Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults

195 Pages·2021·17.967 MB·English

by  Paul Venzo, Kristine Moruzi

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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
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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
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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’
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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).
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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