ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the post-imprisonment detention of sex offenders, media classification, and child surveillance devices as governmental technologies oriented by common-sense assumptions about young people and sex. Drawing on related cultural studies concepts including structures of feeling, common culture, and hegemony, the chapter examines clichés about youth and the necessity of adult intervention, including as ‘pre-harm parenting’. The chapter assesses the usefulness of common sense for understanding cultural and youth studies’ investments in a range of overlapping concepts implicit in our critical judgements of particular governmental interventions: minority and majority, rights and consent, adolescence, capacity, and so on.
