This article explores the functions of secondary girl characters in English-language American and Canadian girls’ Bildungsromane. Previously, we have explored girls’ literature as a distinct genre, framed in the theory of genre as social action, and our past scholarship examines the ways in which pre-WWII girls’ Bildungsroman stories emphasize girls’ eventual integration into their communities. Rather than having adventures, as in boys’ coming-of-age texts, we have noted ways in which the main girl characters grow “down” into social restrictions, usually as (potential) wives and mothers. Secondary female characters in these girls’ stories are compared, contrasted, or conflated with their close peers as they grow to womanhood, whether they function as the protagonists' “bosom friend,” a rival or “frenemy,” a sibling, or a classmate. However, without the same coming-of-age expectations of a text’s or series’ heroine, these secondary female characters often demonstrate alternate paths to womanhood, highlighting diversities or serving as a warning to the girl protagonists on their journeys.
{"title":"Sisters, Bosom Chums, and Enemies","authors":"Dawn Sardella-Ayres, A. Reese","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.719","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the functions of secondary girl characters in English-language American and Canadian girls’ Bildungsromane. Previously, we have explored girls’ literature as a distinct genre, framed in the theory of genre as social action, and our past scholarship examines the ways in which pre-WWII girls’ Bildungsroman stories emphasize girls’ eventual integration into their communities. Rather than having adventures, as in boys’ coming-of-age texts, we have noted ways in which the main girl characters grow “down” into social restrictions, usually as (potential) wives and mothers. Secondary female characters in these girls’ stories are compared, contrasted, or conflated with their close peers as they grow to womanhood, whether they function as the protagonists' “bosom friend,” a rival or “frenemy,” a sibling, or a classmate. However, without the same coming-of-age expectations of a text’s or series’ heroine, these secondary female characters often demonstrate alternate paths to womanhood, highlighting diversities or serving as a warning to the girl protagonists on their journeys.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79599195","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}
This article explores the meanings of girls’ silence in three popular late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century novels: Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi, 1880), and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). These three classics of girls’ fiction are international bestsellers; all three novels are available in Nordic languages as well as their original English or German. Often read as taming narratives in which wild girls are forcibly shaped into compliant young women, these texts allow us to see how the girls’ book has struggled with conformity and agency since its beginnings. As influential early girls’ books, these novels help us disentangle the patterns early examples of the genre offer us as twenty-first-century readers and critics. Though a girl’s silence can indicate trauma and social repression (as we see in What Katy Did and Heidi), withholding speech can be a voluntary decision that girls make for themselves (as in Anne of Green Gables). In this article, we draw on disability theory to propose a model for thinking about the distinction between silence and silencing. While silence can be a form of repression, paralyzing the thoughts as physical injury paralyzes the body, it is also linked to prayer and the concept of self-possession. Silence is not always a marker of the loss of voice or physical autonomy; by appealing to the idea of self-possession, we can move beyond a dichotomy of speech as positive and silence as negative.
{"title":"The Self-Possessed Girl in Golden Age Girls’ Books","authors":"Julie Pfeiffer, Darla Y. Schumm","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.715","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the meanings of girls’ silence in three popular late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century novels: Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi, 1880), and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). These three classics of girls’ fiction are international bestsellers; all three novels are available in Nordic languages as well as their original English or German. Often read as taming narratives in which wild girls are forcibly shaped into compliant young women, these texts allow us to see how the girls’ book has struggled with conformity and agency since its beginnings. As influential early girls’ books, these novels help us disentangle the patterns early examples of the genre offer us as twenty-first-century readers and critics. Though a girl’s silence can indicate trauma and social repression (as we see in What Katy Did and Heidi), withholding speech can be a voluntary decision that girls make for themselves (as in Anne of Green Gables). In this article, we draw on disability theory to propose a model for thinking about the distinction between silence and silencing. While silence can be a form of repression, paralyzing the thoughts as physical injury paralyzes the body, it is also linked to prayer and the concept of self-possession. Silence is not always a marker of the loss of voice or physical autonomy; by appealing to the idea of self-possession, we can move beyond a dichotomy of speech as positive and silence as negative.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73506756","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}
Allowing Space for Undecidability: Complex Picturebooks in Literary Education Previous research on children’s literature calls attention to picturebooks as a challenging art form, containing complex themes and sophisticated literary qualities. However, previous research shows that picturebooks in educational settings are still mainly explored with emergent readers. In this study, we elaborate on the relation between aesthetics and pedagogy by discussing how the complexity and undecidability of picturebooks can contribute to literary education by applying the concept of undecidability (Johansen, “Kunst”; Litteratur). Applying a thinking with theory approach (Jackson and Mazzei), we use the theoretical concept of undecidability, in relation to the picturebook Skuggorna (The Shadows, 2018) by Maija Hurme and Anssi Hurme as well as in relation to pedagogical considerations for literary education. The analysis of Skuggorna shows how it contains undecidabilities on several levels and how these undecidabilities cause the meaning of the narrative to shift. The study offers implications for literature teaching with this type of picturebook and, consequently, elaborates on what these undecidabilities can provide literary education. Moreover, the study shows how the challenging picturebook can provide spaces for upholding undecidabilities and negotiations in the literature classroom.
