Cet article propose une lecture intermédiale du Voyage de Chihiro (2002) de Hayao Miyazaki en tant que récit initiatique explorant les conditions du « bien-grandir » à l’ère de la globalisation et du capitalisme. En mobilisant le concept japonais de ma — espace interstitiel, ambiantiel et relationnel — ainsi que la notion de perception médiale, il analyse comment Chihiro développe une sensibilité capable de faire-lien et faire-lieu. Ce modèle de bien-grandir invite à penser une forme d’éthique de la perception, qui permet de discerner, dans les interstices d’un monde aliénant, les conditions ambiantielles d’un vivre-ensemble véritable.
Cet article s’intéresse à certains moments charnières du récit d’apprentissage au féminin que forment ensemble les romans de Marie Darrieussecq Clèves (2011) et Fabriquer une femme (2024), où la narration met l’accent sur les sensations haptiques (relatives au toucher, à la proprioception ou à la kinesthésie) du personnage de Solange. Il s’agit de voir comment l’écriture rend ainsi sensible au lectorat l’expérience incarnée de la jeune fille, en décalage avec la signification socialement attribuée aux étapes qu’elle franchit (ménarche, perte de la virginité, accouchement). À la lumière de notions de phénoménologie féministe et des concepts de female gaze et de feminist gaze , je propose donc de montrer en quoi les modalités de narration de ces deux romans invitent à ressentir avec Solange son expérience corporelle du devenir-femme, contestant au passage l’autorité des balises qui tendent à réduire ce parcours à une initiation à la sexualité hétéronormative et à la maternité.
Shrek (2001–2010) et Maléfique (2014–2019) réinventent le conte de fées La Belle au bois dormant à travers le regard de ses « méchant·es », alliant récits initiatiques pour enfants et réflexions sur les normes sociales. Les protagonistes y défendent des utopies alternatives mais, en grandissant, finissent par réintégrer l’ordre établi, symbolisé par la monarchie et la chrononormativité (une temporalité normative marquée par des étapes obligatoires comme le mariage). Ces oeuvres soulignent que grandir implique d’accepter la rationalité adulte et d’abandonner un âge onirique et fluide. Ce phénomène peut être éclairé par le concept d’enfant-nation, liant enfance individuelle et collective selon l’idée que la société progresse en se développant comme un enfant. Dans cette perspective, les princesses incarnent un futur national, dressant un pont entre la notion d’enfant-nation et celle de femme-nation comme reproductrice et porteuse du futur national.
Cet article explore la dialectique entre l’enfance et le vieillissement dans le cinéma de la figure éminente, mais trop souvent méconnue, du cinéma iranien, Sohrab Shahid Saless. Nous analysons comment l’utilisation du cinéma lent par Saless, notamment dans le traitement de ces thèmes, s’apparente à une forme de résistance et de choix politique. Par ailleurs, l’article met en lumière les points de convergence et de divergence entre ses représentations de l’enfance et celles d’autres cinéastes contemporains influencés par lui, notamment Abbas Kiarostami.
Shrek (2001-2010) and Maleficent (2014-2019) reinvent the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty through the eyes of its "villains," combining initiation stories for children with reflections on social norms. The protagonists defend alternative utopias but, as they grow up, end up reintegrating the established order, symbolized by the monarchy and chrononormativity (a normative temporality marked by obligatory milestones such as marriage). These works emphasize thatgrowing up means accepting adult rationality and abandoning a dreamlike, fluid age. This phenomenon can be illuminated by the concept of the child-nation, which links individual and collective childhood, based on the idea thatsociety progresses by developing like a child. From this perspective, princesses embody anational future, building abridge between the notion of child-nation and that of woman-nation as reproducer and bearer of the national future.
This article explores the spaces of Meow Wolf's "House of Eternal Return" in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the ways in which those spaces represent female adolescence and queer temporalities. Analyzing Evan + Zane's music video for "White Rabbit" as a means of drawing on the interconnections between queer temporalities, growing up, and imagination, this article focuses on how queer time and queer kinship are represented in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Meow Wolf, and "White Rabbit."
This article explores the dialectic between childhood and aging in the cinema of the prominent yet often overlooked figure of Iranian cinema, Sohrab Shahid-Saless. We analyze how Saless's use of slow cinema, particularly in the treatment of these themes, reflects a form of resistance and a political choice. Furthermore, the article highlights the points of convergence and divergence between his representations of childhood and those of other contemporary filmmakers influenced by him, notably Abbas Kiarostami.
