Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Derritt Mason

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781496830999
  9781496830982
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496831002
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Selected as the Children's Literature Association's 2023 Honor Book Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture—queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Notes on an Anxious Genre: Queer Young Adult Literature and Culture
• Chapter 1: Visibility: Growing Sideways in I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
• Chapter 2: Risk: The Queer Pedagogy of The Man Without a Face
• Chapter 3: HIV/AIDS: Playing with Failure in Caper in the Castro and Two Boys Kissing
• Chapter 4: Dystopia: Queer Sex and the Unbearable in Grasshopper Jungle
• Chapter 5: Horror and Camp: Monsters and Wizards and Ghosts (oh my!) in Big Mouth
• Chapter 6: Getting Better: Children’s Literature Theory and the It Gets Better Project
• Chapter 7: Not Getting Better: Sex and Self-Harm in It Gets Better / Glee Fanfiction
• Conclusion: Immaturity: Reflections on the “Great (Queer) YA Debate”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author