以前关于儿童文学的研究将绘本作为一种具有挑战性的艺术形式，包含复杂的主题和复杂的文学品质。然而，先前的研究表明，在教育环境中，绘本仍然主要是与突发读者一起探索的。在本研究中，我们通过讨论绘本的复杂性和不可判定性如何通过应用不可判定性的概念对文学教育做出贡献来阐述美学与教育学之间的关系(Johansen，“Kunst”;Litteratur)。运用理论思考方法(Jackson and Mazzei)，我们将不可判定性的理论概念应用于迈贾·赫尔姆和安西·赫尔姆的绘本《斯库格尔纳》(the Shadows, 2018)以及文学教育的教学考虑。对Skuggorna的分析显示了它如何在几个层面上包含不可判定性，以及这些不可判定性如何导致叙事意义的转变。该研究为这种类型的绘本文学教学提供了启示，并因此详细说明了这些不可判定性可以为文学教育提供什么。此外，该研究还显示了具有挑战性的绘本如何在文学课堂上为坚持不可判定性和谈判提供空间。
{"title":"Utrymme för det obestämbara","authors":"Heidi Höglund, Katrina Åkerholm","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.713","url":null,"abstract":"Allowing Space for Undecidability: Complex Picturebooks in Literary Education \u0000Previous research on children’s literature calls attention to picturebooks as a challenging art form, containing complex themes and sophisticated literary qualities. However, previous research shows that picturebooks in educational settings are still mainly explored with emergent readers. In this study, we elaborate on the relation between aesthetics and pedagogy by discussing how the complexity and undecidability of picturebooks can contribute to literary education by applying the concept of undecidability (Johansen, “Kunst”; Litteratur). Applying a thinking with theory approach (Jackson and Mazzei), we use the theoretical concept of undecidability, in relation to the picturebook Skuggorna (The Shadows, 2018) by Maija Hurme and Anssi Hurme as well as in relation to pedagogical considerations for literary education. The analysis of Skuggorna shows how it contains undecidabilities on several levels and how these undecidabilities cause the meaning of the narrative to shift. The study offers implications for literature teaching with this type of picturebook and, consequently, elaborates on what these undecidabilities can provide literary education. Moreover, the study shows how the challenging picturebook can provide spaces for upholding undecidabilities and negotiations in the literature classroom.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83673648","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}
This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy in two recent historical novels for children about the British Home Front during the Second World War: Letters from the Lighthouse (2017) by Emma Carroll and Our Castle by the Sea (2019) by Lucy Strange. It argues that the representation of civilian life during the war in both novels is conditioned by recent socio-political events in Britain, namely, the recurrent appropriation of the wartime past in support of nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric. The texts discussed in this article seek to counter this narrative, foregrounding immigration as a vital part of Britain’s wartime past. Drawing upon historical fiction studies and cultural analysis, the article begins with an exploration of the aesthetic treatment of wartime Britain in the texts more broadly, arguing that Letters from the Lighthouse participates in and subverts idealised visions of the Home Front, while Our Castle by the Sea rejects nostalgia entirely. I conclude my discussion with an examination of the use of the wartime spy story as an aesthetic template for exploring concepts of xenophobia and prejudice in the two novels. Ultimately, this article contends that literary aesthetics perform a pedagogic function in both texts, presenting the contribution of immigrants and refugees as crucial to the story of the Britain Home Front.
