This week’s guest contributor is Dr. Sophia Sarigianides. For the past few years, she has been pushing me to think deeply about how I teach and research Young Adult Literature. She is always thought provoking. Even when I don’t agree with her, I find that I keep thinking about what she has to say. She is exactly the kind of academic and teacher who encourages engagement with new ideas. As a result, she is a perfect candidate for a keynote speech at almost any YA conference. Indeed, she will be one of the academic keynotes at the 2016 Gayle A. Zeiter Young Adult and Children’s Literature Conference this June. See more about keynote speakers here and watch for more details soon about registration at the Zeiter Center website. If you are in or near Las Vegas we have a warm-up event on March 5, 2016 with some more great writers and academics. Okay, enough promotional chat. Take it away Sophia.
Examining Youth and Sexuality in YA Literature
I didn’t expect my interest in studying representations of adolescence in young adult literature to lead me to focus on youth and sexuality, but it did. My thinking about young people and our ideas and expectations of them hasn’t been the same since.
When asked to teach my first YA course as a doctoral student, I felt intimidated. The graduate program drew teacher candidates with strong literary preparation and I wanted to ensure that their treatment of YAL felt rigorous to them, that they felt challenged by the course. To push myself and my students, I opened a copy of Lesko’s Act Your Age! A cultural construct of adolescence that had been sitting on my shelf for years. I had no idea whether it even made sense to think about Lesko’s ideas about adolescence in a YA class, but something propelled me to try anyway.
That something was likely the fact that I felt implicated by Lesko’s exposure of how most of us think about adolescence through a range of stereotypes: reckless, overly-emotional, irresponsible, immature. I loved the middle and high school students I had taught in California, but I thought of them through these “confident characterizations” of young people that ultimately demeaned them as people.
I didn’t expect my interest in studying representations of adolescence in young adult literature to lead me to focus on youth and sexuality, but it did. My thinking about young people and our ideas and expectations of them hasn’t been the same since.
When asked to teach my first YA course as a doctoral student, I felt intimidated. The graduate program drew teacher candidates with strong literary preparation and I wanted to ensure that their treatment of YAL felt rigorous to them, that they felt challenged by the course. To push myself and my students, I opened a copy of Lesko’s Act Your Age! A cultural construct of adolescence that had been sitting on my shelf for years. I had no idea whether it even made sense to think about Lesko’s ideas about adolescence in a YA class, but something propelled me to try anyway.
That something was likely the fact that I felt implicated by Lesko’s exposure of how most of us think about adolescence through a range of stereotypes: reckless, overly-emotional, irresponsible, immature. I loved the middle and high school students I had taught in California, but I thought of them through these “confident characterizations” of young people that ultimately demeaned them as people.
Slowly, I revised my YA course for English teachers to foreground the ways that a body of writing that names its readership—“young adults”—represents adolescence. For every YA book read in our class, we think about the key question, How do YA texts represent adolescence/ts? Joined by like-minded colleagues, Robert Petrone and Mark Lewis, the three of us coined a name for this approach to studying literary texts: the youth lens. You can read more about it and how to use it in some of the writing we have done together: in “The Youth Lens: Analyzing Adolescents/ce in Literary Texts”; “How Re-thinking Adolescence Helps Re-imagine the Teaching of English” (and the special issue of English Journal in which you can find this and other articles focused on adolescence); and in the upcoming Winter 2016 issue of The ALAN Review “Acting Adolescent? Critical Examinations of the Youth-Adult Binary in Feed and Looking for Alaska.”
After getting a chance to think more about how this approach to studying YAL affected pre-service teachers, who sometimes found it risky, I wanted to study how experienced, in-service teachers working in a poor, predominantly black and Latino school might react. That’s where the focus on sex came up.
I’d been teaching Francesca Lia Block’s (1989) Weetzie Bat for years in my YA course, and pre-service students often worried about the depiction of sexual young people, cohabitating, and choosing to parent. I actually loved focusing on these depictions to help us notice our assumptions about youth. So I used this text in my study with experienced teachers, too, thinking that these depictions might seem less risky to them. I can be very naïve. Working with these smart, dedicated teachers, listening to them worry about what such a depiction might seemingly endorse for their students really, really taught me a lot that had been staring me in the face for years: most of us hold to these expectations of young people as sexually innocent and it affects our curriculum and certainly our text selections as well as the ways we think about and treat youth in our classes. I talk more about these assumptions and their repercussions here and if anyone has trouble accessing these pieces, contact me directly.
I’d been teaching Francesca Lia Block’s (1989) Weetzie Bat for years in my YA course, and pre-service students often worried about the depiction of sexual young people, cohabitating, and choosing to parent. I actually loved focusing on these depictions to help us notice our assumptions about youth. So I used this text in my study with experienced teachers, too, thinking that these depictions might seem less risky to them. I can be very naïve. Working with these smart, dedicated teachers, listening to them worry about what such a depiction might seemingly endorse for their students really, really taught me a lot that had been staring me in the face for years: most of us hold to these expectations of young people as sexually innocent and it affects our curriculum and certainly our text selections as well as the ways we think about and treat youth in our classes. I talk more about these assumptions and their repercussions here and if anyone has trouble accessing these pieces, contact me directly.
