Sharpening the Pointe: The Intersectional Feminism of Contemporary Young Adult Ballet Novels

This chapter explores a new movement within the female-focused YA dance novel. Rather than narrate the meritorious rise of an individual dancer, today's ballet novels instead interrogate how structural prejudices of racism and sexism create barriers to the center stage. Focusing primarily upon works authored by women of color, or told through queered perspectives, the chapter surveys how YA narratives in varied melodramatic, thriller, and paranormal forms work to trouble the pink and pretty “music box ballerina” iconography.

Eliminating Extermination, Fostering Existence: Diverse Dystopian Fiction and Female Adolescent Identity

This chapter engages in a much needed exploration of the popular sub-genre of dystopian texts with female main characters. An intersectional examination of female protagonists of color provides readers with a valuable resource to introducing diverse texts to readers and classrooms. By disrupting the hypercanon of YA dystopian texts that focus largely on white protagonists, this chapter moves conversations about identity and the treatment of marginalized populations in future societies into a more central space in the discussion surrounding these texts.

Reimagining Forever … The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature

This chapter argues that many recent novels for adolescent readers embrace and (often problematically) appropriate the marriage plot in their representations of teen romance. In contrast to Judy Blume’s Forever, which advanced the possibility of first loves that do not last forever, novels such as Stephanie Perkins’s Anna and the First Kiss, Jenny Han’s Summer trilogy, and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl position their protagonists as making lifelong commitments at an early age. This chapter asserts that such representations participate in a larger postfeminist effort to center “conventional” marriage as the successful culmination of adolescent womanhood.

Mythopoeic YA: Worlds of Possibility

This chapter discusses how mythopoeic YA, a speculative, ‘imaginary world’ fiction initially by women and still for adolescent girls, brings new worlds into being to actualize new modes of being. Drawing on the hero stories of traditional mythic narratives, mythopoeic YA engages and complicates the system of binary opposition at the heart of its source material by occupying spaces between oppositions, giving space to female-authors, and by foregrounding female-heroes, non-Western worlds, and relationships thereby offering alternative and inclusive models of being-hero. First emerging in the early-1980’s with the work of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley, Leigh Bardugo’sGrishaverse and Tomi Adeyemi's Orïsha offer excellent, contemporary examples.