{"title":"Reimagining Blighty","authors":"Siobhán Callaghan","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.711","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy in two recent historical novels for children about the British Home Front during the Second World War: Letters from the Lighthouse (2017) by Emma Carroll and Our Castle by the Sea (2019) by Lucy Strange. It argues that the representation of civilian life during the war in both novels is conditioned by recent socio-political events in Britain, namely, the recurrent appropriation of the wartime past in support of nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric. The texts discussed in this article seek to counter this narrative, foregrounding immigration as a vital part of Britain’s wartime past. Drawing upon historical fiction studies and cultural analysis, the article begins with an exploration of the aesthetic treatment of wartime Britain in the texts more broadly, arguing that Letters from the Lighthouse participates in and subverts idealised visions of the Home Front, while Our Castle by the Sea rejects nostalgia entirely. I conclude my discussion with an examination of the use of the wartime spy story as an aesthetic template for exploring concepts of xenophobia and prejudice in the two novels. Ultimately, this article contends that literary aesthetics perform a pedagogic function in both texts, presenting the contribution of immigrants and refugees as crucial to the story of the Britain Home Front.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74087246","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}
Augmented reality (AR) picturebooks combine printed children's literature with augmented reality. This study examines the shared reading of the Finnish AR picturebook Mur, eli karhu (2016) by Kaisa Happonen and Anne Vasko. The main aim of the study is to explore the playful reading experience of three Finnish families with children between the ages of 4 and 6. Three main categories of engagement with the book are discussed in the article: interpretation, negotiation, and play. The findings of the study suggest that children are skilled users of mobile digital media but may not understand the content of AR without parental mediation. In addition, parents and educators are required to have substantial pedagogical and aesthetic knowledge to successfully support children’s engagement with hybrid and multimodal literary works. This knowledge involves understanding both children’s literature and the digital medium.
增强现实(AR)绘本将印刷儿童文学与增强现实相结合。本研究考察了Kaisa Happonen和Anne Vasko对芬兰AR绘本《Mur, eli karhu》(2016)的共同阅读。这项研究的主要目的是探索三个芬兰家庭的有趣阅读体验，他们的孩子年龄在4到6岁之间。本文讨论了与书互动的三个主要类别:解释、协商和玩耍。研究结果表明，儿童是移动数字媒体的熟练使用者，但如果没有父母的调解，他们可能无法理解AR的内容。此外，家长和教育工作者需要具备丰富的教学和美学知识，以成功地支持儿童参与混合和多模式的文学作品。这些知识包括对儿童文学和数字媒体的理解。
{"title":"Interpretation, Negotiation, Play","authors":"Hanna Järvenpää","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.717","url":null,"abstract":"Augmented reality (AR) picturebooks combine printed children's literature with augmented reality. This study examines the shared reading of the Finnish AR picturebook Mur, eli karhu (2016) by Kaisa Happonen and Anne Vasko. The main aim of the study is to explore the playful reading experience of three Finnish families with children between the ages of 4 and 6. Three main categories of engagement with the book are discussed in the article: interpretation, negotiation, and play. The findings of the study suggest that children are skilled users of mobile digital media but may not understand the content of AR without parental mediation. In addition, parents and educators are required to have substantial pedagogical and aesthetic knowledge to successfully support children’s engagement with hybrid and multimodal literary works. This knowledge involves understanding both children’s literature and the digital medium.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84944797","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}
Plagued in Wonderland by questions of self-uncertainty, Alice endures a journey of nonsensical adventures only to wake up and discover it was all a dream. However, the Caterpillar’s enigmatic question – “who are you?” – prevails, and this article asks the same question of Camille Rose Garcia’s illustrated Alice – who is she? This article explores the character of Alice in Garcia’s Wonderland and investigates the impact of Walt Disney’s 1951 animated film on her illustrative styling. The Disney metapicture is an important lens here as the uncanny resemblance to the 1951 Alice looms in Garcia’s depiction of Carroll’s protagonist. Thus, I perform a close reading of a selection of illustrations from her 2010 published edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through a Disney lens. The idea of a “gothic Alice” is quite significant in relation to girlhood studies as it (re)-positions the notion of normative femininity and allows for expanded interpretations of what it means to identify as “girl.” In this case, Garcia’s Alice repositions the protagonist away from the image of the Victorian child (John Tenniel’s image in the first edition) and the docile, doe-eyed young girl of Disney’s construction. Instead, she represents the “other.” Overall, Garcia’s version of Alice stems from the haunting presence of Disney’s 1951 animated dreamchild. Through allusion and metapicture, Garcia creates a wasteland that adds to the contemporary (re)-interpretation of Alice.
