Dr Leah Phillips

Forthcoming with Bloomsbury

This book posits popular and media culture as limiting—if not also harmful—to adolescent girls, while also demonstrating how mythopoeic YA fantasy (a vein of speculative fiction) contests the dominant, hegemonic narratives of female adolescence. Popular and media culture is a discursive space emanating from the West, particularly the United States and its culture of celebrity. Yet, it is also the digital and visual space of social media, where adolescent girls are increasingly “living” more and more of their lives. Through heavily stylized and always-edited images, this dominant space offers adolescent girls a very narrow and limited means of becoming self, one insisting on a discourse of self-through-appearance at the expense of the body’s fleshiness. Demonstrating a creationary (world-building) mind-set, mythopoeic YA fantasy fiction offers a sub or counter-cultural space in which alternative frameworks of living and being an adolescent female body are possible. Specifically, the sometimes-fantastical bodily transformations available in this genre fiction offering a re-mapping of the body’s curves and contours, one taking “lumps,” “bumps,” and “scars” into account. Drawing from a variety of fields: YAL and feminist theory, studies of myth and folklore as well as popular culture and cultural anthropology, this book engages liminality—the adolescent (between child/adult), the body (between self/other), and young adult literature (YAL) (between children’s/adult literature)—because the liminal frustrates the system of binary oppositions structuring and ordering the dominant space.
In this space, hegemonic discourse privileges a developmental model of adolescence that the hero’s journey narrates, that is, the journey of adolescence and the hero’s journey are essentially the same: both endorse a white, youthful, able-bodied, male figure and both aim, through a linear framework, to maintain heteronormative values and ideals, while also reinforcing patriarchy. The adolescent becomes a stable, heterosexual adult; the hero wins the princess’s hand in marriage. In other words, these two journeys chart the same hegemonic story, in specific manifestations. The hero is the adolescent; the adolescent is the hero. Moreover, their shared fantasy of achieving a stable, secure, and, by default, heterosexual (adult) identity is only ever that, a fantasy. It is the ideal, and ideals are not expressions of things as they are but, rather, conceptions of things as they are desired to be—by, in this case, hegemonic, patriarchal discourse. Furthermore, within both these frames, the body marks the adolescent/hero as adolescent/hero. The adolescent is adolescent because of pubertal bodily changes, and the hero is hero because of his bodily strength and potency, characteristics also associated with the ideal adolescent body. Yet, this ideal—expressed by both discourses—also refuses the body, especially the female body.
However, mythopoeic YA fantasy, that is written by women and for adolescent girls, challenges these dominant hegemonic discourses of the body and of its appearance, and while such challenging occurs in many ways and in many books, this book focuses on the mythopoeic YA fantasy of Tamora Pierce and Marissa Meyer. Spanning just over three decades (1983 to present), Pierce and Meyer’s texts parallel the narratives arcs—excesses of expectation, Girl Power and increasing emphasis on appearance—that have coalesced into their current forms within the discursive space of popular and media culture. Pierce’s Tortall Universe and Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles offer not only a particularly provocative timeline, serving as a platform from which to consider other texts within the genre, but they also overtly feature bodies of instability, directly countering the images of stability and perfection dominating hegemonic discourse. The cross-dressing, “glamoured,” menstruating, shape-shifting and cybernetic bodies available in these texts offer alternatives to both the hegemonic discourses of the mythic tradition (ideal heroic form) as well as the visuality of popular and media culture, a space influenced by the discourses of myth and the one most directly affecting contemporary adolescent girls.
While mythopoeic YA fantasy is posited as a counter or subcultural space to popular and media culture, the relationship between the two is not binary. Rather, the two discourses—hegemonic fantasies of being a girl and fantastical narrations of being a girl—are interwoven and overlapping. In short, where popular and media culture offers illusions of choice, impossible ideals and silences, mythopoeic YA fantasy—because it is fantasy—offers bodies that express multiplicity and difference, thereby offering frameworks for living and being a body that challenge the dominant, hegemonic fantasy of adolescence. This reconfiguring of the body is essential. Because the body is that by which the girl is excluded, the body must be mapped differently for inclusion—of difference, change, and multiplicity—to occur. Thus, this book maps these frameworks, speaking from the silenced position within, and between, the binary oppositions—popular and media culture/mythopoeic YA fantasy, male/female, mind/body, human/animal, human/machine, abled/disabled—underpinning this discursive construction. It does so to ask: what happens to the self, and to its relationship with other selves, when it is conceived of as both embodied and non-binary?

