The Infantilization of the Postmodern Adult and the Figure of Kidult

Jacopo Bernardini ()
Additional contact information
Jacopo Bernardini: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Political Sciences, Università degli Studi di Perugia (Italy).

Postmodern Openings, 2014, vol. 5, issue 2, 39-55

Abstract: Being young today is no longer a transitory stage, but rather a choice of life, well established and brutally promoted by the media system. While the classic paradigms of adulthood and maturation could interpret such infantile behavior as a symptom of deviance, such behavior has become a model to follow, an ideal of fun and being carefree, present in a wide variety of contexts of society. The contemporary adult follows a sort of thoughtful immaturity, a conscious escape from the responsibilities of an anachronistic model of life. If an ideal of maturity remains, it does not find behavioral compensations in a society where childish attitudes and adolescent life models are constantly promoted by the media and tolerated by institutions.

Keywords: Adulthood; kidult; Infantilization; adult; youthful; immaturity; postmodern; postmodernity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://postmodernopenings.com/archives/1592 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lum:rev3rl:v:5:y:2014:i:2:p:39-55

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Postmodern Openings from Editura Lumen, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antonio Sandu ().