{"title":"“I must have been changed several times since then”","authors":"Jade Dillon","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.721","url":null,"abstract":"Plagued in Wonderland by questions of self-uncertainty, Alice endures a journey of nonsensical adventures only to wake up and discover it was all a dream. However, the Caterpillar’s enigmatic question – “who are you?” – prevails, and this article asks the same question of Camille Rose Garcia’s illustrated Alice – who is she? This article explores the character of Alice in Garcia’s Wonderland and investigates the impact of Walt Disney’s 1951 animated film on her illustrative styling. The Disney metapicture is an important lens here as the uncanny resemblance to the 1951 Alice looms in Garcia’s depiction of Carroll’s protagonist. Thus, I perform a close reading of a selection of illustrations from her 2010 published edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through a Disney lens. The idea of a “gothic Alice” is quite significant in relation to girlhood studies as it (re)-positions the notion of normative femininity and allows for expanded interpretations of what it means to identify as “girl.” In this case, Garcia’s Alice repositions the protagonist away from the image of the Victorian child (John Tenniel’s image in the first edition) and the docile, doe-eyed young girl of Disney’s construction. Instead, she represents the “other.” Overall, Garcia’s version of Alice stems from the haunting presence of Disney’s 1951 animated dreamchild. Through allusion and metapicture, Garcia creates a wasteland that adds to the contemporary (re)-interpretation of Alice.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82066658","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}
{"title":"Meghan Gilbert-Hickey & Miranda A. Green-Barteet (red.), Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction","authors":"Jerry Määttä","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.705","url":null,"abstract":"Review/Recension","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86096850","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}
In mainstream discourse on the genre, the contemporary young adult (YA) supernatural romance is frequently dismissed as one-dimensional and low quality; literature that reproduces traditional and conservative ideologies of gender and sexuality for an undiscerning adolescent female audience. In this article I contest this dismissal, arguing that the genre contains complex and contradictory representations of femininity and female sexuality, and that these representations expose and rehearse ambivalence surrounding adolescent girls and girlhood in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on the growing disciplines of both romance and YA studies, I conduct this contestation through close reading and analysis of Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls series, which consists of Shiver (2009), Linger (2010), Forever (2011), and Sinner (2014). Ambivalence and complexity are discussed in the series through representations of female gustatory and sexual hunger as well as food and feasting and the presence of the supernatural through representations of female lycanthropy. Through the symbolic associations of food with sexuality and sexual activity, scenes of female gustatory hunger and feasting within the corpus attempt to negotiate the engrained diet culture and repression of adolescent female sexual desire within the late 2000s and early 2010s in the anglophone world. Female hunger and appetite are at once encouraged and praised (within human characters) and presented as dangerous and in need of restriction (within female lycanthropes). This emphasises the still-rigid boundaries and fears surrounding feminine excess. In this article, I not only analyse the ambivalence and anxiety that surround adolescent girls during this period, but also emphasise the importance of popular literature as a site in which these attitudes and anxieties can be explored, resisted, and reproduced.
{"title":"I Like a Girl Who Can Eat","authors":"Nicola Welsh-Burke","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.685","url":null,"abstract":"In mainstream discourse on the genre, the contemporary young adult (YA) supernatural romance is frequently dismissed as one-dimensional and low quality; literature that reproduces traditional and conservative ideologies of gender and sexuality for an undiscerning adolescent female audience. In this article I contest this dismissal, arguing that the genre contains complex and contradictory representations of femininity and female sexuality, and that these representations expose and rehearse ambivalence surrounding adolescent girls and girlhood in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on the growing disciplines of both romance and YA studies, I conduct this contestation through close reading and analysis of Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls series, which consists of Shiver (2009), Linger (2010), Forever (2011), and Sinner (2014). Ambivalence and complexity are discussed in the series through representations of female gustatory and sexual hunger as well as food and feasting and the presence of the supernatural through representations of female lycanthropy. Through the symbolic associations of food with sexuality and sexual activity, scenes of female gustatory hunger and feasting within the corpus attempt to negotiate the engrained diet culture and repression of adolescent female sexual desire within the late 2000s and early 2010s in the anglophone world. Female hunger and appetite are at once encouraged and praised (within human characters) and presented as dangerous and in need of restriction (within female lycanthropes). This emphasises the still-rigid boundaries and fears surrounding feminine excess. In this article, I not only analyse the ambivalence and anxiety that surround adolescent girls during this period, but also emphasise the importance of popular literature as a site in which these attitudes and anxieties can be explored, resisted, and reproduced.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77921206","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}
How can the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies inform each other in literary analysis? In this article, we analyse how being a girl means negotiating fat using the Swedish young adult novel Trettonde sommaren (Thirteenth Summer, 2018) by Gabriella Sköldenberg as an example. In the novel, surveillance of the teenage girl’s body weight – which can be seen as a manifestation of fat haunting – is introduced by the mothers of two cousins, Angelica and Sandra, during a summer stay at their grandfather’s home in the countryside. Although the two girls are not described as fat, thin normativity becomes a key issue in the narrative through their mothers’ supervision. This leads to the confrontation with and death of another character who is perceived as fat by the girls and their mothers: the friendly and motherly Rut. The interplay between different gazes is at the core of our analysis and helps us explore how discourses of girlhood and fatness intertwine in the novel. We show how Angelica moves from being influenced by the mothers’ and Sandra’s thin normative gaze, to adopting an oppositional girl gaze which encompasses what we refer to as a fat gaze, a gaze that looks with the fat character rather than at her. Our analysis of gazes demonstrates the benefit of a combined focus on girlhood and fatness in approaching the novel. From a broader perspective, it also shows how the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies can enrich each other and together offer answers to how body size is experienced and conceptualised in relation to girlhood in young adult fiction.