Forthcoming:

While there is wealth of young adult (YA) fantasy literature available to adolescents today, this chapter engages a specific vein of fantasy, one that I term mythopoeic YA fantasy. A thriving subgenre of speculative fiction, as well as a part of the wider field of YA literature (YAL), mythopoeic YA fantasy is, not uncomplicatedly, a Tolkienian inspired vein of fantasy with “high fantasy” as its closest kin (cf. Sullivan; Alexander). It also closely aligns with what has recently been called feminist YA fantasy (cf. Rhodes), though both genres offer particular nuances. Coming into being in the early-1980s with the works of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley, mythopoeic YA fantasy not only has a lengthy history, but it is also an ever-growing genre. In other words, this is not simply “speculative fiction,” the amorphous category into which young adult literature specialist Michael Cart places — because they all have fantastical elements — fantasy, science fiction, dystopias, and the “paranormal” (Young Adult Literature 101–104). Yes, mythopoeic YA fantasy is a part of this wider genre, but it is also a distinct genre. This fantasy, more clearly than any other, demonstrates a tie to traditional mythic narratives, including myths, legends, and folktales. The stories shared by cultural groups that not only describe a world’s creation but that also narrate expected behavior within that world (cf. Eliade; Malinowski; Bascom).

While the mythic aspect of this literature engenders a fundamental sense of world-creating and world-shaping, mythopoeic YA fantasy’s role as guide is heightened by its existence within the field of YAL. That is, mythopoeic YA fantasy is a genre existing within a specific field of literature and both genre and field contribute to mythopoeic YA fantasy’s overall configuration and purpose. Like children’s literature, YAL addresses a specific audience, the young adult. Within this rests an underlying assumption that YAL performs, or at least has the potential to perform, a particular function in the lives of ‘real’ adolescents. As Cart states, “to see oneself in the pages of a young adult book is to receive the reassurance that one is not alone after all, not other, not alien but, instead, a viable part of a larger community of beings who share a common humanity” (“The Value of Young Adult Literature,” n. pag.). In this way, the YA book serves as a mirror for the adolescent; it offers a way of being in this world (cf. Tatum 2009; Bodart 2006; Dail and Leonard 2011; DasGupta 2011). It is my contention that mythopoeic YA fantasy uses this saturated positioning — its mythic heritage and being YAL — to offer alternative frameworks, through the worlds it creates and the female heroes it offers, of living and being an adolescent female. In short, as a sub or counter-cultural fantasy literature within the field of YAL, mythopoeic YA fantasy is intensely preoccupied with expanding the positions available to adolescent female girls by creating worlds where the impossible is possible.

Thus, while guiding or shaping is not inherently problematic — we need maps, they help us navigate uncertain territories, find our place within the world — the images of perfection (‘photoshopped’ magazine covers) dominating the discursive space of female adolescence in contemporary Western culture are problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, the dominant hegemonic maps associated with adolescence foreclose possibilities to adolescent girls by trapping them within a body that is always at odd with the ideal (Phillips). However, it is my contention that mythopoeic YA fantasy challenges the dominant hegemonic constructions of female adolescence — that one must be able-bodied and attractive — by featuring adolescent female bodies that change, break, bleed, and may not always be entirely human. Participating in the cultural processes of myth and of interpellation, mythopoeic YA fantasy is principally about creating a space in which bodies of difference are possible. Thus, this chapter focuses on how mythopoeic YA fantasy creates spaces of possibility, while also considering the bodies of difference available because of, and through, these places. Alongside this, I offer defining characteristics of the genre, as well as examples of mythopoeic YA fantasy.

