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Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults PDF

195 Pages·2021·17.967 MB·English
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i Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non- fiction writing, picture books, film and television, and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts commu- nicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality. Paul Venzo is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Paul has published widely on litera- ture for young people, with a particular focus on representations of iden- tity and sexuality. His writing can be found in publications such as the Journal of Homosexuality and the Journal of LGBT Youth, including the recent article ‘Mums, dads and the kids: representations of rainbow fam- ilies in children’s picture books’ (2020). Kristine Moruzi is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She published Constructing Girlhood Through the Periodical Press, 1850– 1915 in 2012. Her second mono- graph, From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840– 1940), with Michelle J Smith and Clare Bradford, was published in 2018. ii Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall, Current Series Editors ‘The Right Thing to Read’ A History of Australian Girl- Readers, 1910- 1960 Bronwyn Lowe Battling Girlhood Sympathy, Social Justice and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature Kristen B. Proehl Cyborg Saints Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction Carissa Turner Smith Out of Reach The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature Kate G. Harper The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults Edited by Heidi Hansson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Anka Ryall Terror and Counter- Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature Blanka Grzegorczyk ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature Brown and Nerdy Cristina Herrera Rulers of Literary Playgrounds Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children’s Literature Edited by Justyna Deszcz- Tryhubczak and Irena Barbara Kalla Antarctica in British Children’s Literature Sinéad Moriarty Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults Edited by Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi iii Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults Edited by Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi iv First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi to be identified as the author[/ s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978- 0-3 67- 67472- 4 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 0-3 67- 67474- 8 (pbk) ISBN: 978- 1-0 03- 13143- 4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK v Contents List of contributors vii Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction 1 KRISTINE MORUZI AND PAUL VENZO Shaping Sexual Subjectivities 13 2 ‘Just a Little Cut’: Censorship and Preadolescent Sexuality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 15 AUBA LLOMPART PONS 3 That ‘Tingly Feeling’: Sex and Sexuality in Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books 29 PAUL VENZO 4 Trans and Nonbinary Teen Voices and Memoir: (Non- )traditional Mirrors of (Non-) traditional Lives 44 ROBERT BITTNER 5 ‘Can Gay Boys Have Bromances?’: Regulating Masculinity and Sexuality in Gay Young Adult Novels 59 TROY POTTER Rethinking Sexuality and Girlhood 79 6 Postfeminism and Sexuality in the Fiction of Sarah J Maas 81 ELIZABETH LITTLE AND KRISTINE MORUZI vi vi Contents 7 Graphic Sexualities: Visual Negotiations of Queer Girls’ Sexuality and Desire in Graphic Narratives 96 LARA HEDBERG AND REBECCA HUTTON 8 ‘Are You Sure We’re Witches and not Puritans?’: Sexual Flexibility and Unrealised Desire in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina 108 DEBRA DUDEK The Politics of Sexuality and Desire 125 9 ‘You Two Seem to be the Same Person’: Death, Sexuality and Female Doubles in Chinese Young Adult Fiction and Film 127 CATHY YUE WANG 10 Intoxicated Masculinity, Allyship and Compulsory Heterosexuality in Young Adult Rape Narratives 140 AMBER MOORE AND ELIZABETH MARSHALL 11 On the Straight and Narrow: The Homonormalising of Australian Queer YA Literature in the Age of Marriage Equality 157 ADAM KEALLEY Index 178 vii Contributors Robert Bittner (PhD) is a sessional lecturer at Simon Fraser University. He recently completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) at the University of British Columbia, working with LGBTQ litera- ture for teens, as well as transgender and genderqueer teen reading habits, and specifically reactions to trans and queer representation. He has an MA in Children’s Literature from UBC and a PhD in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from Simon Fraser University. Robert is currently the President of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes and sits on a number of committees for the American Library Association. Debra Dudek is an Associate Professor in the English Program at Edith Cowan University. She has published internationally on visual and verbal texts for young people, including picture books, graphic novels, television, film, and novels. She is particularly interested in how texts for young people engage with social justice issues, and a focus on love and ethics informs her research more generally. Her research has been published in journals such as Papers, Jeunesse, Children’s Literature in Education, Ariel, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Overland; in books including Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2011), Seriality and Young People’s Texts (Palgrave, 2014), and Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017); and in her single- authored mono- graph The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them (Routledge, 2017). Lara Hedberg is a late- stage doctoral candidate at Deakin University