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The invention of the tweens: youth, culture and media

During the first decade of this century, various discourses within the Brazilian context, celebrated the image of savvy children consuming "like adults" and providing adults with technological know-how. This is the starting point to investigate the recent creation of tweens, boys and girls between childhood and adolescence, by undermining this supposed phase of life and having a genesis of this subject pre-teen, stemming from the possible conditions of its emergence, all within a youth culture. Based on Foucault's understanding of subjectivity, the article underlines arguments linking the changes in the conception of the modern individual to the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity in contemporary societies, articulating them to media discourses constituting tweens. Such communication processes give voice to children, contributing thus to the social construction of their autonomy.

Tweens; Pre-Adolescents; Autonomy; Modernity


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