In contemporary Western culture, there is not only a preoccupation with mapping female adolescence — so that those of us who are not adolescent girls may define them as such — but there is also a popular consensus that adolescent girls need maps — to guide them through their transformation into women. Caught in the middle of the child/adult binary, the adolescent girl is “on the road” towards adulthood (Hyde 6), hence the heightened​ relevance of maps. However, while maps are critical to the adolescent girl’s becoming-woman, they are not guaranteed to provide positive models of either being-adolescent girl or of becoming-woman. Maps have the power to offer amazing potential or to foreclose it and the dominant, hegemonic maps of contemporary Western culture do the latter. These maps foreclose possibility to adolescent girls by trapping them within a body that is always at odds with the ideal, a trapping that is engendered by the “truth” of scientific discourse and reflected, and reinforced, in popular and media culture.
However, there are alternatives. Mythopoeic young adult (YA) fantasy offers a sub- or counter-cultural space in which alternative maps of living and being an adolescent female body are possible. Participating in the cultural work of mythic literatures — establishing the world and its order while also charting expected behaviors (cf. Eliade; Malinowski; Bascom) — mythopoeic YA fantasy, especially that which is written by women and for adolescent girls, offers a particular space in which hegemonic discourses of perfection, as they are prioritised in contemporary Western culture, may be disrupted and in which new kinds of behaviours may be charted. Thus, I contend that mythopoeic YA fantasy literature, a literature particularly concerned with hailing and interpellating an adolescent audience (Althusser), is challenging the teleologically linear, flat, and limited maps of contemporary Western culture. Crucially, this literature does so through a mapping sensibility, that is, this predominantly Secondary World fantasy is concerned with re-mapping the terrain of female adolescence by featuring both maps of its story-worlds as well as an ethos of (re)mapping, or (re)creating.

Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books appear to be about the traditionally construed hero’s journey, though with a female hero rather than the conventional male. Superficially, this change seems insignificant: the “monomyth” is reproduced. Founded upon binary oppositions, this monomyth is the male hero’s journey – the traditional journey. However, while these female heroes may appear to conform, this paper explores how, upon a close reading of the narration of two particular moments of change, or “transcendence”, within that journey, the necessary structure collapses. The journey, as is traditionally conceived, is impossible.

The first instance works to construct the apparently stable body as changeable, through the narration of shape-shifting. Through this reading, the obviousness of the body (and of identity) is explored and troubled. The second instance works, through the narration of transition into a womanhood, to question the individuality of the body. The body is again produced as changeable, but this transition works to expand readings beyond individual subjectivity to construct the body as operating within a collective. While collapsing traditional conceptions of myth, these readings also work to reposition and rearticulate the female body outside of myth’s masculine discourse, allowing a reinterpretation of that body in terms of the feminine.

In this article I explore how mythopoeic Young Adult (YA) fantasy offers examples of living and being an adolescent female body that challenge the dominant, hegemonic discourses dictating the adolescent girl’s appearance in the West’s image-saturated culture. I begin by establishing the features of mythopoeic YA fantasy, before looking at Daine in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet and Cinder(ella) in Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles. Daine’s shape-shifting body and Cinder’s cybernetic one offer bodily change as an integral part of the (adolescent female) body, as opposed to the fixed, perfection required by the fantasy femininity offered in popular culture, including print, televisual and social media. Employing a reading of touch in order to explore the multiplicity that is available on, and through, these bodies, I question the representational economy dominating the hegemonic discursive construction of the adolescent girl.

In lieu of an abstract,

"Addressing the complexities of growing up, Judy Blume’s books for young people — especially Forever (1975) in its depiction of adolescent sexual awakening — have guided countless teenagers through the delights and trials of adolescence, the years between childhood and adulthood. Blume’s earlier Deenie (1973) deals with adolescent body image, and her iconic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) with puberty, particularly menarche. Forever, however, takes adolescence to the cusp of adulthood by addressing sex, a subject many adults would prefer to keep from children. Thus, while the novel’s premise, boy meets girl, is quite simple, the novel’s approach to adolescent sexuality is, still, revolutionary, especially in its specific concern with female sexual awakening."

In lieu of an abstract

"Author, teacher, mentor, tireless opponent of censorship and the guru of girlhood are just a few of the appellatives Judy Blume has acquired over her nearly fifty-year career as a writer for children and young adults. Through the adventures of Margaret, Deenie, Katherine and a host of others, Blume frankly explores racism, religion, family life, menarche, sexuality, body image, and what it means to be a girl while also legitimising and celebrating the interior lives of young girls. Indeed, Judy Blume's role in the lives of girls and women is indelible. With several of her seminal works — Are You There God? It's Me, Margret (1970), Deenie (1973), and Forever (1975) — first appearing in the early 1970s, Blume is also central to the golden age of young adult literature (YA) and thus to contemporary perceptions of the field. However, while Blume’s books are celebrated, they also face some of the harshest censorship associated with children’s and young adult literature."

