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 communicate 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.
Author(s): Paul Venzo; Kristine Moruzi
Series: Children's Literature and Culture
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 194
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Notes
References
Shaping Sexual Subjectivities
2 ‘just a Little Cut’: Censorship and Preadolescent Sexuality in Philip Pullman’s his Dark Materials
‘Just a Little Cut’
Desiring Knowledge and Knowing Desire
Just Tell Them Stories
Notes
References
3 That ‘Tingly Feeling’: Sex and Sexuality in Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books
Scholarship Around Sex Sducation Picture Books
The Purposes and Pleasures of Sex
Representations of Diversity
Showing: The Role of Aesthetics
Telling: Sex Education As Storytelling
Conclusion
Notes
References
4 Trans and Nonbinary Teen Voices and Memoir: (Non-)traditional Mirrors of (Non-)traditional Lives
Fame and Privacy
Physical Bodies, Dysphoria, and Sexual Intimacy
Conclusions
Notes
References
5 ‘Can Gay Boys Have Bromances?’: Regulating Masculinity and Sexuality in Gay Young Adult Novels
Reading the Gay Bromance
The Limits of Coming Out in a Bromance
How to Love in a Bromance
Without the Bro, It’s a Gay Romance
Conclusion
Notes
References
Rethinking Sexuality and Girlhood
6 Postfeminism and Sexuality in the Fiction of Sarah J Maas
The Gothic, Fantasy and Postfeminism in Young Adult Literature
Sexuality in A Court of Thorn and Roses Series
Sexuality in the Throne of Glass Series
Conclusion
References
7 Graphic Sexualities: Visual Negotiations of Queer Girls’ Sexuality and Desire in Graphic Narratives
Note
References
8 ‘are You Sure We’re Witches and Not Puritans?’: Sexual Flexibility and Unrealised Desire in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Comic
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Comic
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Netflix Series
Postscript
References
The Politics of Sexuality and Desire
9 ‘You Two Seem to Be the Same Person’: Death, Sexuality and Female Doubles in Chinese Young Adult Fiction and Film
Coming of Age As Girls in Post-Socialist China
The Good Girl and the Bad Girl
Between the Homosexual and the Homosocial
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 Intoxicated Masculinity, Allyship and Compulsory Heterosexuality in Young Adult Rape Narratives
Rape Culture and #metoo
(In)toxic(ated) Heteromasculinity
Good Girls/bad Girls
Allyship
Conclusion
Notes
References
11 On the Straight and Narrow: The Homonormalising of Australian Queer Ya Literature in the Age of Marriage Equality
The Homonormalising of the Marriage Equality Agenda
Micah Johnson Goes West: Shame and the Delegitimisation of the Non-Monogamous Queer
The Things We Promise: Resurrecting the Threat of aids to Proscribe Queer Sex
The Love Interest: Pitting the ‘good’ Queer Against the ‘bad’
Conferring Legitimacy: The Heterosexual, Biological Family As Gatekeeper of Society
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
