Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0008
Derritt Mason
This chapter explores how fanfiction writers deploy characters from the television show Glee in the context of the It Gets Better anti-bullying YouTube project to imagine scenarios where the project’s teleological narrative fails to describe the lived experiences of queer youth. Glee reached peak popularity in 2010–2011, the year that It Gets Better was launched and queer YA began undergoing a publishing boom. In fanfiction that combines Glee with It Gets Better, fans repurpose It Gets Better to bring critical elements to the YouTube project that are missing from its official stories: sexual pleasure, and the possibility that it doesn’t always get better. These traces in material culture of young people writing back to It Gets Better, Mason concludes, illustrate problems with Jacqueline Rose’s argument about the untouched “middle space” between adult authors of children’s literature and the genre’s young audiences.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0005
Derritt Mason
This chapter draws on Andrew Smith’s 2014 novel Grasshopper Jungle to explore the representation of queerness as a locus of dystopian adolescent experiences and, by hyperbolic extension, the cause of the apocalypse. Smith’s novel satirically amplifies the idea that adolescence is itself a kind of dystopia, and simultaneously points to how queer sex is a kind of darkness—or invisibility—often “experienced as unbearable,” in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s words, by critics of queer young adult literature. Austin, Grasshopper Jungle’s history-obsessed narrator, records in astonishing detail the world’s destruction by mutant bugs, yet Austin’s moment of sexual intimacy with his male best friend remains a striking silence in his otherwise scrupulous account. This chapter concludes that Grasshopper Jungle’s excessive rendering of YA’s storm, stress, darkness, and violence ironically makes visible the novel’s unwillingness to confront the unbearability associated with queer sex.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0004
Derritt Mason
This chapter puts into conversation two temporally and formally distant texts: C.M. Ralph’s video game Caper in the Castro, created during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989 and recently restored in 2017; and David Levithan’s 2013 young adult novel Two Boys Kissing, which is set in the present-day but narrated by a ghostly chorus of gay men—called the “shadow uncles”—who died during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. As a video game, Mason argues, Castro allows us to play with and feel the anxieties about HIV/AIDS that continue to circulate in queer YA and its criticism—including Levithan’s novel, which confines HIV/AIDS to historical trappings, keeping it detached from the social worlds of its young contemporary protagonists. This is consistent with the treatment of HIV/AIDS elsewhere in young adult literature, which habitually mis- and underrepresents the virus in order to preserve the innocence of its protagonists.
本章讨论了两个暂时和形式上遥远的文本:C.M.拉尔夫的电子游戏《卡斯特罗的Caper in the Castro》，创作于1989年艾滋病危机最严重的时期，最近于2017年恢复;以及大卫·利维坦2013年的青少年小说《两个男孩接吻》，这部小说以现代为背景，但由一群被称为“影子叔叔”的同性恋男子幽灵般的合唱讲述，他们在艾滋病最严重的时候去世了。梅森认为，作为一款电子游戏，《卡斯特罗》让我们能够体验并感受在酷儿青少年游戏及其批评中持续流传的对艾滋病毒/艾滋病的焦虑——包括列维坦的小说，它将艾滋病毒/艾滋病限制在历史的陷阱中，使其脱离了当代年轻主人公的社会世界。这与青年文学中其他地方对艾滋病毒/艾滋病的处理是一致的，这些文学为了保持主人公的纯真，习惯性地歪曲和低估了这种病毒。
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Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0006
Derritt Mason
This chapter moves readers from Andrew Smith’s adolescence-as-dystopia to the popular animated Netflix series Big Mouth, which represents adolescence as a horror show. Like Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth provides audiences with monstrous avatars for the storm and stress of adolescence. Instead of horny, rampaging mutant mantises, however, Big Mouth offers viewers Hormone Monsters, haunted houses, ghosts, and other Gothic tropes as embodiments of those anxieties that surround puberty and its horrifying humiliations. Unlike Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth universalizes queerness, celebrates the polymorphous perversity of childhood, and uses camp to defuse many of the anxieties that attend other representations of adolescent sexuality. Big Mouth offers us a kind of camp with strong ties to shame—what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls “dark camp”—and illustrates how shame and debasement can function as a powerful model of relationality, one that unites the show’s young protagonists through shared queer feelings.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0001
Derritt Mason
This chapter traces the emergence of queer themes and characters in young adult literature, as well as critical commentary on queer YA, to demonstrate how anxiety is the affective form that best characterizes this subgenre of children’s literature. Mason argues that, in the long tradition of children’s literature criticism, queer YA criticism functions as an illuminating index of anxieties about how adults address queer youth. This chapter draws on sociological work on adolescence, as well as psychoanalytic theorists Adam Phillips and Julia Kristeva, to illustrate how adolescence and young adult literature are themselves the products of adult anxiety. Anxiety characterizes the affective economy through which queer young adult literature circulates, Mason argues, while itself evincing a queer temporality that places delay and forward-oriented growth in tension with one another. Overall, Mason demonstrates the utility of children’s literature and its theories for thinking more broadly about adult concerns and anxieties.
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{"title":"Horror and Camp:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"104 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114002287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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