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph:

Melvin Burgess’s Junk — or Smack in the US — marked a turning point in young adult (YA) fiction in the UK, a field within YA now known as UKYA. The novel’s bleak yet realistic portrayal of two teenager’s descent into heroin addiction offers frank, honest discussions of drugs and drug culture, including squatting, prostitution, and teen pregnancy. First published in 1996 by Andersen Press, Burgess contends that Junk was “an experiment”, both for him and his publishers, pushing the boundaries of “teenage fiction” in the UK, which, at the time, was aimed at younger teens, not those over thirteen/fourteen (Burgess, “Junk (Smack)”). Addressing the older end of the, then only potential, teenage market, Junk revolutionised UKYA. In separate interviews with Adolescent Identities, children’s and YA editor Sarah Shaffi and YA author Sophie Cameron both cite Junk as formative to UKYA and their teenage reading (“Adolescent Identities”).

The first in a 3-part series for the American Childhoods series on H-Net, What is YA? begins framing how I conceptualise YA in my research. In short, I see YA as a field of literature and media marked by liminality. This piece defines those terms, while also situating my arguments.

Held on the 13th of December 2017, Identities in YA marks a turning point in the study of young adult fiction. In this conference report, I not only share information about the day but also situate the conference within the wider field of YA studies and use this positioning to articulate a mini-State of YA

In ‘realistic’ young adult (YA) literature, pregnancy is typically treated with disdain. Thus, when narrations of pregnancy do appear in YA literature, they typically portray pregnancy, and subsequent parenthood, as problematic. This refusal to engage pregnancy as anything more than a problem offers a heightened instance of wider discourses in this genre that aim to maintain conservation, hegemonic ideas; to limit adolescent girls’ control over their bodies by telling them that they shouldn’t display sexuality or “sleep around”. This limiting of the body’s sexuality is embedded in contemporary Western culture’s dominant image of acceptable girlhood: the girl is young, fit (both sense of the word) and certainly not pregnant.

“Breaking News: Woman is Expecting a Baby”

This was how the Huffington Post UK reported the news that the Duchess of Cambridge, better known as Kate, is expecting her second child.[1] Over the course of the next several months, Kate, will be reduced to our fascination with her clothes, changes in hairstyle and – most importantly – that growing bump. She will become (is becoming) Kate Middleton: walking-womb. Thus, while I truly appreciate HuffPost UK’s gentle mockery of itself (and media outlets the world over), the mockery only serves to indicate just how much this pregnancy is not (or will not be) normal, even by the (abnormal) standards of pregnancy. Kate’s pregnancy – and our growing concern with her growing bump – serves to mark a peculiar preoccupation with the pregnant form.

In Wolf-Speaker, the second book of Tamora Pierce’s Immortal’s quartet, the male badger god informs Daine, the quartet’s shapeshifting female-hero, that she is to “set this whole valley to rights” on behalf of the “fish, fowl, four leggers, two leggers, and no leggers” living within it (1994, 201). This valley is Dunlath, a fief in the fictional Kingdom of Tortall, and one at risk of utter destruction as a group of nobles and mages plot rebellion against the King, incited by the discovery of opals, a rare and incredibly valuable natural resource within this world. Drawing on her ability to speak, and crucially to listen, to all the creatures populating Dunlath, “human, immortals and beasts” (199), Daine is to “shape a bridge between kindreds” to not only stop the rebellion but, and more importantly, to also save the valley and inhabitants (1994, 201).

This paper will explore the “bridges” Daine builds, as well as the ones she embodies, as a shapeshifting, teenage activist tasked with uniting the denizens — human, animal, and immortal — of Dunlath so that together they may save it and themselves from the conspirators destroying it. This account of relationality and cooperation — between beings as well as between self and body — demonstrates how a self might be “scored by relationality into uniqueness” (Battersby 1998, 7). In so doing, the novel offers an alternative to the narrow, limiting and exclusionary narratives of individualism at work in mainstream contemporary culture, a framework that has implications for what it means to be human.

