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"Lock Up Your Sons": Queering Young Adult Literature and Social Discourse

Young adult literature (YA) has been stereotypical in many of its portrayals of LGBTQ teens from the 1960s to the early 2000s, but three contemporary YA series--Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments, Sarah Rees Brennan's Demons trilogy, and Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales--indicate a change toward more nuanced characterizations. Using four categories--scriptedness, context, importance, and sexuality--to determine whether these representations of LGBTQ youth challenge or reiterate older tropes, my analysis indicates that YA has moved toward more complex representations of queerness, yet some normative discursive structures are still at work, such as poisonings or curses, supernatural parallels to coming out, and heteronormative humour. Although representations of queerness have diversified, then, the implicit ideologies in each author's portrayal of queerness demands closer attention.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:NSHD.ca#10222/15353
Date17 August 2012
CreatorsWheadon, Rebekah
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish

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