Change, mutation, chaos, new horizons, encounters with norms, first experiences, moments of identity awareness—growing up unfolds through stages that are at once painful and exhilarating. Childhood and adolescence, marked by definitional ambiguity, are transitional states whose boundaries and representations shift across cultures and historical periods.
This issue of Intermédiality examines how cinema, television, literature, the visual arts, and digital media narrate and give form to this delicate process. Media objects help normalize the transition to adulthood and shape how this stage is understood, fulfilling a triple function: prescriptive, counter-hegemonic, and supportive of our understanding of becoming.
Across literature, cinema, and media more broadly, adolescence has been imagined as a transitional phase defined by negation, change, and opposition. A range of related concepts emerges from this framework: marginal perspectives, minor sensibilities, learning, memory, nostalgia, and relations to community. Media representations also frequently adopt an adultist stance, reproducing relations of domination through a “reassuring” vision of childhood as vulnerable, naïve, asexual, in need of protection, and devoid of dissident agency. At the same time, they offer images of rupture and utopia that open up meaningful alternatives to dominant injunctions.
In turn, childhood and adolescence must be understood as essential conceptual categories for thinking about media. Intermediality is mobilized here as a tool for foregrounding not only aesthetic and formal characteristics, but also the social, communal, and political dimensions of these media encounters. Attending to their multiform materiality and situating media objects within their contexts makes visible networks of relations, borrowings, and layered forms of embeddedness. The link between growing up and intermediality thus becomes clear: the intermedial space in which growing up takes shape accompanies growth itself, transforming alongside it and continually reconfiguring in response to the discourses that give it form.
The nine contributions gathered in this issue make visible some of these meaningful forms, opening a dialogue around a theme of pressing contemporary relevance and significant social and cultural resonance, while remaining open to the unexpected.
Summary
Introduction. Grandir : entre adultisme, regards en arrière et utopie
Marta Boni, Université de Montréal et Stéfany Boisvert, UQÀM
Articles
Grandir, une fin heureuse ? La construction intermédiale de l’enfant-nation dans Shrek et Maléfique
Lisa Schwencke, Université de Montréal / Aix-Marseille Université
Parenting with Metal: Extreme Media Literacy Between Generations
Ruth Barratt-Peacock, University of Huddersfield
The Public Servant and the Auteur: A Comparative Analysis of Julie Andem’s and Sam Levinson’s Showrunning Approaches
Stefania Marghitu, University of Alabama et Gry C. Rustad, University of Oslo
Une écriture haptique du devenir-femme : Clèves et Fabriquer une femme de Marie Darrieussecq
Gabrielle Flipot Meunier, Université de Montréal / Sorbonne Université
“One Pill Makes You Larger and One Pill Makes You Small”: Queering Age and Time in Meow Wolf and “White Rabbit”
Sarah E. S. Sinwell, University of Utah
The Wraith of Childhood: How Contemporary TV Series Set the Origin of Characters’ Vulnerability—and of Creative Developments—On Childhood Trauma
Marta Boni, Université de Montréal
La temporalité de l’enfance et le vieillissement précoce dans le cinéma de Sohrab Shahid Saless
Mahdis Mohammadi, LISAA / Université Gustave Eiffel
Grandir dans un monde en transition : Ma, perception médiale et rite initiatique dans Le Voyage de Chihiro (2002)
Sara Bouvelle, Université de Montréal
Artist Dossier
Nova’s Film: Notes on a Toddler’s iPhone Movie
Caroline Bem, Université de Montréal