13 Reasons Why the Rape Myth Survives

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Delphine Letort

The controversies triggered by the Netflix adaptation of Jay Asher’s young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) have focused on suicide and downplayed discussions of rape as a central plot device. Making use of stereotypical characters (such as the cheerleader and the jock) and archetypal setting (including the high school), 13 Reasons Why delves into the reassuring world of the suburban town; it deals ambiguously with the entwined notions of gender and power encapsulated in the teenpic genre. A detailed analysis of the series indeed reveals that its causative narrative reinforces the rape myth by putting the blame on girls for events that happen to them. In this article I explore the tensions of a TV series that endorses the rape myth through the entertaining frame of the teenpic.

Author(s):  
Amanda Ellis

This chapter reads closely Isabel Quintero’s 2014 young adult novel Gabi, A Girl in Pieces. Quintero’s novel, which takes the form of a year’s worth of diary entries, and includes an illustrated copy of the titular character’s zine on female body diversity, narrates the story of a young Chicana outsider’s senior year of high school. In lieu of “fitting in” Gabi the teenage poet pens her way out of loss, homophobia, lurking sexual violence, grief, and depression. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces reveals that the creation of political art, the practice of writing, and the role of Chicana poetics can serve as vital creative outlets for Chicana outsiders, be they nerds, goths, geeks, or freaks.


Author(s):  
Katie Schrodt ◽  
Erin R. FitzPatrick ◽  
Kim Reddig ◽  
Emily Paine Smith ◽  
Jennifer Grow

This chapter addresses the need to make time and space for transliteracy practices in the classroom. University pre-service teachers are used as the primary example as the chapter documents how these students made meaning across a range of platforms, while reading the acclaimed young adult novel The Hate U Give. The university course, titled Language and Literacy, focuses on methods of literacy instruction in the classroom. A lesson plan framework is included in the chapter that is especially user friendly for educator preparation classrooms as well as high school and middle school teachers. The chapter explores the experiences of the college students while reading The Hate U Give, while detailing how the students created meaning through a variety of traditional and modern teaching practices.


Book 2 0 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliane Aparecida Galvão Ribeiro Ferreira ◽  
Guilherme Magri da Rocha

This article discusses Nanook: ele está chegando (‘Nanook: He Is Coming’) (2016), written by Brazilian author Gustavo Bernardo, a Brazilian dystopian apocalyptic young adult (YA) novel influenced by an Inuit legend that mixes science with mysticism and human subjectivity. In this book, 15-year-old Bernardo emerges as a harbinger of events that will occur in the narrative, when he affirms that ‘Nanook is coming’. From that point onwards, climatic and supernatural events happen, which affect the whole world, with consequences for Ouro Preto, the former capital of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the story takes place. These consequences include snowfalls, increasingly intense cold and the disappearance of some animals. Nanook: He Is Coming was selected by the Brazilian National Textbook Program (PNLD – Programa Nacional do Livro Didático) for high school students. This programme is designed to evaluate didactic, pedagogical and literary works and make them available for free to Brazilian students what are studying at public schools. This article concludes with an analysis of the text, using critical tools, which include Reception Theory to examine the communicability of the novel with its implicit reader, the dialogical relationship with that reader and the novel’s language, stylistic characteristics, the constitution of its narrative operators and its ideological discourse.


Author(s):  
Chiara Xausa

Through a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, a survival story set in a futuristic Canada destroyed by global warming, this article explores the conceptualization and reimagination of the Anthropocene in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous theory and fiction. Firstly, I will argue that literary representations of climate change can be complicit in producing hegemonic strands of Anthropocene discourse that consider human destructiveness and vulnerability at undifferentiated species level. Secondly, I will suggest that the novel’s apocalypse reveals the processes of colonial violence and dispossession that have culminated in the eruptive event of environmental catastrophe, rather than portraying a story of universal and disembodied human threat that conceals oppression against Indigenous people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Tynan Drake

In post-apocalyptic fiction, the concept of empathy often is depicted as a weakness that the characters cannot afford if they hope to survive. This depiction leads to harmful perceptions on the value of empathy and its ability to avert apocalyptic catastrophes. By examining David Clement-Davies young adult novel The Sight through theories of narrative empathy and through James Berger’s theories of post-apocalyptic representation, this essay argues that by representing empathic understanding, fiction writers have the power to influence positive changes in real world situations. By representing the need to teach empathy for all people, regardless of their differences, and the harm a lack of empathy can cause on both a personal level and on a large societal scale, this novel encourages future generations to seek peaceful and empathic solutions instead of repeating the cataclysmic mistakes of their forebearers.


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