Mythopoeic YA tells female-hero stories; it narrates the adventures of adolescent girls who are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be hero, girl, and even human. In so doing, this subgenre of YA speculative fiction intervenes in the paradigm of (white, non-disabled, neuronormative, heterosexual, cis) male superiority established and naturalised by traditional hero stories, like those of Moses, Oedipus, Hercules, Odysseus and Beowulf. As the personification of reason, order, and that which is ‘good’, these men, who are also often god-touched, demonstrate how one is meant to be within a given community or belief system — at the expense of those who do not look (male, white, young, able) and act (with superiority) as they do, owing to a structure of opposition underpinning the hero story. This system imposes disparity and otherness on that which is ‘not-hero’ (monster, body, woman) to violently ensure the hero’s heroicness. For the system to be maintained, a clearly defined gap, a schism, must exist between those opposing sides lest they risk bleeding into one another. If there is no indisputably blank space between hero and monster, they might not be so different; they might be the same. Female-heroes not only exist in and through ‘blank’ spaces, but they also do so from the ‘othered’ (male/female) position, disrupting the violent hierarchy, radical alterity and erasure, particularly of bodily difference, required by the hero story’s logic of opposition.
          As this paper will address, the body is the core battleground, the site upon which the requirements of opposition unfold: the body is both the first and most intimate boundary, serving to preserve the difference between, for example, Self and Other; it is also the Other within the Self, as such the body is the most fundamental threat to the entire system. Archetypal hero stories, including mainstream examples of YA fantasy, attempt to allay the body’s disruptive potential by, centrally, erasing markers of difference (race, class, gender, ability). Crucially, while this erasure — that is a refusal — affects anyone not meeting the archetype’s narrow and limiting norms, the resulting alterity falls most heavily on adolescent girls, especially if their body is also Black or Brown, disabled, or otherwise not performing hyper fantasy femininity, even more so when markers overlap as such bodies cannot perform the absence of meaning required by binary oppositions. The female-hero intervenes in this narrative by including the body and its inherent ambiguity within the heroic frame.

Adolescent girls are at the forefront of language evolution. Their playful and innovative communication methods — hyperbole, acronyms, images, and emoticons — are changing how we all speak. However, despite an increased presence in contemporary media culture, mainstream views systematically censure them. Society trivialises their use of language, limits what they are allowed to talk about, and restricts who is ‘allowed’ to speak in a way that is valued. However, YA anthologies are offering what might be termed a new form social protest as they speak out against such censuring. By featuring voices in concert, championing topics often excluded from mainstream literature, and celebrating marginalised voices, YA anthologies are forging a new ground, making space(s) for voices of all kinds.

In this paper, I will focus on the UKYA anthology Make More Noise published by Noisy Crow in 2018, while also touching on other recent YA anthologies. Taking its name from British suffragette Emmaline Pankhurt’s iconic “You have to make more noise than anybody else…”, Make More Noise celebrates women’s suffrage at the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in Britain. Featuring short stories that celebrate inspirational women across a range of genres, my reading of this UKYA anthology draws on Megan Musgrave’s coining of imaginary activism, expanding her focus on the symbolic forms of activism depicted within YA literature to include how YA anthologies — through their commitment to multiple voices, perspectives, and genres — offer further instances of activism, particularly in terms of the culture of support such collective works can encourage.

Water as Trickster: Undoing Oppositions in, and through, YA Literature In Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom duology, there is an underlying tension between water and ice. Encapsulated in a Fjerdan saying, "The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive" (Six of Crows 253), water/ice appears to offer a binary opposition between that which is fluid and that which is solid. Moreover, this opposition speaks to several oppositional categories running throughout the novels: " Grisha " (magically gifted)/not; "merch" (merchant)/Dreg (gang member, living in the Barrel); free/indentured (slave), muddy/pure. However, in typical YA fashion opposition is complicated. Water may hear and understand, but it is also hungry and potentially destructive. Ice may be unforgiving but it is also penetrable, and it may become water once again. This paper argues that, rather than binarily opposed, water and ice exist on a continuum of relation and that this continuum speaks to a defining characteristic of YA. After first exploring the obvious and 'simple' articulation of water and ice, this paper will consider how the two categories are more related than they appear. In this way, this paper considers water a 'trickster' element, one that takes on properties and disrupts expectations. Crucially, this disruptive aspect features, admittedly differently, through all of water's states: gas, liquid, solid. Each state offers a particular ambiguity, thus linking each – despite attempts to separate them. Finally, this paper will argue that water's liminality is a characteristic of YA. While Bardugo's duology is key to this reading, the paper will reference more widely to support its claim – that liminality, rather than opposition, is key to both understanding the role of water (and ice) in young adult fiction, as well as how liminality defines YA.