Fascinated by these questions, I thought I would investigate them further with an elective course I taught last year called Theory and the YA Novel. In this course, I felt more liberty in selecting texts without having to worry as much about challenges to using them in classrooms, but to pursue this question of how sexuality is depicted in texts aimed for youth. So, for the first time, I read Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. This fantastic and brutal book, published in Australia without the “YA” label but in the U.S. with the YA label to critical acclaim, allows a gripping exploration of youth and sexuality within and beyond the realms of reality. I highly recommend it.
One of the students in that course who also happens to be an English Education major decided to make these questions the focus of her year-long senior honors research and writing project. I want to close off this post with a discussion of her work. Amber Robert (who was tickled to hear that I was featuring her work in my posting) wanted to explore the question of how adolescent female sexuality was depicted in texts featuring youth. Her project ended up focusing on three texts: Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade; the comedy film Easy A; and Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
Amber’s project brought together a YA text I consider a classic (Make Lemonade); a very popular film (Easy A); and a book that was new to me, an award-winning text focused on LGBTQ themes (Cameron Post). I love what Amber did with her paper and how much I learned about depictions of female sexuality in texts featuring youth from our year-long conversations. For Amber, these texts grew progressively more transgressive in the way they featured young women as sexual.
In Wolff’s fantastic novel, we are helped to revise our ideas of young mothers by accompanying LaVaughn on her change of heart about Jolly as she helps her take care of her two kids. But in the end, in order for LaVaughn’s mom to change her mind—and perhaps some of us to change ours about Jolly?—Jolly has to heroically save her child from choking. It’s tough to focus on teen pregnancy in YAL without judging the youth, especially the young women (as Kokkola compellingly shows us in her book focused on this issue in YAL). In other words, as much as I love this novel and teach it regularly—especially since Wolff purposely left out racial references to allow readers to notice when we map them onto the women in this text (something like Toni Morrison in her only short story “Recitatif”)—the book foregrounds the difficulties that accompany female teen sexuality through pregnancy.
Amber’s project brought together a YA text I consider a classic (Make Lemonade); a very popular film (Easy A); and a book that was new to me, an award-winning text focused on LGBTQ themes (Cameron Post). I love what Amber did with her paper and how much I learned about depictions of female sexuality in texts featuring youth from our year-long conversations. For Amber, these texts grew progressively more transgressive in the way they featured young women as sexual.
In Wolff’s fantastic novel, we are helped to revise our ideas of young mothers by accompanying LaVaughn on her change of heart about Jolly as she helps her take care of her two kids. But in the end, in order for LaVaughn’s mom to change her mind—and perhaps some of us to change ours about Jolly?—Jolly has to heroically save her child from choking. It’s tough to focus on teen pregnancy in YAL without judging the youth, especially the young women (as Kokkola compellingly shows us in her book focused on this issue in YAL). In other words, as much as I love this novel and teach it regularly—especially since Wolff purposely left out racial references to allow readers to notice when we map them onto the women in this text (something like Toni Morrison in her only short story “Recitatif”)—the book foregrounds the difficulties that accompany female teen sexuality through pregnancy.
I have seen Easy A_ many, many times and think it’s enormously hilarious and entertaining. In Amber’s project, though, we noticed that though Emma Stone’s character takes on the slut label in clothing and feigned behavior in a resistant move pushing back against how her social community judges her (much like the Hester Prynne whose story she is responding to from English class), she’s punished for it by her judgmental peers, and ultimately remains a virgin until the last frame of the movie. In other words, her transgressions are contained within the viewer’s hoped-for innocence for her, and the film isn’t as transgressive as it might seem. One has to wonder, too, what would happen if Emma Stone’s character were black or Latina. Would the slut performance remain as comical and playful, or do social views of non-white female adolescence differ greatly with regard to sexuality as many scholars argue?
It was the book that Amber got me to read for the first time, Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, where the most transgressive depiction of female adolescent sexuality could be seen, and this in a book featuring a white lesbian protagonist. Highly unusual for a text featuring adolescents, Danforth’s text depicts Cameron falling in love, enjoying sex, having multiple partners without punishment, and, though she’s depicted as suffering as a result of her sexuality, she transcends this social judgment by finding a community of peers—and a likely adult—who support her. Given dominant views of youths’ sexuality, texts like Danforth’s offer young people a fresh, surprising, supportive narrative to counter the worry and anxiety that prevails in most YA texts featuring sexual youth.
So why does all this matter?
Following this “parlour conversation” about youth sexuality and how it’s represented in YAL primarily aimed at a youth audience is important. Youth are sexual. We were; they are. There’s no question about this. Yet, most of the literature aimed at youth punishes characters for their sexuality (see Kokkola’s book mentioned earlier). Imagine what these messages do for young readers without recourse to other views about sexuality. Imagine what it does to youth for whom a sexually innocent adolescence is unavailable. It matters greatly for us to think about these questions as we make text selections and recommendations for teachers, for young people, and for the many adults also reading YAL.
Following this “parlour conversation” about youth sexuality and how it’s represented in YAL primarily aimed at a youth audience is important. Youth are sexual. We were; they are. There’s no question about this. Yet, most of the literature aimed at youth punishes characters for their sexuality (see Kokkola’s book mentioned earlier). Imagine what these messages do for young readers without recourse to other views about sexuality. Imagine what it does to youth for whom a sexually innocent adolescence is unavailable. It matters greatly for us to think about these questions as we make text selections and recommendations for teachers, for young people, and for the many adults also reading YAL.
Thanks Sophia.
Click below for a flier about our March 5th conference
Click below for a flier about our March 5th conference
| draft3_gazmarch5_poster.pdf |
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