This article explores how contemporary television series use childhood as both a narrative and affective device to revisit trauma, vulnerability, and emotional complexity. Drawing on affect theory, intermediality, and cultural analysis, it examines how "minor feelings" emerge in serial storytelling. Rather than portraying childhood as a space of innocence, the article highlights its role as a site of conflict, memory, and unresolved tension. Focusing on the use of toys as vectors of memory, it analyzes flashbacks as tools to represent fractured temporality and the lasting impact of early emotions on adult subjectivity. Using the Quebec television series In Memoriam (Crave, 2024) as its central case study, the paper shows how toys can trigger traumatic recall and illuminate ongoing psychic wounds. Television's capacity for repetition allows these minor feelings to circulate within spaces of nostalgia and unease, often mobilizing the uncanny. The paper argues that TV functions as a mobile archive of feelings, shaping how viewers engage with both personal and collective pasts.
ButI know you'regetting older, growing, changing. And, Iguess, ifI'm being really honest, that's what scares me. I don't want things to change. So I think maybe that's why I came in here, to try and stop that change. To turn back the clock. [...] So you know what? Keep on growing up kid. Don't let me stop you. Make mistakes, learn from 'em. And when life hurts you, because it will, remember the hurt. The hurt is good. It means you're out of that cave. But, please, if you don't mind, for the sake of your poor old dad, keep the door open three inches1.
This article examines some pivotal moments of Marie Darrieussecq's coming-of-age novels Cl & egrave;ves (2011) and Fabriquer une femme (2024), in which the writing emphasizes the haptic sensations (relating to touch, proprioception or kinaesthesia) of the protagonist Solange. The aim is to see how the adolescent girl's embodied experience is thus made palpable to the reader, but also at odds with the socially accepted meaning of the different milestones she encounters (menarche, loss of virginity, childbirth). In light of some notions of feminist phenomenology and the concepts of female gaze and feminist gaze, I seek to show how the writing of these two novels invite their reader to share Solange's bodily experience of becoming a woman, in a way that undermines the authority of milestones that tend to reduce this journey to an initiation into heteronormative sexuality and motherhood.
This article proposes an intermedial reading of Hayao Miyazaki's SpiritedAway (2002) as a coming-of-age narrative that reimagines what it means to grow and mature in a world shaped by capitalist globalization. Mobilizing the Japanese concept of ma-understood as an interstitial, ambient, and relational space-alongside the notion of medial perception, it examines how Chihiro gradually develops a sensitivity that enables her to create meaningful connections and reclaim communal spaces. The film thus offers a model of maturation grounded in an ethics of perception, one that allows for the recognition of ambient, relational conditions of authentic togetherness.
Reading interviews published in Canadian magazine Hellbound, I trace a bidirectional dissonance between metal parents' metal media practices and their role as parents. These "metal parents" address friction between these roles by asserting metal music's value as a tool for helping children develop mental health management strategies and the media literacy to critically engage with sexual content in other popular media. The latter becomes particularly important in connection to children growing up with metal containing sexual and violent content. Whether we frame it as growing up with metal or raising children with metal, these interviews indicate that there is a significant shift towards intergenerational media practices in consumers ofmetal music, to which the industry is slowly adapting. Nevertheless, parents appear to still approach metal in the home with ever-shifting compromises and, above all, active engagement between child, parent, and text.
This article compares the production/showrunner practices and representation of two of the most successful teen television series of the 2010s, Skam (NRK, 2015-2017) and Euphoria (HBO, 2019-). It compares the collaborative public service production practice under Julie Andem's Skam with the perpetuation of the singular male auteur through Sam Levinson's authorial control in HBO's "prestige" teen series Euphoria. We argue that Andem's and Levinson's showrunning approaches create two very different representations of growing up. Andem's mission allows us to view her as a civil servant for social media meets public service teen programming, whereas Levinson's film background and personal struggles with addiction dominate popular Euphoria discourse. Andem incorporates intermediality as an ethnographic means to connect to youth audiences' tangible issues through research and social media intimacies, whereas Levinson adapts a cinematic intertextual approach.
A toddler, not quite two years old, records a 7' 46" iPhone video. This "perfect" film (after J & oslash;rgen Leth's "perfect" human) exposes the basic operations of smartphone thinking-feeling (Massumi). Drawing on haptic theories of filmic engagement (Marks, Sobchack), I examine how Nova's camera returns, again and again, to rugs, throws, windows, chairs, and to the hardwood floor. Adult voices-mother, father, grandmother-provide a mundane soundtrack which offsets Nova's systematic inquiry into medial visual perception. At the film's center, a brief, surprisingly steady shot gathers the adults at the kitchen counter into a domestic "primal scene" that allows the child to come to terms with both closeness and distance: rather than simply tethering (Turkle) Nova to her parents, the phone works like a small "holding" device, in a Winnicottian sense. Finally, as Nova's grandmother directs her to "take a picture of my flowers," and before the phone is wrested from her, it becomes evident that Nova has developed a true method for seeing-being in the world.
This article examines Olive Senior and Grace Nichols' poems. It looks at how they challenge the colonial and tourist imaginary by depicting Caribbean landscapes in which hurricanes reflect colonised cultures, the violence of colonial history, and the threat of climate change. The poetic representations of hurricanes invite us to rethink the definition of landscape and the history of its construction in the Caribbean.
