Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture

Don't let the pink retro cover fool you ... a bookworm in a frilly ballgown is still, well, a bookworm. Not a judgement on author Amy Best, but the ingenuity in the concept and research behind this book is really not dealt justice by the pedantic writing. Having noticed the way the proms have taken on a life of their own since the ten or so years since I last donned a poufy pink dress, I was very eager to see what an academic study of this phenomenon. However, reading this book, I often found my fingers searching for the hard plastic comb binding often used on graduate school papers. Granted, the material in Prom Night likely did come from Best's doctoral research, but some cheekier writing is called for to keep lowly Bachelor's Degree holders like myself from being reminded of why we jumped into the commercial, instead of academic world.

This is an excellent book -- theoretically sophisticated but eminently readable. It takes the prom seriously as an event which is meaningful to kids and explores the way that the prom operates simultaneously as a site of social control and as an opportunity for resistance. On the former point, the author examines the way that the prom experience is mediated for kids by schools, parents, the market and popular culture in ways which reproduce and reinforce inequalities based on class, race, gender and sexuality. Further, she highlights the way that kids themselves participate in reproducing these inequalities. But she also looks to ways that kids resist all of the above, for example, through overt protest against non-inclusive proms (ie. boycott of a prom where interracial dating was prohibited), through the organization of alternate events (such as gay proms), or through symbolic acts of resistance by those who do attend (ie. girls in tuxedos). The author's analysis is particularly powerful because it is infused with respect for the kids who are the subjects of her study.