Participating in the cultural work of mythic literatures—establishing the world and its order while also charting expected behaviours (Eliade 1959; Malinowski 1926; Bascom 1954)—mythopoeic YA fantasy, that is also written by women and for adolescent girls, offers a particular space in which hegemonic discourses of perfection may be disrupted and in which new kinds of behaviours may be charted. Thus maps, and a notion of mapping, are integral aspects of mythopoeic YA fantasy—a vein of speculative fiction featuring world-building, magic, an appeal to mythic literature, and a creationary mid-set (Tolkien). The maps featured in these stories appeal to, while simultaneously creating, a sense of reality, a sense that this story-world is—or could be—“real” (Muehrcke and Muehrcke 1974). While maps are critical to the creation of the place of the Secondary World, mapping is also a fundamental sensibility of these stories, as this speculative fiction offers a sub or counter-cultural space in which alternative maps of living and being an adolescent female body are possible. Where popular and media culture offers a narrow and limited means of becoming a female-self, this speculative fiction offers female heroes who break boundaries and blur borders. In short, mythopoeic YA fantasy texts with maps are also maps themselves; they map new ways of being female. It is this double notion of mapping—and the implication of both on the subject positions available to adolescent girls—that this paper explores, through a look at the work of Tamora Pierce, a long-standing example of mythopoeic YA fantasy.
Through a consideration of the pretextual maps that visually offer a transition into the world of the story while also serving to foreshadow the kind of story that might occur, I explore how these paratextual maps surround and extend the story-world through a relationship of continuity (Genette 1987; Gray 2010). These maps speak to, or indicate, what is known about a world. They depict—or create—the perceived shape of the world at the time of map-making, and they offer an apparent truth, the reality of the landscape they map. The same holds true for the developmental theories “mapping” adolescence and with the images of the “ideal” female body that pervade popular and media culture. These images “map” the expectations of, and for, femininity in that space. However, there is a blank space between the map and the thing mapped, and in this space, change may occur. Thus, through this opened space and the narration of a topographical map, I demonstrate how maps model the contesting of superficiality and visuality dominating contemporary media culture. The magically heightened topographical nature of, what is, a magical map contests the flatness of not just conventional, two-dimensional maps but also, by extension, the flatness—and superficiality—of the images by which the adolescent girl in popular and media culture constructs herself.

The liberal humanist model of self that is available in the West is one underscored by the Cartesian dualism that separates mind from, and privileges it over, body. Daine’s shape-shifting in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet, an example of mythopoeic YA fantasy, offers a narrative of self that complicates this paradigmatic opposition by offering inflections of mind into body, inside into outside, self into other, and human into animal (and, always, vice versa). Through the symbiotic joining of minds that precipitates it, Daine’s full body shape-shifting posits the mind as that which is shared between embodied selves, not that which divides them.

As mythopoeic YA fantasy, this quartet features many functions associated with mythic literatures, especially myth’s offering of frameworks for living and being in this world, an offering that the YA aspect of this fantasy heightens. As such, the embodied self offered by Daine’s shape-shifting serves as a framework for an embodied subjectivity that does not exclude woman, animal, or the other from its structure. This is especially provocative for adolescent girls who, because of being adolescent (thus disrupting binary pairs) and female (thus othered by the male/female binary), have the most to lose under dominant narratives.

This paper is concerned the alternative Imaginary—a language of female adolescence and of being an adolescent female body that challenges the dominant hegemonic construction—offered by mythopoeic YA fantasy. For the adolescent girl, adolescence is heightened relationship to her body, a body that is both her source of power—if she has a “sexy” one, as Gill suggests, she has agency—as well as something she must keep under control, not only does “sexy” not (usually) happen overnight, but the body’s propensity for fleshiness makes this “sexy” difficult to achieve and to maintain. The fleshiness of the body makes the stability of binary oppositions, oppositions that underpin the hegemonic construction, difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

Thus, the body’s fleshiness, anything not meeting the ideal, is often refused. However, Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books (1983–ongoing) and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles (2012–2015), as examples of mythopoeic YA fantasy, offer relational models of existence, one that I explore through a metaphor of “the Pack,” that refuse the linearity, binarity and individuality of hegemonic discourse. Moreover, this relational model of self is made possible by positing touch as an additional, to sight, means of perceiving the body. Touch not only loosens the dominance of the visual pervading contemporary culture, but it does so through a provocative framework of connection—the surface of the touched and toucher must connect—that takes the contours, and potentially depth, of the body into account.

