Fantasies of citizenship: adolescence and temporality in young adult literature

["childrens literature";young adult literature;queer theory;girlhood;fantasy literature;gender;citizenship;temporality

Sahn, Sarah F

关键词: ["childrens literature";    young adult literature;    queer theory;    girlhood;    fantasy literature;    gender;    citizenship;    temporality;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/92917/SAHN-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This project examines how the figure of the adolescent is represented, constructed, and disciplined as a potential citizen in young adult (YA) literature at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Engaging the field of children's and YA literature through queer and feminist theory, I analyze how the adolescent's proximity to, but inability to fully inhabit, normative adulthood disrupts totalizing narratives of development and citizenship.Queer theory has recently attended to the question of childhood through highbrow andadult literature and culture, perhaps most notably in Lee Edelman's No Future (2004) andKathryn Bond Stockton's The Queer Child (2009). Conversely, childhood studies and children’sliterature have engaged feminist and queer theory, but have not yet attended fully to the potentialof adolescence for theorizing alternatives to what José Muñoz calls "straight time," the orderlyprocession of marriage and reproduction dictated by the norms of white middle-classrespectability. Drawing on Muñoz's work on utopia and Stockton on queer childhood, Icomplicate recent conversations on queer temporality, community, and the queerness oranti-queerness of the child. My archive of popular and acclaimed YA fantasy literature of the lastthree decades engages the growing pervasiveness of powerful young women protagonists toexplore the complexities of community, belonging, and coming of age in literature for and aboutyoung people. As a locus of especially visible resistance to normative constructions of gender,race, and adult citizenship, the figure of the girl highlights the potential of adolescence fortheorizing alternatives to hegemonic discourses of self and community. The project as a wholeargues that recent YA literature imagines the adolescent as a figure for utopian possibility andcritical citizenship—what I argue is a kind of transformative citizenship—engaged in interrogating normalizing discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and community. Challenging thenotion that children’s and YA literature functions to inculcate young readers into normativecitizenship, I show how even mainstream literature for young people is engaged in rethinkingcitizenship practices in communities and collectivities not defined by the nation-state.Chapter One examines the intersections of adolescence, temporality, and citizenship inAvi’s Newbery Honor novel The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (1990). Set aboard asailing ship in 1832, the novel chronicles 13-year-old Charlotte's coming of age over the courseof her journey from England to Providence, Rhode Island. Her discovery of a planned mutinyforces Charlotte to confront her complicity with the systemic violence that underlies herprivileged world, and eventually to reject not only the limited model of American citizenshipdictated for her by her gender, race, and class, but also the imperative to transition out of theliminal space of adolescence. Charlotte thus becomes the paradigmatic image of the adolescentsuspended in transition that animates my analysis: Removed from the orderly, linear conceptionsof time defined by capital and the developmental imperative of what she calls her destiny, tobecome "a lady," Charlotte finds axes of movement previously unavailable to her and chooses toremain in a suspended, unpredictable, and cyclical temporality that reveals how adolescencedisrupts naturalized racial, classed, and gendered imperatives of adulthood and citizenship.Turning from historical fiction to medievalist fantasy, Chapter Two argues that thedevelopmental period of adolescence and the historical period of the Middle Ages are analogoustemporal "middles," bracketed off but with a tendency to trouble the boundaries between pastand future, fantasy and reality, the archaic and the modern, and the primitive and the civilized.Analyzing Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet (1983-1988), an early exemplar ofrecent trends in YA fantasy directed at girls, I argue that medievalist fantasy is especially well-suited to engaging the slippery temporality of adolescence to facilitate a transformativepolitics of growth and resistance. Focusing on the third novel of the series, in which theprotagonist Alanna is adopted by a tribe of the desert-dwelling Bazhir people who live under thecolonial rule of her native Tortall, the chapter shows how Alanna’s move to the marginal spaceof the desert stages potential for, and limits of, resistance to the patriarchal and colonialist powerstructures she is subject to even as she bears them with her.Chapter Three focuses on the relationships among the protagonists of the threeloosely-connected novels of Kristin Cashore’s Seven Kingdom's Trilogy (2008-2012) totheorize the potential of transformative citizenship as a source of community and worldmakingthat transcends political, geographic, and even temporal boundaries. The protagonists of this YAfantasy series all possess extraordinary powers that mark them as dangerous to theircommunities and make them vulnerable to dehumanization and exploitation by those in power.Through their contacts with one another, they form an alternative kinship network that allowsthem to reimagine themselves as healers and protectors. Offered alternative avenues of growthfrom the monstrosities prescribed by their societies, their metamorphoses transform the worldaround them.In contrast to the utopian visions in Cashore's trilogy, Chapter Four examines the limitsof transformative citizenship in an analysis of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games Trilogy. KatnissEverdeen lacks even the limited the privilege and access that allows the protagonists of Cashoreand Pierce's novels to bring about change in their respective homes. I engage the temporaldisruptions of personal and historical trauma—a thread throughout this dissertation—tounderstand the impossibility of complete liberation from histories of violence and exploitation.Finally, I consider the utopic longings of Collins's dystopia, even as it disappoints expectations of both the revolutionaries in the text and many readers who desire Katniss's unequivocaltriumph. Collins's trilogy provides glimpses of utopia even in the midst of horror, offering adynamic vision of a utopia that is always in process.Contributing to queer theory, children’s literature, and American literary studies,"Fantasies of Citizenship" shows how YA literature offers dynamic alternatives to stagnatingvisions of normative adulthood, citizenship, and futurity. Both no longer and not yet, theadolescent’s unstable temporality emerges as a generative site from which to engage processes ofcitizen formation, collectivity, and worldmaking.