The Desiring Girl and Young Adult Fiction

Abstract

This thesis critiques the representations, and lacunas in representation, of teenage girls’ sexual desires in a selection of young adult (YA) novels written since the turn of the millenium, considering their contributions either to a necessary opening up of a cultural discourse of girls’ desire, or to the prevalent dangerous silencing of such a discourse. It takes as a point of departure the perspective that, to the extent that YA fiction engages with that which is sexy about sex, it is an ideal safe, private space for girls’ exploration of their sexual subjectivities. Through critical analysis informed by interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives, as well as by autoethnographic life writing, the research uncovers a marked tendency for YA fiction to construct girls’ desire as doubly wrong: girls are most commonly represented not only as the wrong gender for desire, but also as having individual particularities that are wrong for desire. Thus South African heroines are constructed as inhabiting the wrong country for desire, their desires inextricably linked to violence. Bisexual heroines are constructed as liking the wrong objects of desire, their desires desexualized, monosexualized, and submerged under essentialist stereotype. And conspicuous-breasted girls who experienced puberty early are constructed as possessing the wrong bodies for desire, representation of them among YA heroines largely an inhospitable absence. The research supports, however, the contention that spaces for the liberation of a genuine discourse of girls’ desire may be found in lesbian-focussed stories that hold themselves apart from the patriarchy of compulsory heterosexuality; and it finds that such spaces may also be carved out by heroines who interrogate their own desires in thoughtful, nuanced ways and, especially, by the exceptional few stories that engage with that which is sexy about sex, and thus open a discourse of desire through the direct evocation of desire itself.