and teaches in Children’s Literature and Media and Communication. Her research focuses on queer girls in young adult speculative fiction and the intersection of children’s literature and queer theory. She has published a chapter on bullying with Clare Bradford in Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures (2018), the article ‘Mums, dads and the kids: representations of rainbow families in children’s picture books’ viii viii Contributors within the Journal of LGBT Youth (2020) and, most recently, the co- authored chapter ‘Goldie Vance: Queer Girl Detective’ in The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader (forthcoming 2021). Rebecca Hutton (PhD) is a Teaching and Learning Officer in the Academic Support Office at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on children’s and young adult texts, with a particular interest in representations of sexuality and gender across genres and forms. Her publications include articles in academic journals such as Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, Interjuli, and The Journal of Popular Culture, as well as chapters in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre (with Clare Bradford), The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-T ale Cultures (with Emma Whatman), and The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader (forthcoming, with Lara Hedberg). Adam Kealley is undertaking his PhD as part of a collaboration between Curtin University, Western Australia and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His thesis explores the Australian Gothic and its potential for representing the impact of convictism on shaping homophobia in Australia, and its haunting effects on the contemporary queer young adult subject. His research interests span the Australian Gothic and queer young adult literature and was awarded the 2016 Children’s Literature in Education Emerging Scholar Award. Elizabeth Little is a PhD student at Deakin University and a secondary school teacher in northern Melbourne. She is passionate about litera- ture, education, sexuality and gender, and the girls who read Young Adult literature. In 2018 she completed a Master of Arts in Writing and Literature, completing a research project on A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas 2015) and The Bone Season (Shannon 2013). She plans to continue interrogating the presentation of female protagonists in YA fantasy. Auba Llompart Pons has a PhD in English Philology (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2014) and she specialises in English Literature. Her main research interests include Children’s Literature, Fairy Tale Studies, Fantasy, Gothic Studies, and Gender Studies. She currently teaches English language and culture at the Translation, Interpreting and Applied Languages Department at Universitat de Vic- Universitat Central de Catalunya. Elizabeth Marshall is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the co-e ditor of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media (2011; 2016), the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (Routledge, 2018), and the co- author of Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (Fordham, 2019). xi Contributors ix Amber Moore is a SSHRC-f unded PhD candidate and Killam Laureate at the University of British Columbia studying language and literacy education with the Faculty of Education. Her previous experience as a high school English teacher informs her research interests, which include adolescent literacy, feminist pedagogies, teacher education, and trauma literature, particularly young adult sexual assault narratives. Her scholarship can be found in English Education, English Journal, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Jeunesse, and Qualitative Inquiry, among others. She also enjoys writing poetry and creative nonfiction. Kristine Moruzi is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She published Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850– 1915 in 2012. Her second monograph, From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840– 1940), with Michelle J Smith and Clare Bradford, was published in 2018 by the University of Toronto Press. She has also co-e dited Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017), Girls’ School Stories, 1749– 1929 (Routledge, 2014), and Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840– 1950 (Springer, 2014). Troy Potter is a lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include the use of genre in adolescent literature to construct, engage with, and respond to contemporary concerns, particularly those relating to gender, sexuality, and disability. He is the author of Books for Boys: Manipulating Genre in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction (WVT Trier, 2018). Paul Venzo is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Paul has published widely on lit- erature for young people, with a particular focus on representations of identity and sexuality. His writing can be found in publications such as the Journal of Homosexuality and the Journal of LGBT Youth, including the recent article ‘Mums, dads and the kids: representations of rainbow families in children’s picture books’ (2020). Paul has contributed to numerous edited collections on both child and adult literature, including his chapter ‘The Season Before Death’ in Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art, and Film (Lexington, 2020). Paul is also the co- author of a marine science education picture book, due for release in 2021. Cathy Yue Wang is a lecturer in Department of Chinese Language and Literature, School of Humanities, Shanghai Normal University in China. She received her PhD from Macquarie University in Australia. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the transformation and adaptation of traditional stories in contemporary Chinese fantasy narratives. She

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