Sharyn M. Pearce

Sex and the cinema: what American Pie teaches the young

This paper focuses on the wildly successful blockbuster American Pie teenpics, especially American Pie 3—The Wedding. I argue that these films are specifically designed to appeal to teenage male audiences, and to provide lessons in sex and romance. Movies like this are especially important as they are experienced by far more teenagers than, for example, instructional films or other classroom materials; indeed, as Henry Giroux has observed, ‘Learning in the postmodern age is located … in popular spheres that shape their identities, through forms of knowledge and desires that appear absent from what is taught in schools’. I discuss whether the American Pie series is actually a ‘new age’ effort that, via insubordinate performances of gender, contests the hegemonic field of signification that regulates the production of sex, gender and desire, or whether it is a retrogressive hetero‐conservative opus with a veneer of sexual radicalism. I probe whether this filmic vector for sex education is about the shaping of responsible, caring, vulnerable men, or is it guiding them to be like their heterosexual, middle‐class fathers? And whether, despite its riotous and raunchy advertising, American Pie dishes up something spicy or something terribly wholesome instead.

Molding the Man: Sex-Education Manuals for Australian Boys in the 1950s

As is the case elsewhere in the world, Australian sex-education manuals reflect prevailing social opinion and follow the shifts and lurches of public approbation. Prior to the 1950s, sex-instruction manuals in Australia were considered primarily suitable for marriage guidance counseling, and were mostly used by members of the clergy for discussion with young couples during their engagement period. In the public world, at least, sex was best not spoken about, and sexual information was rarely directed at young people themselves, but instead was intended to be mediated by parents, teachers, clergy, or doctors. It was during and after the Second World War that sex education for young people—“teenagers,” as they began to be called at this time—came to be seen as an important part of their civic instruction, and as a prime pathway for their indoctrination into the social ethics of the time. This chapter offers some reasons for this dramatic change in thinking and analyzes some representative sex-instruction manuals of the decade, concentrating particularly upon what they had to say about and to Australian boys, and upon their underlying messages about the edification and shaping of the future man. While there were just as many sex-instruction booklets for girls, these are beyond the scope of this chapter, which chooses to focus upon the education of the undisputed “head of the household,” who was expected, even before marriage, to be responsible for the “weaker sex.”

Messages from the Inside?: Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australian Children's Literature

It remains to be seen whether the events toward the end of 2001 in Australia and elsewhere will produce a triumphant counterdiscourse of assimilation and/or exclusion, and whether tolerant pluralism of the multicultural society, so comparatively recently nd arduously asserted, is exposed as fragile and illusory. A childrens literature reflecting a society intent upon renovating the fading picture of a homogenous Australia really would be a step backward.

The evolution of the Queensland kid: changing literary representations of Queensland children in children's and adolescent fiction

Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Childrens novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.