{"title":"Girlhood, Gazing, and Fatness","authors":"Asalena Warnqvist, Maria Österlund","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.693","url":null,"abstract":"How can the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies inform each other in literary analysis? In this article, we analyse how being a girl means negotiating fat using the Swedish young adult novel Trettonde sommaren (Thirteenth Summer, 2018) by Gabriella Sköldenberg as an example. In the novel, surveillance of the teenage girl’s body weight – which can be seen as a manifestation of fat haunting – is introduced by the mothers of two cousins, Angelica and Sandra, during a summer stay at their grandfather’s home in the countryside. Although the two girls are not described as fat, thin normativity becomes a key issue in the narrative through their mothers’ supervision. This leads to the confrontation with and death of another character who is perceived as fat by the girls and their mothers: the friendly and motherly Rut. The interplay between different gazes is at the core of our analysis and helps us explore how discourses of girlhood and fatness intertwine in the novel. We show how Angelica moves from being influenced by the mothers’ and Sandra’s thin normative gaze, to adopting an oppositional girl gaze which encompasses what we refer to as a fat gaze, a gaze that looks with the fat character rather than at her. Our analysis of gazes demonstrates the benefit of a combined focus on girlhood and fatness in approaching the novel. From a broader perspective, it also shows how the fields of fat studies and girlhood studies can enrich each other and together offer answers to how body size is experienced and conceptualised in relation to girlhood in young adult fiction.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76449712","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}
This article contributes to the limited body of work attending to girlhood in children’s nonfiction, with specific focus on collective biographies about women published since 2016. In recent years, children’s nonfiction books about women have proliferated rapidly in the United Kingdom and beyond. This proliferation has coincided with an intensification of academic and public interest in young people’s engagement with feminist ideas, where female empowerment is often marketed as a commodity. The biographies often present narratives of “empowered” women, and the implication of their framing is that readers will consume the texts and be inspired to achieve empowerment as well. Such discourses of empowerment are conducive to neoliberal subjectivities, where the self is regarded as autonomous, self-reliant, and responsible. This article offers a critical content analysis of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women (2016), Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (2017), and three of Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women books (2016–2020). My analysis is framed by poststructuralist feminist theories and popular feminism as theorised by Sarah Banet-Weiser. I suggest that, despite the important and admirable intentions underlying their publication, the overarching discourses of girlhood that these texts present are problematic. Specifically, whilst female representation is important, there are undertones that render women and girls individually responsible for themselves, especially for their aspirations and successes. As readers are inspired to take responsibility for their lives, other factors that produce and maintain their unequal status in the first place are eschewed.
{"title":"Empowering or Responsibilising?","authors":"Louise Couceiro","doi":"10.14811/clr.v45.687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v45.687","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes to the limited body of work attending to girlhood in children’s nonfiction, with specific focus on collective biographies about women published since 2016. In recent years, children’s nonfiction books about women have proliferated rapidly in the United Kingdom and beyond. This proliferation has coincided with an intensification of academic and public interest in young people’s engagement with feminist ideas, where female empowerment is often marketed as a commodity. The biographies often present narratives of “empowered” women, and the implication of their framing is that readers will consume the texts and be inspired to achieve empowerment as well. Such discourses of empowerment are conducive to neoliberal subjectivities, where the self is regarded as autonomous, self-reliant, and responsible. This article offers a critical content analysis of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women (2016), Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (2017), and three of Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women books (2016–2020). My analysis is framed by poststructuralist feminist theories and popular feminism as theorised by Sarah Banet-Weiser. I suggest that, despite the important and admirable intentions underlying their publication, the overarching discourses of girlhood that these texts present are problematic. Specifically, whilst female representation is important, there are undertones that render women and girls individually responsible for themselves, especially for their aspirations and successes. As readers are inspired to take responsibility for their lives, other factors that produce and maintain their unequal status in the first place are eschewed.","PeriodicalId":52259,"journal":{"name":"Barnboken","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79971396","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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