Groomed for capitalism: biopower and the self-care, self-improvement rituals of adolescence in Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade and Donald Glover’s Atlanta

ABSTRACT

Self-care, self-improvement and biopower, as they relate to the commodification of adolescence and the grooming of young people as neoliberal citizens, are the central concerns of this article. Foregrounding new perspectives on the effects such trends have on the body [Cusset, F. (2018). How the world swung to the right: Fifty years of counterrevolutions. MIT Press], it analyzes two texts, the film Eighth Grade and the Atlanta episode entitled ‘Fubu’ (season 2, episode 10), to consider how neoliberal capitalist values manifest in the lives of protagonists, Kayla and Earn, whose young bodies have been colonized by the self-care, self-improvement ethos of our current cultural spirit.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• biopower
• youth & adolescence
• gender
• race

Acknowledgements

The author would like to give thanks Dr Denise Ives and Dr Cara Crandall for their interest and participation in generating ideas for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unlike YA media, whose themes, humor and pop cultural milieu are geared toward teen audiences, coming-of-age movies, particularly those set in the recent past, are intended to appeal to the nostalgia of older audiences who grew up in an earlier era.

2 This refers to a narrative and visual style of film-making characteristic of American movies between the 1910s and the 1960s.

3 Though television and film have different storytelling dynamics and ways of dealing with character development – for example TV, by nature, resists a ‘wrap up’ whereas film typically leans into it, this is accounted for in analysis by treating the Atlanta episode as a standalone account as opposed to setting it too deeply in the context of the series.