"For many little girls, Cinderella is synonymous with “Disney Princess” – that astronomically successful franchise in which eleven young ladies become Princess. Not only is she beautiful, but her transformation – from pauper to princess (albeit courtesy of a fairy godmother) – makes her ever so real: if Cinderella can make such a transformation, so might I. However, Cinderella’s transformation is not limited to this ‘becoming-princess’; her transition is also about growing up, and in this way, it is a narrative of feminine identity. It is about, in Cinderella’s case, taking on the identity of Princess, a particular version of femininity. Within the Disney Princess frame, it is a mass-market, consumer-orientated version of femininity that demurely plays on the edges of hyper-sexualisation. However, Disney’s Cinderella is not the only Cinderella in existence. In fact, the Cinderella motif (the process of becoming princess) exists in countless forms. For this reason, I am interested in the tension between Disney’s Cinderella and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder (2012), in which Cinder(ella) is a posthuman, cyborg – with ‘complex’ reproductive wiring. 

Since the early 1990s, Western culture has seen an increased concern with feminine appearance, particularly regarding female adolescents.  Thus, where Disney’s Cinderella presents a particular, stable image, an image that participates in constructions of heightened fantasy femininity, Meyer’s Cinder offers an alternative construction of the body, one that blurs human and machine – potentially subverting the requirements of Western Beauty Culture in the process. While Disney’s Cinderella is not the first incarnation of this figure, she – particularly her positioning as a Disney Princess – marks the start of a narrative arch within postfeminist media culture that sees an antithesis in Meyer’s Cinder, and it is this journey: from Cinderella to Cinder that this paper explores, picking up issues of postfeminist sensibility along the way."

Daine and Maerad, the heroines, respectively, of Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet and Alison Croggon’s The Books of Pellinor, are shapeshifters: they transform into animals. However, their transformations are not as straightforward (human to animal) as it might appear. For both girls, the animal is constructed as integral to their identity: they are not simply girls, female adolescents; they are also the animal(s) into which they transform. For Daine, this is owing to her demi-god status. Gifted with ‘wild magic’, she shares a unique bond with the People (animals) that not only allows her to shapeshift but to also communicate with them, even when in human form. For Maerad, it is owing to her Elemental heritage. She is “triple tongued” and “triple named” (not to mentioned prophesied to save the world), and this Elemental aspect of her tripartite identity allows her transform into a wolf.
    Thus, a transition that would appear superficial – she changes shape – reaches deeper, it affects identity. It affects the identity of both the girl who shapeshifts and the animal(s) into which she changes. Neither girl nor animal entirely remains, and it is this instability that concerns this paper. The opposition between animal and human is troubled, and in so being, these narrations of change question both what it means to be human as well as what it means to be animal. For the adolescent girl – whose very existence seems to depend upon her body, her physical appearance, the implications of such instability on identity are far reaching. However, it is an instability that also impacts not only conceptions of individual animals (those changed into) but also the notion ‘animal’. Essentially, the question becomes three-part: what does it mean to be girl; what does it mean to be animal, and how very different are they?

"Adrift somewhere between childhood and adulthood, teens live in a period of transition, especially in terms of bodily changes and identity formation. While both are key themes of young adult (YA) literature, YA fantasy, through its departure from consensus reality, plays a particularly pivotal; it is a space of possibility, a space for bodies and identities to be explored. However, in order for this possibility to occur, the logically created Secondary World is essential, and to this end, maps – or their conspicuous absence – are critical to these texts, as is the case for Tamora Pierce’s Tortall universe, Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm series and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles. Thus, this paper explores how maps function – to ground readers in a particular fantasy world, to establish a space for identity formation and to introduce notions of creation – within these texts.

Initially, the map locates readers, quite literally, within a particular space. The visual image of the map appeals, perhaps ironically, to a reality outside of the text’s narrative. It both, visually represents the world of the narrative and, at the same time, creates it, marking out its boundaries and borders. For the (teen) reader, the visual image of the map appeals to a sense of stable reality – this is the world. The map also invites readers into the fantastic world, asking them to partake and to participate, to accept (at the most basic) the ground rules of the world. To this end, while Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles do not (yet) include any maps, it has not stopped fans (readers) from beginning to create their own. It is to this notion of fan as secondary creator, as sub-creator, with which this paper concludes – the map marks a beginning to the visual images related to these texts, but it is not the end. 
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Defined by famous (white) men as being about famous (white) men, the hero journey is his-story, and it is a prolific one. It is the story of world-creating, of world-shaping, of control, and as such, it narrates the interface – the edge between what is known and what has not yet been discovered (or claimed). Through the figure of the hero: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and his Green Knight, Aragorn son of Arathorn, Luke Skywalker and Prince Charming, the same story is repeatedly told, and it is the story of his domination over some evil foe in order to bring about change, whilst reinforcing the status quo – ‘happily ever after’. Traditional myth is, despite thrilling escapades, conservative in nature, particularly where the hero is concerned. He wears a particular guise of healthy masculinity, and his journey follows a typical formula: he leaves home, defeats a monster and returns.
Except when myth does not reinforce that status quo, except when that hero is a female, and mythopoeic young adult literature, of which Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books are a part, is one such ‘except’.  While participating in the conversation of myth, this literature shifts the context of that old story, and in so do doing, it functions to create a space in which the bodily changes of female adolescence are rearticulated, through the female hero. Journeying in the same fashion as her male counterparts, this (female) hero breaks boundaries and blurs borders, and she does so through the negations of bodily instability that are present in her tale. Through narrations of shape-shifting and of the transition into womanhood, the shape of myth is used within this (new) context to explore and normalise the instability of the adolescent female body, and within this context, myth functions as a space of, and for, change.

Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books appear to be about the traditionally construed hero’s journey, though with a female hero rather than the conventional male. Superficially, this change seems insignificant: the “monomyth” is reproduced. Founded upon binary oppositions, this monomyth is the male hero’s journey – the traditional journey. However, while these female heroes may appear to conform, this paper explores how, upon a close reading of the narration of two particular moments of change, or “transcendence”, within that journey, the necessary structure collapses. The journey, as is traditionally conceived, is impossible.
The first instance works to construct the apparently stable body as changeable, through the narration of shape-shifting. Through this reading, the obviousness of the body (and of identity) is explored and troubled. The second instance works, through the narration of transition into a womanhood, to question the individuality of the body. The body is again produced as changeable, but this transition works to expand readings beyond individual subjectivity to construct the body as operating within a collective. While collapsing traditional conceptions of myth, these readings also work to reposition and rearticulate the female body outside of myth’s masculine discourse, allowing a reinterpretation of that body in terms of the feminine.

In this session, we shall examine contemporary young adult (YA) publishing in the UK, including themes, trends, and taboos. Existing between that which is ‘for’ children and that which is ‘for’ adults, YA fiction occupies a theoretically and culturally fraught terrain, much like the ‘young adults’ it hails. As such, questions of purpose, definition, and appropriateness pervade. Through a critical examination of two key texts, we will consider these issues alongside the development of the field across the last two and a half decades, asking how much, if at all, YA has evolved in recent years.  Dawson’s novel is highly recommended for contemporary context.

Hero stories are deeply rooted in Western Culture. From religion and myth to blockbuster films and YA fiction, the story is everywhere, and it shapes how we, the ones who hear and see it, understand the world around us. For too long, hero stories, which could also be called dominant discourse, have undertaken this social and cultural work through the archetypal hero: a white often ‘god’ touched, middle-class cisgender and heterosexual ‘fit’ young man who exists in opposition and superiority to that which he is not, including adolescent girls. Indeed, the adolescent girl is often figured as the hero’s prize; the bride he wins for slaying the monster. In so being, this story excludes girls from the role of hero because they are his prize. It also bars them from that position – if they do not look, and to a lesser degree act – the part. Crucially, while this exclusion affects all girls, it does not do so evenly. If the girl is also Black or Brown, disabled, or otherwise not performing expected and accepted versions of adolescent girlhood, marginalisation increases.

This paper offers a model of “being-hero” that frustrates the violent hierarchy, radical alterity, and erasure, particularly of bodily difference, embedded in the core of the hero story. On the way, it considers Walt Disney’s Cinderella, arguably contemporary Western Culture’s most iconic prize and YA’s “exceptional female heroes” (Wilkins 2019) before turning to the relational model of being-hero and, briefly, the female-heroes in mythopoeic YA taking full advantage of it.

In 2020, YASA hosted its first biennial conference.

"What does YA Studies look like in 2020? The YA Studies Association’s first biennial conference will explore recent critical developments in YA Studies from around the world. This online conference aims to bring together diverse, international voices across a range of disciplines, offering a diverse schedule of synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for presenting and engaging throughout the first week of November."

Draft syllabus for a module exploring the role of YA & YA book prizes in shaping the field of adolescence - what it means to be a teen. Using the YA Book Prize's 2018 shortlist, we will explore the current shape of UKYA while also considering what these 10 books say, or don't, about being a teenager in contemporary Britain. By module's end, students will be able to identify a range of tropes and themes particular to UKYA, evaluate how they relate to defining adolescence, and appraise the role of prizes in this process.