in Great Britain, 1998 in the United States), and the debuts of popular, long-running TV series like Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Charmed (1998–2006). In the decades since, audiences have enjoyed a multiplicity of texts featuring young heroes with supernatural powers made possible by those early media texts’ successes. Network and studio executives tend to greenlight projects in genres and franchises whose recent performance indicates audience interest and therefore financial promise. On networks like the CW and streamers ranging from Disney and Netflix to Max (also called HBO Max in some markets), various contemporary texts have thus built upon one another’s popularity, establishing recognizable discourses and practices surrounding tales of supernatural youth that resonate with audiences and are, therefore, commercially viable. These discourses and practices are so cohesive, so identifiable, and so enduring, that supernatural youth media (SYM) have coalesced into a distinct genre—identifiable by its texts’ networks of overlapping similarities (Wittgenstein, 1953) and interconnected discursive norms (Foucault, 1972). Today, SYM continues to thrive both in reboots of the last generation’s texts and in the production of new texts like Netflix’s School Spirits (2023), suggesting that audiences have an enduring fascination with the intersections of youth and mystical or occult themes.

Details

Pages
XII, 252
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781636677194
ISBN (ePUB)
9781636677200
ISBN (Softcover)
9781636677217
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783034354059
DOI
10.3726/b22359
Language
English
Publication date
2024 (December)
Keywords
television film youth supernatural cultural studies gender teenagers teen media Media
Published
New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XII, 252 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Ilana Nash (Volume editor) Rebecca C. Hains (Volume editor)

Ilana Nash is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University. She is the author of American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (2006) and several articles on girls’ representations in media. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture. Rebecca C. Hains, Ph.D. is a professor of media and communication at Salem State University. She has authored and edited many books and articles on children’s media culture from a critical/cultural studies perspective. A 2024 Fulbright Scholar, Hains serves on The Journal of Children & Media editorial board.

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