Getting Better: Children’s Literature Theory and the It Gets Better Project1

Abstract

This chapter considers Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s It Gets Better project, an anti-bullying YouTube campaign that launched in 2010 following a rash of queer youth suicides, and argues that this project is a site of convergence for children’s literature and adult fictions. Mason suggests that the circulation and adaptation of cultural texts like It Gets Better across and through multiple genres—what he refers to, after Kathryn Bond Stockton, as a text and/or genre’s “sideways growth”—challenge critics to widen their theoretical lenses for the study of young people’s texts and culture. The book version of It Gets Better engages in a repetitive anxious rehearsal of its own metanarrative of “getting better” and renders the project (im)possible, Mason argues, drawing on Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan. While It Gets Better fails politically, it succeeds nonetheless at generating critical cultural discourse about how adults address queer youth.