ABSTRACT
Academic scholarship hasn’t engaged seriously with adolescent love and romance. The only discourses within which adolescent subjectivity is spoken about are those of protection, consumption and risk. Romance among middle-class urban adolescent boys is viewed by schools, teachers and parents as either not serious – as ‘puppy love’ – or as ‘dangerous’, thus a reason for moral panic. In this chapter I critically engage with young people’s narratives about their romantic lives in an attempt to unsettle the discourse of adolescent love as puppy love and rethink gender relations. I examine adolescent male romance and consumerism, experiences and ideas of heterosexual romance, the relationship between sex and romance, and experiences of indeterminacy, failure, and uncertainty. These, I argue, question our ideas of male desire and allow me to re-conceptualize adolescent male desire.
