In her rigorous, ambitious and timely study, Chronic Youth, Julie Passanante Elman powerfully demonstrates how the transformation of the teenager from rebel to patient in the US not only reflects an understanding of the teenager as a problem to be managed and solved but has also participated more broadly in an ongoing normalization of a culture of rehabilitation as “coterminous with good citizenship” for everyone. The book intervenes in existing youth and media studies frameworks and impressively draws on disability, queer, gender and affect studies. It shows cultural historians and theorists in the above fields how important it is to analyse the ways rehabilitation emerges “historically and cooperatively” (92) through figurations of adolescence, disability and sexuality across a variety of “socially responsible” cultural media platforms or what she calls “rehabilitative edutainment” (4). After the Introduction, where key terms such as “rehabilitative citizenship” are defined and historicized, each of the four chapters, arranged chronologically, attends to a specific experience, cultural text and medium, while also examining their place within the book's larger argument about the cultural history of neoliberalism (7). The close readings are lucid and engaging and Passanante is careful not to mute the various moments of resistance, however brief, voiced in the texts (for example of crip/queer sexuality) amidst the pervasive disciplines of self-surveilling citizenship.

Chapter 1 assesses the importance of the disabled 1970s cultural icon “the bubble boy,” focussing on journalistic and doctors’ accounts of David Vetter III and Ted DeVita and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), an early example of “disease-of-the-week” television programming. She traces in these representations of both real and fictional bubble boys two conjoined rehabilitative narratives, that of overcoming sexual repression and overcoming disability, and how adulthood is represented as the achievement of heterosexuality and able-bodied masculinity through differing discourses of “disabled martyrdom” that also implicate American narratives of technological process (23).

Chapter 2 turns to ABC's famous After School Specials that addressed (able-bodied) teenagers as proto-citizens and contextualizes the Specials in relation to television regulation and debates about educational broadcasting in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Passanante shows how disability entered these programmes as a metaphoric language for educating teens about overcoming adversity, leading to the infantilization of disabled people. While the programmes paved the way for a new openness about teen sexuality and transformed the popular image of television as dangerous for youth, they reconsolidated heterosexist and ableist norms. Importantly, Passanante in this chapter calls on media scholars to historicize the emergence of tolerance, with all its depoliticizing effects, as edutainment and its role in “normalizing visions of teen crisis and ‘healthy’ development.” She also demonstrates how a culture of perpetual reinvention pre-dates reality television and relied on teen viewers (91).

The co-constitutive relationship between compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality is also maintained in 1980s “teen sick-lit,” the focus of chapter 3. Using Lurlene McDaniel and Jean Ferris's work, it analyses “the affective labor of sadness as a crucial growth-inducing emotion best conveyed in tragic disability narratives” and pays attention to the role of young women in rehabilitative edutainment, which is often neglected in youth subculture studies. Passanante locates such problem-driven stories and their pedagogical impulses within national reading initiatives of the era and fears of apathetic citizenship, and engages with cultural debates about the “medicinal value of literary realism” (96), specifically sad stories which cultivated emotions that “felt real.” She makes a strong case for the need to reevaluate the relevance of affect theory to the study of age and dis/ability and to consider the place of negative affect within dominant histories of affective labor (for example, Arlie Russell Hochschild's). Borrowing Lauren Berlant's term, she persuasively argues for the existence of “a teen ‘intimate public’” that “greased the wheels of broader post-Fordist cultural, political, and economic transitions” (129).

Chapter 4 traces the rise in the 1990s of “neuroparenting,” Passanante's term for a new “compassionate medicalization model” of parenting teenagers that, drawing on the so-called decade of the brain, incorporated new neuroscientific discoveries to cast teen bodies and minds “as always already ‘crazy by design’” (133). What is distinct about the moment when teens become a “species” is that disability no longer functions metaphorically as it animates a range of debates about proper parenting; antidepressants for youth; juvenile justice policies; school violence; and sexual, gender and racial difference. The chapter shows how the discourse of adolescence-as-disability operated in gender-specific and racializing ways informing, for example, the process whereby white school shooters were identified as rehabilitable subjects in opposition to teens of color (labelled “superpredators”) who were perceived as inherently criminal and unrehabilitable.

Overall, Chronic Youth is an accomplished piece of work that should appeal to scholars across a variety of disciplines. Its provocative and insightful discussions illustrate how the transition from rebel to patient has been “in every instance political, affective and deeply historical” (171). Perhaps, as Passanante also states in her conclusion, the most important contribution of her book beyond academia is that in exposing the naturalization of rehabilitative citizenship, “we might embrace the ongoing work of collective human care rather than the insular paternalism of individual improvement that perpetuates the chronic youth of neoliberal capitalism” (175).