Glendale Mall

Sometimes a Mall

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a mall is just a mall. Except that this is almost never true. For Americans who grew up in any city large enough to have its own shopping mall (or who grew up next to a city that was large enough to have its own shopping mall), the mall was a place where many of them learned to be grown-ups. Or at least how grown-ups would be if they had a more-than-usual amount of disposable income and no job to get to. And a lot of hormones to work off.

This paper examines the Glendale as a site in which the commerce that is enacted is far less important that the growing-up that occurs there. The fact that teenagers use malls as a sounding board for their adult lives is never an explicit aspect of the identity of the Glendale...
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