Formal Schooling: Guidance Pedagogy, Cinematic Form, and the Student’s Body

“Formal Schooling” theorizes cinematic form as a pedagogy of imperative guidance in what I term the mid-century guidance counsellor cinema, an American teen film corpus that reflects and responds to the guidance counsellor’s emergence as a figurehead of normative development following WWII. Made up of an eclectic group of texts, from teensploitation movies to educational social guidance films, the guidance counsellor cinema deploys cinematic form as an omniscient guidance counsellor to forcibly construct adolescent genders and normative understandings of healthy sociality. I thus develop a novel way of reading educational (and) teen media, wherein common techniques like freeze frames, acousmatic voiceovers, reverse-speed cinematography, and editing wipes are theorized as forces of visual, formal pedagogy bent on shaping, transforming, and reforming unruly teen bodies. “Formal Schooling” thus poses two primary interventions: firstly, that we can read most, if not all, teen films for their pedagogical cinematic forms; and secondly, that despite guidance pedagogy’s imperative call for the reproduction of normativity, the guidance counsellor cinema betrays resistance through unexpected moments of genderqueer embodiment, antisocial girlhoods, and juvenile delinquency. If we read carefully, we can find the unguidable’s persistence in the guidance counsellor cinema’s seemingly rigid, didactic forms. Drawing from and contributing to feminist film theory, gender studies, critical pedagogy theory, histories of American teen cinema, and formalist methodologies, this project reads cinematic form as guidance counselling to understand how American cinema creates adolescent gender—“proper” embodiment. I develop a unique methodology combining close readings of films, rigorous theoretical frameworks, and in-depth analyses of archival materials (teen magazines, promotional materials, film reviews, psychological discourses) to understand the guidance counsellor cinema’s student body as constructed through strategic mechanisms of (cinematic) formal schooling. In short, I ask: If binary gender was so obvious, why is it taught at all? This question permeates “Formal Schooling,” a question that resonates with today’s contentious cultural climate, wherein genderqueer youths and their teachers are continually attacked. “Formal Schooling” mounts a new historically grounded theory of teen embodiment on screen to show that even in the 1950s, strange misfits and their illegible bodies persisted.

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